2018 Most Successful Year For Bitcoin

To many, the year 2018 is all but a disaster in terms of bitcoin price.

Some pundits have stated that it is a natural cycle of the bitcoin market, but no one can deny that it has taken its toll to many investors especially those who have bought the top of the recent all-time-high prices December of 2017.

However despite these prevalent bearish conditions, a prominent investor dared to say that 2018 is the most successful year bitcoin.

Jameson Lopp is a prominent bitcoiner and the CTO of crypto startup CasaHODL who has recently stated in twitter that 2018 had been a great year for bitcoin in terms of network performance.

He cited the significant increase of Segwit Witness protocol (SegWit) support in bitcoin.

This technology allows more transactions to fit into each processed block through data optimization.

Its adoption has increased from 10% to around 40% as more exchanges and platform opted to support the technology for cheaper transactional fees worldwide.

There are also other noteworthy developments in the year for the bitcoin community, such as the launch of lightning network which is a second layer scaling solution for bitcoin.

This technology facilitates off-chain instant and low-cost transactions.

Similarly to SegWit it has seen massive growth this year with around 500 BTC or $193 million capacity at the time of this writing.

Other developments includes Bitcoin satellite deployment and more hashing power in the bitcoin network making it more secure and more decentralized.

Crypto To Outperform All Other Asset Classes In 2019

No-coiners and skeptics has been poking fun on the dismal performance of cryptocurrencies in 2018.

However this current bearish sentiment is not the monopoly of cryptocurrencies as other global macro markets begun to falter as well.

Tech giants such as Apple, Google and Amazon has fallen so far that it is now in bear market or recession territory.

Even the SPDR Homebuilders ETF and the Shanghai Stock Exchange Composite are down 30% and 29% respectively.

These events by the U.S. Federal Reserve (FED) and have taken preventive measures to country the effects of current market trend to the economy.

According to the founder and chief investment officer at Ikigai, Travis Kling Bitcoin was brought to the world at the commencement of globally-coordinated quantitative easing (QE) - the largest monetary experiment of all time to help global economies.

Now that it is ending, it is causing major pain he says.

Given all these circumstances he reveals on his twitter that cryptocurrencies might be the best performing asset of 2019.

Kling states that bitcon gives consumers the ability to opt-out of the largest monetary experiment of human history as it is a non-sovereign digital money that transcends shortcomings in traditional markets.

Argentina Getting 8 New ATMs Before The Year Ends

The country of Argentina might be ending the year with a new Bitcoin ATM making it one of the countries that has the most number of Bitcoin ATM in Latin America.

The company called Athena Bitcoin has been investing in the infrastructure for the past few months and has installed seven machines around the Buenos Aires in shopping malls and major retailers for maximum exposure.

In addition to this, the director of IT and innovation at Athena Bitcoin, Santiago Molins, has recently revealed that his firm is also planning to install three more Bitcoin ATM machine in January of 2019 which will be situated the said capital and its surrounding areas.

Users of the Bitcoin ATM will be able to instantly receive the bitcoins they bought without having to wait for confirmations on the cryptocurrency’s blockchain.

Although zero confirmation are risky, the director assures users that they have a methodology that makes double spending impossible.

The director also admits that the general public is not rushing to tryout the Bitcoin Machines but the bitcoin ATM are getting new users as the economic situation of the country becomes more complicated.

He also reveals that the price of bitcoin is directly correlated with market volume of Bitcoin ATM when the market is down so does the volume the reverse happens when the market is up.

It must be noted that the number of Bitcoin ATM has doubled this year.

Vctrade Accepts Bitcoin, Ethereum and Ripple

A new cryptocurrency exchange launched by Japanese financial giant SBI holdings, Vctrade is now accepting Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH) and Ripple (XRP) deposits.

This was revealed at a press release published in the 21st of December 2018.

It has also been revealed that the exchange is considering to add Bitcoin Cash (BCH) when it is down evaluating the cryptocurrency.

Withdrawals will not be available until late January 2019 and be limited to hardware wallets called “designated wallets” by the company.

The feature of using a specific wallet will address concerns pertaining to anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing on the exchange as wallets will be associated to its owner.

SBI holding’s foray into cryptocurrencies is considered a major development in Japan crypto as it is considered one of the major financial conglomerate in the country.

According to its website it has over 92 billion yen ($828 million) in paid-in capital and over six thousand consolidated employees.

SBI holdings has been actively participating in blockchain-related activities.

Back in September, it signed a memorandum of understanding with Dayli Intelligence, a company that specializes in Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) as well as Blockchain technologies.

It has been reported that the baking subsidiary of SBI, SBI savings bank, wants to bolster its banking fintech business with the use of the emerging technology.

South Korean Business Schools Offering Crypto And Blockchain MBA

It has been reported that the Seoul School of Integrated Sciences and Technologies is now offering a Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree program focusing on blockchain technology and cryptocurrency industry.

The new program is described as a master’s degree program in blockchain, cryptoeconomics and token economy courses from technological, cryptoeconomic and business strategic perspectives.

The said program will take about 1.5 years to complete in the university.

The curriculum includes an in depth learning of Bitcoin, Ethereum, Smart Contract Technology, Cryptology, EOS and other cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies.

Students will also learn about management, strategic statistics, digital financial accounting, digital marketing strategies, crypto funds, Dapp planning and writing strategy for persuasive whitepapers.

According to one of the representative of the graduate school the mission of the university is to remedy the lack of academic research and systematic education in the country.

This is to address the high level of social interest in the blockchain technologies and cryptocurrencies.

The university is also known as aSSIST, a professional graduate school that was founded in 2004 that has been offering Master & Ph D degrees in business administration, technology management, big data and other science and technology.

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