UPbit, one of South Korea’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, has been accused of manipulating its order book in an attempt to inflate the exchange's volume between October 2017 and December 2018. According to local media Prosecutors’ Office of the southern district of Seoul has formally charged three senior staff members, including founder Song Chi-Hyung, on charges of fraud. Allegedly executives have made fraudulent transactions, using a fake corporate account to make bogus orders worth 254 trillion won (over $226 billion).

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This week’s #CryptoCaselawMinute delivered by The Block brings expert cryptocurrency legal analysis of how Ripple was able to maneuver through two class action lawsuits.

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Bitcoin’s price has been showing signs of growth recently. The $20,000 mark is still far off, although the green color of the digital asset is beginning to calm crypto enthusiasts. How fair is the current price of Bitcoin and how much should BTC truly cost at the end of 2018: $0 (because the bubble has burst), $20, $600, $4,000 or more than $20,000?

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​​Since December 17, the Bitcoin price recovered by 28% on most major crypto exchanges. But, on a 30-day basis, the value of the first cryptocurrency still remains down about nine percent from $4,400 and must surpass resistance levels above this mark to confirm a bullish movement on the upside. Why Bitcoin isn’t ready for a rally beyond $5,000?

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📨 #DeCenterDaily

🗓 Launch of Bakkt, futures trading and custody platform, might be delayed for the second time due to lack of necessary approvals from CFTC and current US Government shutdown.
via CoinDesk

📲 Today, at 11:00 AM (UTC), Binance, the leading cryptocurrency exchange by volume, will add two trading pairs with XRP, and will rename the original ETH Trading Market into the ALTS Trading Market, to support more trading pairs with different quote currencies.
via CryptoGlobe

🇷🇺 A recent poll among residents of the Russian Federation showed that more than 13% of the country's population use cryptocurrencies to pay for online purchases.
via Bitcoin.com

💵 According to crypto analytics firm Data Light in 2018 the number of cryptocurrency ATM machines in the world has doubled, with approximately six new machines installed every day.
via CCN

⚡️Lightning Network, a second-layer scaling solution that facilitates instant, low-cost, scalable Bitcoin transactions, has breached the capacity of 500 BTC in its network.
via NewsBTC

The Block asked top crypto experts to share their vision of Facebook’s upcoming stablecoin. Some say that Mark Zuckerberg is going to successfully co-opt DLT to the benefit of Facebook. While others fear that world's largest social network won’t have adequate internal controls to manage the complexities and moral hazard of mingling social media with financial access. Or maybe it will become world’s leading global bank, providing access to financial services to 100’s of millions of users?

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​​Travis Kling, the founder and chief investment officer at Ikigai, believes that there’s a “significant chance” that cryptocurrencies could outperform all other assets in the upcoming year. After all, as Kling highlights, Bitcoin was brought into existence at the very beginning of globally coordinated quantitative easing (QE), a move that allowed the U.S Federal to lower interest rates and buy trillions of dollars’ worth of government bonds and mortgage-backed securities.

Twitter Post

According to a recent report by CoinMetrics, a cryptoasset data provider, during a Bitcoin Private fork 2.04 million additional units were covertly minted, thus pushing the actual supply of BTCP to 23.04 million, instead of 21 million. Bitcoin Private is a fork-merge of Bitcoin and ZClassic, which was initially released on March 6, 2018. The 10-page report states that secretly coined cryptocurrency is worth $3.672 million.

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In a recent video interview for Cointelegraph, Peter Brandt, spoke of how best to act during the bear market period. Brandt is a trader with 40 years of experience and is the CEO of Factor Trading, which was founded in 1980. DeCenter collected some tips and opinions on why a bearish phase can be favorable for the market and what is the best course of action until Bitcoin flies “to the moon.”

https://dcntr.org/bitcoin-bear-market

During a Q&A session on Reddit Andrew Bustamante, a former CIA intelligence officer and founder of the Everyday Espionage training platform, revealed that he has a number of concerns about blockchain technology and how it might be the biggest threat’ to US national security.

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📨 #DeCenterDaily

🍴 In the light of Coinmetrics' case study on Bitcoin Private's coin supply, which found over 2 million of additional units that were covertly minted, BTCP core developers are offering to remove illegitimate coins via hard fork.
via The Block

🇨🇳 China’s Center for Information and Industry Development (CCID) under the Country's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has released its latest crypto ranking of 34 projects, with EOS taking the first place, followed by Ethereum, while Bitcoin dropping from the 13th position to the 18th.
via Cointelegraph

🗓 Dr.Craig Wright believes that with the use of smart contracts Bitcoin could become a major means of making automated payments for subnoscription services.
via CCN

⛔️ Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and Barclays and other Wall Street giants have found themselves in limbo, when it comes to cryptocurrencies, and thus are postponing plans to enter this highly volatile market.
via Bloomberg

🗣 Alex Pack, a managing partner of Dragonfly Capital Partners: "Bitcoin could maybe fall as low as $2,000, or even $1,000, but not $0. For something like Bitcoin, which is a landmark in the history of money, it has become a more dependable store of value.”
via Forbes

​​Jameson Lopp, Bitcoin veteran and the CTO of Casa, has proof that Lightning Network has registered a very good year in 2018, with steady growth of active nodes, number of channels and network capacity.

