Bitcoin will be $50,000 or zero - depending on who you believe
Crypto News: No regulation in the EU but a new crypto for India?
As the cryptocurrency market sell-off – which saw more than 60 percent wiped off their value in a little over a month – appeared to hit bottom this week, financial experts offered wildly differing views on where Bitcoin and its crypto peers will go next.
Sounding the most bullish note was Thomas Glucksmann, head of APAC business development at Gatecoin, who said that Bitcoin will hit $50,000 by the end of the year – citing the arrival of institutional money to the space.
The Winklevoss twins, who have quite a lot of skin in the game, believe it will someday be worth 40 times its current value – which is $340,000.
That, though was countered by Steve Strongin, head of Goldman Sachs global investment research, who told CNBC that they have no intrinsic value and would not be around in the long-term at all. Nouriel Roubini even called people buying them “crypto crazies”.
Only one thing is certain, of course, and that is they can’t all be right.
EU to not looking to regulate cryptocurrencies yet
When asked whether the EU would join the likes of China and South Korea in regulating cryptocurrencies, Daniele Nouy, chief supervisor at the European Central Bank (ECB), offered a pretty straightforward response: “It’s not,” she said, “exactly very high on our to-do list.”
That is clearly good news for a sector that has digested a lot of negative news since the turn of the year, although it doesn’t mean the ECB is ignoring the issue.
“We scrutinise the issue in a regulatory perspective and we are ready to do something if it was needed,” he added, but suggested there was little appetite across member countries.
Is India about to launch its own cryptocurrency?
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley made headlines last week when, in his Budget speech, he insisted that cryptocurrencies were not legal tender and that the government would not recognise them.
However, it has emerged that The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) is already looking at introducing its own – with the success of Bitcoin encouraging the central bank to look at a coin that could become an alternative to the Indian rupee for digital transactions.
Anonymous traders in South Korea staying away
A week after the ban on anonymous trading came into effect in South Korea, in which traders needed use the names on their linked bank accounts, only about eight percent of anonymous accounts have switched to real-name trading.
A total of 1.74 million virtual accounts for cryptocurrency trading exists between the three main banks and only 143,300 accounts have made the switch.
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