 Hi, I'm Molly Jane, Managing Editor here at Cointelegraph and I'm talking to Maddie Greenspan this week about Bitcoin's price. Hey Maddie, so Bitcoin's price right now is trading between about $7,500 and $8,100. What's going on there and is there any sort of trend that you can see? Yeah, so at the moment we're consolidating gains, right? We've had a huge year so far, so from the lows in mid-December, several ramps already. February was a notable one. Early April, and then that massive one in mid-May. That one in mid-May is actually, it happened over several days, which was a really good sign. So it's not, you know, like some people are waiting for a Bart Simpson pattern, right? Where we see those huge surge and then a consolidation and a huge surge back, or a huge plunge. When you have that type of sustained rally, that's much less likely to happen. And what we're seeing now is a consolidation pattern up at the top. So basically, after you have that type of surge, it's very normal to get a little bit of a pullback, or at the moment it's basically cementing in people's minds, okay, this is what the price is right now. So we're trading in a range at the moment from around $7,500 to $9,000. Of course, there's that notable resistance point right in the middle, which is around $8,100. But the big one is $9,000. If we go past $9,000, if we get a big breakout of $9,000, that's one that's very likely to cause more FOMO. And obviously on the downside, if we get a break below that $7,500, but there's a lot of support here too. So $7,000 is a support, $6,400, which was the great stabilization range you'll remember from last year. $6,000 is a support, $5,000 is a very heavy support. So that's more or less where we're at at the moment. So now kind of going on to the news cycle. The Facebook coin news, the fact that they have 100 people working on it, the fact that the white paper is supposed to come out June 18th. Do you think that that's going to be influencing the market, or is that something that has already influenced the market, and if so, is the price indicating that influence? So the thing about the Facebook coin is that we don't know very much about it right now. All we really know is that Facebook has put one of their top players, David Marcus, in charge of a blockchain division, and that they're hiring like crazy. At last count, it was estimated that they have about 50 employees working on their blockchain section. After that, what we get are a lot of leaks, right? So we had an article in The New York Times, we had an article in Bloomberg, and the latest one here is from TechCrunch, which was just last week. And when you get these type of leaks, they always say sources say. So they are not saying who is telling us what's going on, but we can trust that because these are big name news sites, they verified their source. So the best thing that we can indicate is, or the best guess that we have at the moment of what's going on is that Facebook is making some sort of a stable coin, which is going to be pegged to the price of several different fiat currencies for stabilizations. They don't want to just peg it to the US dollar, but actually a basket of different currencies. And it's going to be integrated with what's that Facebook, probably Instagram, or a holistic integration throughout the Facebook. So this is similar to what Tencent has done in China, where they have WeChat, WeChat Pay, and stuff like that. So Facebook is very likely looking to do something like that. Now, question that we all want to know, is this good for Bitcoin? Is it good for the crypto industry? And I actually ran a poll on my Twitter account, which is just closing within the next, so by the time this video is published, it'll be closed already. Facebook coin is blank for the crypto industry, 55% indicated that it's good for the industry, and then 10% other, 35% said it's bad. So overall, what it looks like is people feel that this is going to be a big on-ramp for crypto, whereas people are going to realize that the Facebook coin is some sort of a centralized version, but people are hoping that it's going to be easier to convert Facebook coin into Bitcoin, and vice versa, so that it'll just basically open up the on-ramps. As far as my personal opinion, this is a tweet that I sent out, Facebook coin isn't a competitor to Bitcoin, it's a competitor to the US dollar. I don't know if you agree with that statement, not agree with that statement up to you, but I feel that this is more or less where we stand at the moment. All right, so with that news maybe coming out this summer, and I mean just other news, price surges, price falls, what do you expect to happen this summer? Do you see any sort of price cycle coming up? Yeah, so the price cycle is very much in line with what we've been saying all along, right? So that we had that, you know, here's the summer, right? Let's say from September till end of 2018, and then