Twitter Thread

​​An infographic on how different generations would spend $10,000. Based on a survey from LendEDU, it shows that Millennials were more likely to choose either real estate (15.1%) or cryptocurrency (9.2%) as an investment. For contrast, look at Boomers, a group that had 11.2% choose real estate and only 3.1% choose crypto.

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Now cryptocurrency users can provide food for horses, baby goats, bunnies and other farm animals at ‘Bitcoin Cash Zoo’. This initiative was inspired by Spencer Lambert, who created a mealworm dispenser that would feed chickens after it had received a payment of BCH.

The River Forest Farm live streams not only Lambert’s chicken coop, but also baby goats, horses, bunnies, ducks, and geese, that can be fed through an automated meal dispenser, which works with 0-confirmation transactions, meaning that animals get their food almost immediately (unless, of course, it is too late and the farm animals are sleeping). The farm’s ‘Dash Ducks’ accepts bitcoin cash, dash, and smartcash, while the other animals can also be fed with litecoin.

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Many interesting technologies have emerged over the past ten years that are starting to improve both business processes and the interaction of ordinary people within society. Two of the technologies widely used in recent years are virtualization and Bitcoin. Virtualization has paved the way for cloud computing, while the Bitcoin protocol can reinvent the finance industry by using blockchain.

Surprisingly, no one has thought of combining these two technologies together. If someone did this, then that someone would solve the most difficult problem for corporate IT directors, namely the issue of maintaining control over processes and customer data by trusting an outside vendor.

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Throughout the year, Bitcoin kept the whole world in suspense, while the altcoins followed and went down to the bearish hell. During this time, the community has almost become accustomed to the idea that cryptocurrencies as a technology were just a wild fantasy of geeks and cypherpunks. And if compared to a money equivalent, then this is surely a pyramid through and through, a financial bubble and just a scam for newbies. This opinion is widely discussed online and covered on TV. But what if our opinion on this matter was forced to think that cryptocurrencies have failed us? After all, there are those who perceive reality as it is and understand that the price of assets falls within the framework of market laws. Moreover, interest in the technology is only growing. This clearly indicates that the economic and conceptual sides of cryptocurrencies live independently of each other.

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📨 #DeCenterDaily

📉 According to a recent CNBC report, just about every single asset class has posted negative returns or unchanged performance year to date.
via CNBC

⛏ Bitcoin mining giant Bitmain confirmed major layoffs, with more than 50% of staff leaving the company.
via CoinDesk

🏦 ⁠Bank of America submitted an application to patent a blockchain system, which will use the technology in cash handling procedures.
via Cointelegraph

🇰🇷 South Korea’s blockchain association wants Gwangju, the 6th largest city in the country, to be turned into a ‘specialized Crypto-Valley District.’
via CCN

☠ According to the Bitcoin Obituaries website, the first cryptocurrency ‘died’ 90 times in 2018.
via Bitcoin.com

​​In the week of December 17 to December 23rd both Bitcoin and Ethereum reached their 7-month high in weekly trading volumes. Bitcoin’s volume reached $46 Billion, while Ethereum’s stopped at $18.5 Billion. The graph also shows, that the volumes for both Bitcoin and Ethereum are still very correlated.

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According to CoinDesk contributor Arwen Smit, there are three areas of conflict, between six “incompatible truths,” that have been slowly taking shape, and that 2019 will see them unleashed in full force. These areas are:

- Ideology vs product-market fit
- Market capitalization vs adoption
- Believers vs non-believers

How will they shape the crypto space in the upcoming year?

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CCN spoke with Nimrod May to find out if SIRIN Labs, which launched its blockchain smartphone, the FINNEY, just a few weeks ago, will continue making phones or focus on developing an OS. May also gave a side-by-side comparison of the SIRIN FINNEY and the HTC Exodus 1.

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The cryptocurrency industry has matured by one year, but investors are still way too trusting. With the support of stars and large companies, fraudulent ICO projects still find their victims. DeCenter has collected the most high profile scams and stories of fraudulent projects that took place in 2018.

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