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The People's Republic of China adopts the first law on cryptography

This law will come into force on January 1, 2020. Interestingly, the law is not connected directly with cryptocurrencies, but is aimed at creating standards for the application of cryptography and passwords management. However, according to experts, passing this law means nothing other than China’s approaching the launching their new national cryptocurrency. It is connected with the fact that cryptography is the main component of cryptocurrency.

TRON dislodged Ethereum in an updated Chinese cryptocurrency rating

CCID of China has presented its fourteenth rating of cryptocurrencies. The leaders occupying the first three positions remained unchanged, but also some reshuffling took place. Ethereum lost 13 points for basic-tech, due to which it ceded the second place in the rating to TRON cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin does not participate in this race to the top and from the moment of publication of the previous rating, having received a small boost to its total index, still occupies the eleventh position.

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Actions of one whale could influence on bitcoin surge in 2017 and Stellar has destroyed 55 billion of their token

Bitcoin price surge of 2017 could be fueled by one whale

The University of Texas has published research which shows that a whale was buying a large amount of BTC during drawdowns and additional emission of USDT. It is important that such a “scheme” was used only on the Bitfinex exchange.

Connection between bitcoin growth and USDT have been discussed before. TokenAnalyst experts have already noted an incredible coincidence between bitcoin pump and Tether emission. However, it was believed earlier that this had been caused by actions of lots of independent traders.

A group of researchers analyzed all BTC and USDT transaction between March, 1, 2017 and March, 31, 2018 and came to a conclusion that it had been one large player. At the same time, no similar pattern was detected on other exchanges.

It should be understood that Bitfinex controlled over 20% of the market in 2017-2018, and it is only by 2019 that the exchange’s market share dropped to 7,3%.

Stellar burst into the top 10 cryptocurrencies after destroying 55 billion tokens

Stellar team reported destroying 55 billion of tokens. They took this decision after analyzing the plan of blockchain implementation. The coins that got destroyed were mainly the ones for airdrop (out of 43,5 billion only 6 remained), as well as operational fund (out of 16 billion, 11 remained) and affiliate programs (12 billion out of 25).

This was announced at Meridian conference in Mexico, Stellar Development Foundation announced the burning and in two hours the token rate increased by 16% from $0,069 to 0,083. Currently, correction took place and Stellar’s price is $0.0806.

The developers said that no further coin burning is planned. In total, 55 billion (worth of $4 billion) of XML were destroyed.

Einstein Exchange shuts down with the debt of 16 million

Einstein Exchange clients say that the exchange’s management and employees stopped replying to requests and complaints, and the users cannot get access to their funds.

Currently, the management of the exchange has been transferred to the British Columbia Securities Commission (Canada). The total damage estimate is $16 million.

When the exchange was registered its management provided judicial evidence of possessing assets to satisfy all withdrawal requests, however refused to provide the location of the funds.

Currently the office of the exchange is closed, there is no access to their website and investigators cannot establish the location of Michael Ongun Gokturk, the exchange founder. The pages of the exchange in social networks are buried under complaints of dissatisfied customers.

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Ethereum developer confirmed the date of hardfork

The next upgrade of Ethereum blockchain called Istanbul, which the users have been waiting for over six months, will be implemented before the end of the year. This has been announced by their developer Peter Szilágyi in Twitter.

The hardfork is scheduled to take place at block 9069000 which should be generated around December, 4, 2019.Fot this new client Geth has already been launched, which already has hard fork.

The peculiarity of the upgrade will be implementing of ProgPoW, programming algorithm aimed at eliminating the advantage of ASIC-miners over GPU-miners.

But the users look more forward to the next upgrade Berlin which is scheduled for the first half of 2020.

North Korea accused of money laundering with the help of cryptocurrencies

The UN Security Council Sanctions Committee on North Korea led an investigation which discovered the connection between the country and the Hong Kong blockchain company Marine China.

According to the representatives of UK Security Council, the country’s leadership has been using various strategies with cryptocurrency to evade from international sanctions. It is reported that North Korea made at least 5,000 transactions using stolen cryptocurrenies. It was made to make establishing the source of the money more complicated.

