The cryptocurrency market is again feverish because of South Korea, where the authorities announced the preparation of a bill on the complete ban of crypto-instruments in the country. On this background, the rate of BTC/USD fell by almost 15%. Over the past three weeks, bitcoin holders have been drained a total of $100 billion. According to the news agencies, last week the police and tax authorities in South Korea conducted searches on the largest digital exchange sites such as Coinone and Bithumb on suspicion of tax evasion. These measures followed the Ministry of Finance’s attempts to find ways of taxing the market. Right now, it is a question of prohibiting the use of anonymous cryptocurrency accounts and restricting banks in handling anonymous transactions with cryptocurrencies. If the total fight against anonymity is given a green light, then it will effectively rob cryptocurrency trading of its main advantage - “invisibility” for the authorities. In December, similar measures were taken in the U.S., where a number of key sites began to require verification of their clients using passports or other identity documents. Hedge funds, which gained access to cryptocurrency trading after the launch of futures on stock exchanges in the U.S., are actively betting on the fall of Bitcoin.
According to CFTC, the volume of short positions in Bitcoin contracts in large players is 2.2 times higher than the long. Optimism and new money on the market is mainly from purchasing speculators, but this is not enough. Remember: the main problem of Bitcoin is lack of scaling flexibility. So, the blockchain block size of Bitcoin is 1 MB and recently, the number of transactions has increased dramatically and many of them have began to “hang”. Bitcoin processes 3-5 transactions per second. The solution to the problem should have been the SegWit2x hardfork, but it was canceled on 8 November. As long as the problem of hanging transactions remains unsolved, and the processing speed not increased, we recommend waiting for Bitcoin in the region of $10 000 and lower.