Bitcoin spent another January day on the back foot, with the cryptocurrency below US$15,000.
On Tuesday, Bitcoin was down 1.43% at US$14,756.
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“Bitcoin continues to be as volatile as ever. After suffering substantial losses on Monday - down close to 15% at one point - Bitcoin did make a modest recovery late in the day but that appears to have been short-lived,” said Craig Erlam, analyst at Oanda.
“It’s trading down around 2% currently on the day and I wonder whether the sell-off over the festive period has knocked speculators confidence in it to make the kind of recoveries we saw at times last year.
“The inability to make these kinds of recoveries may just be temporary and a period of stability may be sufficient to draw traders back in but I wonder whether another correction may take place before that happens.”
“Bitcoin may have gone through a large correction over the last month but even that only represented about half the huge rise between mid-November and mid-December. Should it survive a couple more weeks without any scares then I think we could see appetite for Bitcoin return.”
Ripple and Ethereum were trading places again with the former, the ‘establishment’s cryptocurrency, dropping back to be demoted to be the third largest digital currency behind the latter.
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Ripple lost around 10% of its value, trading at US$2.22 (for a market cap of US$86bn) whereas Ethereum was up 4.3% changing hands at US$1,199 (giving it a market worth of US$116bn).
Cryptocurrency naysayers are hardly difficult to find, but, it may seem a little surprising that the most recent voice calling the market lower comes from one of the crypto pioneers.
Comments from Charles Hoskinson, a co-founder of the Ethereum digital currency system, suggest a cryptocurrency crash will be needed, before the market can be strengthened and consolidated.
"What's going to occur is a lot of these ventures that don't have strong fundamentals, don't have good tech, or just unrealistic projects, they will eventually run into some major wall they can't quite overcome,” a CNBC report quoted Hoskinson as saying.
“They will fracture up and you will see a lot of them are certain to fail."
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He added: “The problem is a lot of them have a lot of money. It's really hard to fail when your burn rate is $5 million or $10 million a year, and you have $1 billion of capital."