It is believed that the North Korean hackers were using phishing attacks and computer viruses to steal digital currencies and then laundered and cashed it in Singaporean banks. The Committee has not named the total amount of stolen funds.

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Morgan Creek CEO: sell Amazon shares, buy bitcoin

Morgan Creek Capital CEO Mark Yusko said that bitcoin is the next groundbreaking technology, and that it is currently the greatest wealth-creation opportunity there is. At the same time, he called Amazon shares “dead money for a decade”.

Morgan Creek Capital is known for investing $5 million in Google in 1996. At the time, Google was the sixteenth-most used search engine and not known by many. Later on, this investment turned into $200 million.

BRICS can create its own cryptocurrency

BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) are considering a possibility to launch a payment system based on cryptocurrency. It would be used for mutual payments between countries – association members.

The idea was introduced by Kirill Dmitriev, the head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) at the BRICS forum in Brazil. According to him, the members of the association's business council supported this suggestion.

Bitcoin keeps falling. When will this stop?

Bitcoin will test again the resistance of $8,600 level, and in case of breaking it, it will carry on falling, according to Aayush Jindal, NewsBTC analyst. The closest targets are marks of $8,500 и $8,300. Jindal thinks that for a full turn, the price needs to settle over $8,880.

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Trading volume on BitMEX hit 2019 low

The daily trading volume on the largest crypto derivatives exchange BitMEX has dropped down to 86,850 BTC — lowest since the November 2018. This was brought to attention by CL, Twitter analyst.

“This market is officially lifeless,” — he wrote in his account.

BitMEX is the platform with the highest liquidity in the world for cryptocurrency derivatives trading.

Venezuelan government to gift the retirees with cryptocurrency for Christmas

Nicolás Maduro, the President of Venezuela, said that all the country’s retirees and officials will get 0.5 El Petro (around $30) as a Christmas gift.

El Petro is a national cryptocurrency of Venezuela. As the government of the country says it is fully backed by oil. The government is trying to use El Petro in the country’s economy and for trading with other countries, however, with not much success so far.

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USA can launch their own cryptocurrency

The Federal Reserve is looking into developing a digital currency in the US. It was announced by its Chairman Jerome Powell in a letter to lawmakers this week in his reply to the letter from Congressmen French Hill and Bill Foster. They are concerned that the Chinese cryptocurrency on which the Chinese government is already working can jeopardize the USA’s position in the world’s economy.

Powell specified that so far the Federal Reserve “not identified potential material benefits of a general purpose central bank digital currency to the implementation of monetary policy" and is only studying the rationale for creating it.

Tether and Litecoin have the largest portion of whales

IntoTheBlock said what percentage of the most popular cryptocurrencies is owned by the largest owners. Tether and Litecoin turned out to be the most centralized: 63% of USDT is owned by 132 addresses, and 47% of LTC is owned by 131 address.

The data for the other large crypto currencies looks like this: ETH — 151 addresses own 39%,
Bitcoin Cash — 112 addresses own 29%, Bitcoin SV — 103 addresses own 24%, and 39% of Cardano is owned by only 41 addresses.

PayPal CEO said he has bitcoins

Dan Schulman, the CEO of payment processor PayPal, revealed that he owns only one cryptocurrency, bitcoin. He also said that BTC is an “interesting idea”, and blockchain is a “promising technology”.

“As for cryptocurrency, it is still very volatile, and that they do not have much demand for it by merchants because merchants operate on very small margins. What they need to do is to turn it to fiat immediately. There is a charge for turning it into fiat, that is why any advantages in price will be eaten up by this conversion fee”, Schulman said.

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Bitcoin crashes below $7,000

Last Friday the world’s first cryptocurrency lost over 10% om price and crashed below $7,000 on a number of exchanges. Such low price of bitcoins is registered for the first time since May this year.

Against this background, the “fear index” has dipped down to extreme values at the level of 20. According to the site Alternative.me it can mean a possible growth of the cryptocurrency.

