What actually is driving the day in the world of bitcoin and crypto?
First, here is our 24-hour crypto market snapshot
Bitcoin (-4%) $57,107
Ethereum (-1%) $4,148
Cro (-10%) $0.5065
Avalanche (+4%) $107.73
Crypto sales and fluctuations
It’s a week before Black Friday (the U.S. pre-holidays spending extravaganza) and bitcoin is already on sale. The bitcoin price has given up much of its October gains, falling to levels not seen since before the bitcoin futures exchange-traded fund (ETF) hype sent it to record highs. Some have suggested the latest downturn is a result of expectations Mt. Gox creditors will offload the bitcoin returned to them early next year.
The rest of the crypto top ten is still trending downward this morning, with this week’s crash now having wiped around $500 billion from the combined crypto market. Ethereum and its rivals Binance’s BNB, cardano, solana and polkadot are all down between 1% and 2%, while Ripple’s XRP is off by 3%.
Just outside of the crypto top ten, avalanche is still making gains, adding 4% over the last 24 hours. Further down the charts, Crypto.com’s cro has crashed 10% after the hype surrounding its sponsorship of the LA Staples Center died down.
What did Hilary Clinton say on crypto: Former U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton has called on countries to keep a close eye on crypto
Hillary Clinton, the former U.S. presidential hopeful, secretary of state and first lady, has warned that bitcoin and cryptocurrencies could have the power to weaken entire countries. Clinton called on nation-states to pay greater attention to “asymmetric power centers,” criticizing Russian president Vladimir Putin and accusing him of deploying “a very large stable of hackers and those who deal in disinformation and cyberwarfare.”
Why it matters: Clinton is the latest high-profile politician to warn over the rise of cryptocurrencies and their potential effect on the wider financial system. Earlier this week, India’s prime minister Narendra Modi called for countries to work together to stop cryptocurrencies “ending up in the wrong hands.”
“One more area that I hope nation-states start paying greater attention to is the rise of cryptocurrency because what looks like a very interesting and somewhat exotic effort to literally mine new coins in order to trade with them has the potential for undermining currencies, for undermining the role of the dollar as the reserve currency, for destabilizing nations, perhaps starting with small ones but going much larger,” Clinton said, speaking during a panel discussion at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Singapore, in comments reported by Coindesk.
The bottom line is that the Cyberspace is the battlefield of tomorrow and some think controlling cryptocurrencies will make war easier to win.
The crypto investors who raised $47 million to buy a copy of the Constitution lost their bid—here’s where the money goes now
IRS eyes increasing crypto seizures
The bitcoin and crypto boom isn’t just working out for traders and investors. The U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has said it’s seized $3.5 billion worth of cryptocurrencies this last tax year—a massive 93% of all the assets seized by tax enforcement for the 2021 fiscal year, according to the IRS criminal investigation annual report.
“I expect a trend of crypto seizures to continue as we move forward into fiscal year ‘22,” IRS criminal investigation chief Jim Lee said on a call with reporters, it was reported by Bloomberg. “We’re seeing crypto involved in a number of our crimes as we move forward.”
The huge infrastructure package signed into law by U.S. president Joe Biden this week that will eventually require crypto brokers to track and report transactions to the IRS is expected to mean the IRS is able to track and seize even more cryptocurrency in the future (though that isn’t settled just yet).
