Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election casts a cloud over Bitcoin’s future in United States. Here are the cryptocurrency highlights of week 45:
- In the wake of Donald Trump’s upset victory in the U.S. presidential election, advisors have floated the idea of naming JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon as treasury secretary. This could be bad news for Bitcoin, as Dimon is known to be a Bitcoin sceptic. In 2015 Dimon said: “Virtual currency, where it’s called a bitcoin vs. a U.S. dollar, it’s going to be stopped. No government will ever support a virtual currency that goes around borders and doesn’t have the same controls. It’s not going to happen.” With Dimon becoming part of the government, he could turn his own prediction into reality.
- With only several days to go until miners can start signaling support for Bitcoin’s segregated witness fork (expected to start November 19), 26% of nodes worldwide are now running the required code. More specifically, 1,433 nodes out of a total of 5,465 nodes connected to the Bitcoin network are now prepared for the upgrade. It is uncertain how much of the total network hashrate these nodes represent, but Bitcoin Classic and Bitcoin Unlimited together control at least 12 percent of it. The latter means Segregated Witness won’t activate any time soon if nothing changes, as it requires the support of 95 percent of the total network hashrate.
- Zcash Classic, the “Zcash Fork with No 20% Founders Tax” was launched this week. The founders disagree with the allocation of ten percent of the 21 million ZEC to ever be created to groups outside of the ZEC miners. The new fork isn’t performing very strong though, with a total market capitalization of just 4 percent of Zcash’s total market capitalization (around 4 million USD).
- Ten global banks have tested a distributed ledger-based know-your-customer registry through the R3 blockchain consortium. BBVA, CIBC, ING, Intesa Sanpaolo, Natixis, Nordea, Northern Trust, Société Générale, UBS and US Bank took part in the three-month initiative, R3 said earlier this week. The registry enabled the banks involved to create and manage digital identities within a shared system, providing a mechanism for adhering to KYC regulations in the finance space.
- The price of Bitcoin increased by less than one percent this week to a current rate of about $705 per BTC. The price of Ethereum lost the gains of the previous week, losing almost 11 percent and taking Ether down to a rate of $9.88 per ETH. Ethereum Classic also decreased strongly, with the price decreasing 13 percent to $0.92 per ETC. Zcash continued to crash, and lost another 70 percent of its value. One ZEC is now trading at $151 per coin.
