 One year has passed since Bitcoin reached its peak price of nearly $20,000 and then went down, bringing along the whole crypto market into the year of the bear. As a Christmas present for all you hodlers, we decided to collect the most bullish statements of the week. Galaxy digital CEO Mike Novogratz said that despite the fact that the bubble has burst, Bitcoin is here to stay. We had a bubble. It popped. You've had a monster correction, right? Altcoins are down 98%. It wasn't tulips. It was a mania built on something that's real. We will have a digital store of wealth. I think it will be Bitcoin. For Spencer Bogart, partner adventure capital firm Blockchain Capital, Bitcoin could go as low as $1,000, yet the current bear market represents a fantastic buying opportunity. Could we go lower? Absolutely. I think anywhere between here and 2,000 or 1,000 is just a fantastic buying opportunity. I think when we look back 24 months from now, even 12 months from now, we're going to say why didn't I buy then? Equally positive seems to be Binance founder and chief executive CZ, who announced this week that his entire net worth is in crypto. None of our plans changed. We're still pushing forward very aggressively. Also this week, Eric Finman proclaims the death of Bitcoin, Blockstream expands its satellite project, fake trading volumes detected on CoinMarketCap, and more. I'm Molly Jane. We are here in New York next to the New York Stock Exchange's beautiful Christmas tree, and this is your hodler's digest holiday edition. Christmas time seems to have come for Bitcoin too. After hitting a 15 month low in the previous weeks, Bitcoin surged back past the $4,000 mark. The market bounce also affected all major cryptocurrencies, many of which gained double figures within a single day. Let's have a look at the latest updates. This week we did see a nice pop in Bitcoin. We went up from just above 3,000 to now just above 4,000. That's about a 25% move in the price of Bitcoin in less than a week. I don't think it's all that significant in the long scheme of things. Ever since we fell from approximately 6,500 straight down, the moment we touched below 5,000, I've been expecting a rally, and the more we kept falling, the bigger the rally I've been expecting. Had we reversed from the $4,500 area, I was expecting us to go all the way back to 6,000+. When we broke below the $4,000 area, I was still expecting the high end of 5,000 for a rebound. We ended up falling all the way to the low $3,000 range. So now I am expecting this pop to approximately 5,000 or maybe 5,500. We were falling too far, too fast, and I've been expecting this rebound. I don't believe Bitcoin. Bitcoin has probably bottomed for 2018. I know we only have about two weeks left in 2018, but the way Bitcoin just went up $1,000 in a couple of days, it can certainly go down $1,000 in a couple of days as well. I do believe we bottomed for 2018, but I don't believe we bottomed for the bear market. I do think new lows are coming at some point next year. Bitcoin is dead, said crypto teen billionaire Eric Finman in an interview with MarketWatch this week. Arguably the youngest crypto millionaire Finman first invested in Bitcoin in 2011, at the age of 12 when he used his grandmother's $1,000 gift to buy almost 100 Bitcoins at the low price of $12 per coin. Finman saw that $1,000 increased 4,000 times to around $4 million during the 2017 Bitcoin price peak. He is also known for winning about with his parents who would allow him not to go to college if he became a millionaire before the age of 18. Despite the Lambo lifestyle the crypto kid boasts about on his Instagram account, Finman claims it is all satire to attract people's attention to the projects he is developing. At the age of 15, he launched Botangle, an educational platform to match students with teachers via online chats. Finman said that Bitcoin may have a bull market or two left in it, but that long term it's dead. It sounds like Finman's views on Bitcoin changed drastically since the end of 2017 when he declared that Bitcoin was the future of currency and the future of the financial system. We reached out to Eric to clarify his stance on Bitcoin. I do think Bitcoin is dead and I say this as someone that's been a part of Bitcoin since 2011. I've been a part of Bitcoin since like forever. I was kind of born into it and that type of thing. I think Bitcoin will go through maybe one, two, maybe three more bull runs, but I think as a long-term project, the original reason why I got into it has kind of died. It was Warren Buffett who said, and I'm paraphrasing his quote totally, even if the stock is still going up, if the reason that I bought into it in the first place goes away, I'm going to sell. And I think that's where I'm at. The reason that I got into Bitcoin is now gone. It is dead, it is gone. That reason has totally been eliminated and destroyed. I don't like Bitcoin Core. I think as everyone knows, it's a little bit too slow. Bitcoin Lightning Network is, I'm not a fan of it. I think that it turns it into Visa Mastercard and I think that Visa Mastercard already kind of exists. And then Bitcoin Cash, which I like the technology, but I think the people behind it can't seem to pull it off. Litecoin is a dead coin and that type of just that whole world is like Litecoin. I think I said, I gave the analogy of when the sun goes out, there's eight minutes before