BTC Trading At $5,000, The Difference With 2017

After a long, long wait, bitcoin is finally showing real signs of recovery. If you haven’t heard, earlier this week, the flagship currency crossed the $5,000 price range. The last time it crossed from the downward side was in 2017 before going on to reach an all-time high of $19,000 at the end of the same year. Hence, brace yourselves people, we might be heading for a similar run.

We simply cannot rule out a repeat of what happened in 2017. The market is really positive at the moment, but as we take up the opportunity to profit from bitcoin. Let’s take a look at the recent developments could make the movement different from 2017 run.

Increased Investors In 2019

The number of bitcoin enthusiasts has risen tremendously from what was registered in 2017. Today, we have active bitcoin wallet users and the likes that are joining the crypto community via bitcoin subreddits. We didn’t have that in 2017.

One of the reasons people joined the bitcoin bandwagon in 2017 is the breaking of the $5,000 mark. Will the same trigger movements similar to 2017’s? It’s hard to determine. What we know is that the price support for the currency has been built at over $3,000 after more than 12 months in the bearish run.

The Segregated Witness

For the very first time, the average transactions per block on a daily basis with exclusions of Coinbase activities passed 1000 by the end of March 2019.

The SegWit was activated in August 2017 and was meant to scale the storage of data in the bitcoin network. As a proposed solution, segwit would process the greater throughput without necessarily changing the size of the block.

Since the implementation, the uptake of the SegWit program has been slow. This can be blamed on key exchanges failing to adopt the segwit in their platforms. Bitcoin visuals report that 2017 recorded only 294 SegWit transactions.

The Lightning Network

The Lightning Network has been termed the best thing in the crypto space at the moment.

The network is an off chain scaling solution for bitcoin that uses smart contract functionality to enable instant micropayments within the network of participants.

At the moment, Lightning Network transactions have surpassed 5 million in capacity. The use of the Lightning Network is set to improve as bitcoin continues to be adopted by merchants seeking crypto as a payment means. The Lightning Network was not available in 2017.

Growing Institutional Interests

Institutional adoption of bitcoin has risen constantly since 2017. Major companies including Facebook, Fidelity, and Bakkt have big plans to venture into blockchain.

The venture into blockchain by the giants is set to benefit the crypto market state in attracting more investors to the industry.

Uptake Shifting To South America

The situation is unlike in 2017 when China called the shots. Today, tough economic situations in South America are forcing people to develop penchants for crypto transactions. Crypto adoption in these countries have increased.

The increasing awareness of bitcoin despite fewer facilities and infrastructure has brought up substantial growth.

On the other hand, China has been discouraging bitcoin use. The republic has even banned direct trading and the Chinese involvement has reduced drastically.