Bitcoin Hell Day

After steadily sitting between $10,000 and $11,000 these past few months, the price of Bitcoin fell 12.8% Tuesday, causing concerns among the online gambling community. 

Bitcoin now accounts for around 70% of all transactions to and from online gambling sites in so-called "restrictive markets".  That's better than half the global betting market, including North America.  Betting sites want customers to feel comfortable using annonymous cryptocurrencies, but not when the price is crashing by more than 10%.

Our friends at BetOnline are currently offering a Bitcoin bonus 5% above market value, so promos like this do tend to ease the pain on days like these.

So what exactly caused today's plunge down to around the $8500 mark?

The first signs of bad things to come were apparent Monday evening when Forbes Billy Bambrough noted the drastic decline in Litecoin.

The reason for litecoin's sudden sell-off was not immediately clear, however litecoin is down some 50% since June, thought to be a response to the gains litecoin made earlier in the year as traders cashed out of their positions.

The drop in Bitcoin comes after Bitcoin’s network hash rate, or speed of the miner’s performance, plunged 40% overnight, according to reports.

Altcoins like Litecoin (as noted above) and Bitcoin Cash have fared far worst.

NewsBTC observed:

Altcoins have been absolutely destroyed. Ethereum has shed 13% in the past 24 hours; Bitcoin Cash, -20%. The market capitalization of the cryptocurrency market has collapsed all the way to $240 billion.

There may be some light at the end of the tunnel however.

It may not be curtains closed for this bull market, however. Martin Chebbi, a Twitter user, reminded Crypto Twitter users that a loss of a descending triangle “doesn’t necessarily mean the end of a bull run”. He notes that in 2017, Bitcoin similarly shed a triangle, to only rally above it in the months that followed.

- Aaron Goldstein, Gambling911.com