Binance CEO refutes rumors about the raid in Shanghai office of the exchange

On November, 21 media announced that the largest office of Binance in Shanghai shut down after a police raid. Many analytics connect this news to the cryptocurrencies losing prices, including bitcoin’s dropping below $7,000.

Changpeng Zhao, CEO of Binance, refuted this information, calling this information a FUD block.

“No police, no raid, no office. Hope you didn’t pay to read that FUD block.” — he wrote in his Twitter-account.

The USA can make Facebook’s cryptocurrency a security

The House of Representative of the USA introduced a new bill about acknowledging managed stablecoins such as Libra as securities.

"Managed stablecoins, such as the proposed Libra, are clearly securities under existing law. This legislation simply clarifies the statute to remove any ambiguity. Bringing clarity to the regulatory structure of these digital assets protects consumers and ensures proper government oversight going forward", — stated Sylvia Garcia, one of the bill's authors.

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Fraudsters are selling Gram. Telegram warns users

Pavel Durov’s team said that selling of Gram tokens has not started yet, and asked users to not fall for scammers’ tricks.

“Some websites offer Gram for sale and pretend to be connected with Telegram. Please be advised that these sites are not official and have no relation to Telegram. Gram has not yet been given to anyone and Telegram is not selling Gram”, - states the official Telegram-channel of the company.

Cryptocurrency worth of $4.4 billion stolen in 2019

According to the research company CiperTrace, the amount of theft and scamming in the sphere of cryptocurrency reached $4,4 billion since the beginning of the year.

The report says that in Q3 of 2019 criminal have stolen the minimal amount during the past years. However, in comparison with the last year, the losses increased by $2,7 billion.

The company’s experts also named the largest crypto crimes of the year: the cryptocurrency pyramin PlusToken ($2,9 billion) and shutting down of the exchange QuadrigaCX ($195 million).

Andreas Antonopoulos: governments place a damper on bitcoin price

Andreas Antonopoulos, famous bitcoin enthusiast, said that governments act to lower bitcoin’s price, but this is not a conspiracy, it’s just their “job”.

“We know for a fact that when the bitcoin bubble started to go up really fast in 2017, the U.S. Treasury decided to fast-track the deployments of futures markets in order to stop that bubble. A lot of people see that as conspiracy, but if you look at the mandate of institutions like the Treasury, that’s actually their job”, Antonopoulos said in his interview with crypto blogger Ivan on Tech.

According to the analyst, this allowed investors to open positions for on lowering the price of bitcoin which balanced the market, as well as reduced its volatility.

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Bank of America named bitcoin the best asset of the decade, billionaires invest into BTC, and ethereum’s volatility is at its lowest

Bank of America: bitcoin is the best investment of the decade

Bank of America Merrill Lynch named bitcoin the best asset for investment of the decade. 1 dollar invested in 2010 would now be $90,026.

For comparison, 1 dollar invested in American stocks during the same period would have the price of $3.46. Myanmar's national currency was named the worst asset, since 2010 $1 invested in it now has a value of just $0.004.

Yet another billionaire bought bitcoins

The number of billionaires investing in cryptocurrencies is steadily growing.

Financial expert Bill Pulte announced his purchase of 11 BTC (around $78,000). He is the CEO of investment company Pulte Capital Partners and is worth about $11 billion. Pulte thinks the main advantage of bitcoin is an opportunity to make a transaction to any part of the world without a middleman. According to the billionaire, bitcoin canmake the life of the poor easier and make the world a better place.

Ethereum’s volatility drops to the level of 2016

Ethereum has been trading in the narrow range of $140-150 for a long time now. According to CoinMetrics.io, ETH’s volatility index dropped to 2016’s lowest.

On December, 8 Ethereum has undergone Istanbul hard fork, which did not lead to the cryptocurrency’s price growth, despite expectations

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Ethereum’s price is threatened, and the number of bitcoin hodlers is growing

Ethereum is threatened: Plus Token pyramid’s assets started moving

The organizers of a cryptocurrency pyramid Plus Token moved 789 525 ETH (about $105 million) to an unknown address. Twitter account Whale Alert paid attention to the transfer.

