Bitcoin Stuck Once Again, 200K Transactions Unconfirmed
An interesting weekend is looming for Bitcoin, as a series of events may shake down the recent record prices. All seemed to go well for Bitcoin, until a rather high difficulty adjustment, which stretched block time to more than 13 minutes.
The BTC market price has stopped its rise and moved down toward $16,742.10, still keeping most of the gains, but the weekend events are anyone's guess. Bitcoin Cash has grown more than 12% overnight to $1,552.11.
In a perfect coincidence, more than 200,000 transactions are awaiting confirmations and mining, as users wanted to move coins for various reasons, from taking profits to an attempt at exploiting the differences on exchanges.
In the past weeks, unconfirmed transaction backlogs were down to a more manageable level of around 50,000 transactions, and 60,000 seemed high. But for more than a day now, upward of 220,000 transactions are awaiting.
Bitcoin is headed for a difficult period in the next two weeks. Firstly, the new higher difficulty will hold on for 16 days more. Then, from Monday, futures trading starts on CBOE, followed by CME futures a week later, with an unknown effect on the price.
There is one more factor- Bitcoin Cash, which was seen as defeated, might continue to pester Bitcoin, due to the exchange in mining power. The BCH difficulty adjustment mechanism turned out to be agile and once again invited miners with a higher profitability.
At this point, a flippening between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash may be more far-fetched, but periods of head-on conflict may repeat, altering the course of both digital assets. At this point, Bitcoin has a huge community of supporters and a robust inflow of new investments in cash, giving it more power.
John McAffee remains ever the Bitcoin maximalist:
"Bitcoin now at $16,600.00. Those of you in the old school who believe this is a bubble simply have not understood the new mathematics of the Blockchain, or you did not cared enough to try. Bubbles are mathematically impossible in this new paradigm. So are corrections and all elsepic.twitter.com/go9v0w92zk— John McAfee (@officialmcafee)December 8, 2017"
Bitcoin now at $16,600.00. Those of you in the old school who believe this is a bubble simply have not understood the new mathematics of the Blockchain, or you did not cared enough to try. Bubbles are mathematically impossible in this new paradigm. So are corrections and all elsepic.twitter.com/go9v0w92zk
But events like the network congestion and mining pools switching networks are still causing jitters, especially given that they are happening suddenly and causing chaos.
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