we had fall, right, until February, very short fall, and then crypto winter, which was a prolonged winter this year, and then a capitulation phase. So at the moment we are very much in spring, so this is where we're at, and personally I think that people should really enjoy from the spring. Summer is very hot, people get burned. I don't know if you remember what happened to Bitcoin and some of the crypto industry during last summer, there were a lot of websites that just couldn't handle the traffic. Some exchanges basically just said, okay, we're not accepting new customers at this time, because there was just so much. The Bitcoin blockchain itself got really clogged, transaction fees spiked, transaction times were out of control. So let's not try and look forward to summer at the moment. We're in spring, let's just enjoy the spring. Okay, my last question has to do with Litecoin, which is up a lot, 7% today. Can you speak about the reasons as to that? Oh yeah, definitely. So Litecoin, we're going to be seeing a halving in Litecoin, as we know that means that every new block is going to see half the rewards, and this is basically influencing the supply, so we're going to be seeing half of the new supply coming, so inflation is basically goes in half. Litecoin has been seeing also, as far as the price is concerned, I believe that Litecoin is really what kicked off the current bull run that we're seeing, so since the mid-December lows, Litecoin has been one of the best performers, second only to really Binancecoin, as far as the large cap altcoins, and it's not seeing a consolidation. Just yesterday we saw a new, fresh, yearly high, very nice trajectory in Litecoin, as far as the technicals are concerned. What's more important, what people are missing, I believe, is that yes, we have the halving event coming up, but Litecoin's fundamentals are extremely strong. If you think about what gives a crypto its value, a lot of that is derived from the network effect, so how many people are actually participating in the network and how many people are using it. This is something that I feel on social media all the time, because every time I write anything about Litecoin, I always get very positive responses, and everybody's always extremely happy about it, but if you want to look at the numbers, you can actually see this is the number of transactions that happen on the Litecoin blockchain, so there's the obvious spike in crypto summer, last crypto summer, January 2018, but what you'll notice here, this is something that's incredible, is that the transaction level never really came back down to previous levels. It just had this great stabilization at around 20,000 transactions per day. What that told me at the time was that we basically created a floor on the transaction level of Litecoin, which created a floor for the entire crypto market, and basically held it up, showing that yes, there is actual usage going on, even when there was apathy in the crypto market capitulation. People wanted to puke from their crypto holdings because they got so wrecked, and Litecoin was still seeing those 20,000 transactions per day, which was much greater than anything that it had ever seen before that. And then, of course, we can also look at the hash rate of Litecoin, which has been on the rise lately, no kidding, look at that, all-time highs right now, and just for comparison, we can overlay Ethereum on top of that. So Litecoin is the blue line, Ethereum is the red line. Take a look at that. Litecoin is one of the most secure crypto networks, I believe, second only to Bitcoin. So this is, if you're familiar with Crypto51 app, which shows how secure each blockchain is by how much hash rate is available to be rented. Bitcoin, obviously, zero, you cannot nice hash. Bitcoin, Litecoin is at 3%, which is less than Ethereum. The only other one is Bitcoin Cash ABC, which has also seen other stability issues according to BitMEX research. So Litecoin has two of those primary factors that contribute to valuation, which is the network effect and the security of the network. So I believe this is very likely the reason why it's been outperforming lately. That was my last question. So thank you so much for speaking with us today. Yeah. Right on. Anytime. It's a pleasure, Molly. So that was me, Molly Jane, speaking with Maddie Greenspan. And remember, this is the month of movie premieres for Cointelegraph. We're going to be premiering Multi-Blockchain Ireland Part 2, Crypto in the USA, and Sex in Crypto. This episode is sponsored by Trade Santa. Trade Santa is a cloud-based trading bot. Set it up in less than two minutes, trade multiple pairs, choose between long and short strategies, check analysis indicators, and see your results in real-time. Trade Santa works 24-7 to get you the profit you set. The platform is already integrated with Binance, BitTracks, Bitfinex, and HitBTC. The link is in the description below.