If you were one of those people that bought Litecoin at US $350, or around there, you are probably crapping your pants right now as Litecoin takes blow after blow and has fallen as low as US $215 in the past week. As the situation stands, it still doesn't look like it's found its ultimate low yet (there may be more selloffs to come as investors seek to minimise their losses and move into other coins, like Ripple).
While Ripple 'rips' through the market capitalisation (grabbing 2nd spot from Ethereum during, what I call, the Christmas "banksters' rush"), Bitcoin and most of the other altcoins experienced a 40% correction, or worse. Litecoin, out of the top 50 coins, has seen the biggest sell-off I have witnessed in its trading history. A huge market correction was expected around Christmas, but why was Litecoin specifically targeted?
I believe I can shed some light into this mystery. You see, when insiders know some big news is coming for one or another crypto, they preemptively try to crash the market for that coin in order for holders to sell up so they can get their hands on as many real coins as they can.
Don't believe the volumes you see on exchanges, they are greatly exaggerated by trade bots who "wall up" the Ask and Bid prices to try and force actual people to trade their coins within the desired margin. Those bots don't want coins from other bots, and their Ask and Bid prices almost never 'collide' due to the speed of algorithmic calculations involved. So, the bots are all trying to get real people's coins into their owners' pockets, and they will continue to do so as long as it profits them.
When consumer confidence in Litecoin drops to its lowest, even the hardiest HODLers may sell up and head for greener pastures.
TRON, ICON, Cardano, RaiBlocks, and so many other coins on the trade-bots' hype list are going up exactly as expected (engineered). The turnaround on coins like this is around 1 week, they go in massive waves up, and then vertically down when it's time to capture the profits. The waves are repeated within progressive time cycles.
Don't get me wrong, the technologies behind these companies is excellent, and development teams legit, however the valuation of their shares / tokens / coins is far removed from their actual adoption and utility in the real world.
Ethereum has earned it's US $750 value through countless utility. However, it's scaling issues, much like Bitcoin, are showing through the seems. For over 2 weeks now, Ethereum has been experiencing maximum (over 100%) capacity for transactions on it's blockchain. This is not a positive sign for the well-informed investor, and they would likely put their money into a competing platform, like Cardano, NEO, Qtum, Skycoin and many others, that launched with better scalability built into their base layer. Litecoin performed quite well, hitting a wopping 6% capacity during what I call "The Big-Crypto Short".
Back to Litecoin. So what is so special about Litecoin that would get the insiders to try and eat up your personal holdings? Well you see, Charlie Lee and friends, have long known the potentials for Litecoin as a "programmable" cryptocurrency. Among many awesome projects in development, one is led by the Litecoin devs, who are building the MAST platform, which would allow Smart Contracts to be integrated with the Litecoin blockchain, opening payment channels, development channels, and of-course investor channels to an already growing network.
Massive financial industry money, as well as prominent social media platforms (hint hint Facebucks) intend to utilise the scalable and already highly adopted Litecoin protocol to facilitate the purchase of merchandise (with their fees and rules attached of-course).
There are also several payment platforms that have announced their adoption of Litecoin as a payment method, either as a Visa or MasterCard, or spendable by you as a 'digital entity', often requiring strict KYC (Know-Your-Customer) identity validation. LitePay and one other mystery provider have currently been mentioned on social media.
Trading on commodity / retail markets similar to eBay would be ideal with a peer-to-peer payment method (with almost US $13 billion in current adoption, and expected to go 5 to 10 times that number, when such news hits the markets).
For now, news on Litecoin development lies dormant behind the regular market shock-announcements like John McAfee's Twitter getting hacked; Bitcoin futures have launched; the Bitcoin bubble is popping (again); or tax regulation and banks targeting exchanges all around the world to try and stamp out market competition.
I hold the belief that Litecoin will hit US $1,000 by late February, and with multiple perturbations in between, then reach US $1,600 by August, 2018. It might even double from there by the year's end.
Big money is entering this market, now that the decline of the U.S dollar is so evident, they have a lot of Benjamin Franklins they need to put somewhere. After all, there is US $21 trillion missing from the government's budget, and it's gone into the hands of some deep state officials, who would need to legitimise their dollars by funneling them through the crypto market as well (as other means), so as not to trigger hyperinflation in the US economy.
So far, the market cap of Bitcoin and top 10 altcoins is hardly big enough to move such sums (some $700 billion), so that's why this market as a whole is about to go astronomical. Imagine even 1 trillion of those missing dollars entering the market. That would more than double the value of most (of the legit) cryptocurrencies and platforms currently out there. BitConnect and other scams will go away, and the banks will release their own cryptos (based on centralised and permissioned blockchains of-course).
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Disclaimer: I hold Litecoin, and have purchased bits here and there during the recent crash. I don't think the price will drop below US $200 before it begins its recovery. I'm watching for good news to come in late February, 2018. Will keep you guys updated.
None of the above content is meant to be financial or investment advice. Please do your own research and come to your own conclusions. Thank you.
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