The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it.
— Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
Weekly Bulletin
As we approach the New Year, let us remember to celebrate the empirically observed anti-fragility of Bitcoin.
Bitmain confirms ‘adjustment to their staff’
Looks like Bitmain management wanted to curtail redundancies in the human resources area so many people are no longer viable members of the workforce (RIP George Carlin).
It was reported that Bitmain is dismissing almost half of its entire workforce in an attempt to restructure itself in order to "build a long-term, sustainable and scalable business."
You see that?
Those are folks talking about all that mining centralization (told you it was a meme).
Market Sentiment
Technicals
Bitcoin (Daily Overview)
There is a this meme going around that we’re going to see a green candle on January 1st (because folks are capitulating, funds are finished realizing their yearly loses, etc…).
I don’t know how I feel about that.
We’re probably going to see another attempt at that 50-SMA line.
I’m also still waiting to see what happens with the Bakkt futures launch.
Bitcoin (4h Volume)
Nothing too exciting on the volume (there was some CMF divergence on the daily candles).
Bitcoin (4h Oscillators)
Bitcoin (4h Support/Resistance Levels)
Bitcoin (Macro Overview)
Below are the 3 most common scenarios I’ve seen being discussed.
Option 1: Fractals analysis bottom (2,300 - 2,600)
Option 2: Fib extension bottom (1,700 - 1,900)
Option 3: Retest support of 2017 rally bottom (900 - 1,200)
Recommended Readings
Don’t trust, verify: a Bitcoin Private case study
Fascinating case study about a covert premine in project that had a ton of hype.
The folks at Coinmetrics started exploring the possibility of a convert premine after they found discrepancies between the supply data pulled from their Bitcoin Private node and the estimated outstanding supply of BTCP.
You can read the full report here.
Bitcoin Private (BTCP) is a fork-merge of Bitcoin and ZClassic (ZCL, a fork of ZCash that removed the founders’ reward). BTCP defined its initial supply according to the sum of the outstanding supply of Bitcoin at the time (16.8m), ZClassic (3.4m) and a small 62,500-unit miner program. This was intended to give it an initial supply of ~20.4m BTCP, with a decaying miner reward, capping the total supply at 21m units as with Bitcoin.
However, 2.04m additional units were covertly minted during the import of the Bitcoin UTXOs and sent to the BTCP shielded pool, bringing the initial supply to 22.6 million, contradicting the whitepaper and all of the materials published by the team. Three hundred thousand units of the covert premine were moved out of the shielded pool towards what appear to be exchanges. Ultimately the lack of uptake of BTCP by the recipients of the airdrop meant that those additional 300k transparent units today represent close to 10% of the BTCP supply in circulation, with 1.80M covertly minted units remaining in the shielded pool.
And here are some relevant tweets from Nic Carter.
If you think something important happened last week and we missed it, let us know!
Continue the discussion in our Telegram group.
That’s all for now.
See you all in the New Year.