Matteo Leibowitz, the Block’s analyst, thinks that scammers can buy Ethereum futures for sale, crash down the spot price and close future contracts with a profit.

In the summer the Chinese police managed to detain the suspects in the Plus Token ponzi scheme case, but access to wallets could not be obtained.

The price of unspent UTXOs in loss hits a record high

The number of unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs) in loss rose to all-time highs above $45 million, according to a research by Glassnode.

This indicates the rise of the number of “hodlers” - people who hold bitcoin despite its price decrease.

Federal Reserve: over 50% of bitcoin transactions are illegal

Lael Brainard, member of the United States Federal Reserve Board of Governors, said that 25% of all bitcoin users participate in illegal operations.
“One study estimated that more than a quarter of bitcoin users and roughly half of bitcoin transactions, for example, are associated with illegal activity”, — the representative of FR said at an ECB event.

She also said that only a third of exchanges meet the requirements for AML (anti money laundering), CFT (combating the financing of terrorism) and KYC (know your customer) procedure.

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Hackers steal 2 million NULS token, Ethereum hard fork scheduled for January,1 and Craig Wright “proved” he is Satoshi Nakamoto

Hackers steal 2 million NULS tokens

Threat actors hacked and official account of the NULS projects and transferred 2 million of tokens. 550 thousand of them have already entered the market, the NULS team says.

At the same time the exchange rate of the coin has stayed almost the same – the currency lost in price just 0.58%. The developers are going to make a hard fork of altcoin to prevent hackers from spending the rest 1,45 million of tokens. The hacking took place because of the NULS 2.2 version security vulnerability.

Ethereum hard fork to take place on January, 1

Ethereum’s hard fork is scheduled for block 9,200,000 which is expected to be mined by January 1, 2020. The update is designed to delay the Difficulty Bomb by 4 million blocks (equivalent to 611 days).

The developers asked nod owners to update their software before December 30, 2019.

Craig Wright “proved” that he is Satoshi Nakamoto

The Australian scientist Craig Wright demonstrated “proof” that he is the bitcoin’s creator Satoshi Nakamoto.

During an interview with Modern Consensus, Wright showed an article to explain the choice the Satoshi Nakamoto pseudonym. The article is about a philosopher Tominaga Nakamoto who lived in 18 century. The printed out document, made according to Wright in 2008, also contained the following handwritten notes:

“Nakamoto is the Japanese Adam Smith. Honest Ledger + Micro Cash. Satoshi is Intelligent History. Not too hard.”

He explained that Tominaga Nakamoto wrote about “honest money and the rational nature of things”. Wright compared his with Adam Smith – one of the founders of the theory of economics.
Craig Right publicly claimed that he was the creator of bitcoin in 2019 about hasn’t yet provided sufficient evidence to prove it.

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Tone Vays: bitcoin will kill altcoins

Bitcoin’s hash rate growth will eliminate most of altcoins, trader Tone Vays says.

He noted that since December 2017, bitcoin’s hash rate has grown by 800%, which was not the case with altcoins. The trader has also added bitcoin’s dominance index went from 50% to 70% in 2019, and next year it will be 85%.

“I think we have another 10-15% in Bitcoin to gain on the sh*tcoins as it continues towards 90% and 95% and then 98%”, - Vays said.

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Dear beloved subscribers, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Our team wishes you an endless cash flow, sincere kindness, incredible success, interesting ideas and great health for new achievements!

We believe in you and genuinely hope that you will amass wealth, be reasonable with spending and enjoy work-life balance.

As a tradition, we wish hodlers the growth of crypto market, arbitragers – only successful schemes, and we wish miners always work with profits.

Already today you can start building your invincible financial fortress the walls of which will protect you against storms and turmoil. This fortress will help you and your family live the same lifestyle despite all the disruptions behind the fortress wall.

It is time for New Year’s resolutions and goals. Achieving them will make your life interesting, bright and successful.

Happy holidays!