you notice the lights go out on earth and Litecoin is in at seventh minute. So I like Ethereum and I like Zcash for its anonymous currency. It's really cool if you have one anonymous cryptocurrency that exists, if you put Bitcoin into Zcash or Bitcoin into Monero and then suddenly you're like off the grid and then let's say you even put it back to a new wallet, that's just kind of out of nowhere, right? I think cryptocurrency is absolutely going to stay here forever. I think cryptocurrency is great. I think it's going to exist for very, very probably to the end of time. Bitcoin is long term as a project is dead and other cryptocurrencies can last, but the community is also not very welcoming at the same time. Yeah, so I had $1,000 given to a gift by my grandmother. She said put it into my scholarship fund and I did not put it in my scholarship fund. I did put it into Bitcoin. So I got about 100 Bitcoins out of that. It was about 10 to $12 was the price and then kind of around 100. And then yeah, I started a business with some of that money when it went up to 1200 and I spent every year trying to get more and more and more Bitcoin, like trying to play the market as best I can. Launched a company, took Bitcoin on that website, sold the company for Bitcoin, and then proceeded to try to play the market from then on and then on and then on. So it just wasn't just 100. I grew it to be more than that as time went on. But yeah, back in 2011, I got my first 100 Bitcoins. I'm at like 350 something Bitcoins, but I have a lot of an Ethereum because I'm kind of transferring over. I still have a lot of Bitcoin cash from that fork. I make myself a target to all these Bitcoin kidnappers or whatever. So I have to be careful, but I'm still doing pretty well. A lot of teenagers did end up buying cryptocurrency because of me and have made a lot of money and will continue to make more money. I was like 16, 17. I was at the top of this building in Dubai that looked like a cruise ship on its side. And I bought, you know, like multi-thousand-dollar gold-flaked champagne. I think that's what I did. I drank gold. I think it was $10,000. I think 2019 will probably be the best year yet, I think for cryptocurrency and the history of cryptocurrency. Timothy C. May, co-founder of the Saferpunk activist movement and author of the Crypto Anarchist Manifesto, died at the age of 67. According to his close friend, Lucky Green, who announced the activist's death on a Facebook post, May died of natural causes in his California home. Also known as the Crypto Godfather, May believed that cryptography intended as the power to encrypt and decrypt messages united with decentralized computer networks will enhance individual liberties and protect users' privacy. That's what Nick Sosbo wrote on Twitter. Tim May was my chief Saferpunk inspiration. His vision is of a cyberspace free from government oppression. The Saferpunk Manifesto, published in 1988, laid the theoretical ground on which blockchain and cryptocurrency are currently built. Back then, May said, computer technology is on the verge of providing the ability for individuals and groups to communicate and interact with each other in a totally anonymous manner. In 1994, May created the Saferpunk mailing list, which became the home for the most revolutionary ideas leading to the birth of crypto. The list included such names as Julian Assange, Nick Sosbo, Hal Finney, Welde, and many others. While being supportive of blockchain technology, in his last interview, May was highly critical of the overspread crypto frenzy. He said, There's way too much hype, way too much publicity and not very many people who understand the ideas. It's almost as if people realize there's a whole world out there and thousands start building boats in their backyards. Some will make it, but most will either stop building their boats or will sink at sea. Blockchain startup BlockStream announced the expansion of its satellite surface this week, capable of streaming the entire Bitcoin blockchain to different corners of Earth. With the activation of its fifth satellite covering the Asia-Pacific region, BlockStream will allow Bitcoin transactions to be executed without internet connection everywhere on the planet, with the exception only of Greenland and Antarctica. On top of that, a new API will allow users to send encrypted messages using micropayments on the Lightning Network. Launched in August last year, BlockStream's satellite network relies on the Earth-based stations connected to the Bitcoin blockchain to send signals to satellites, which then re-broadcast the signals to the designated areas. In order to use the service, users will just need a small satellite receiver connected to a computer. BlockStream CEO Adam Back said that the project aims at minimizing Bitcoin's dependency on internet connectivity and make it more accessible in the emerging markets. He said, We see the increased robustness of the Bitcoin network and the lower cost of participation contributing to helping businesses rely on the service for backup, and for emerging markets to use as their primary access to the Bitcoin network at a lower cost. We reached out to BlockStream's chief strategy officer Sansa Mao and asked him for more insight on the project. The satellite API will allow anybody to connect to our services to broadcast communications over the satellite. So that will be paid for with Lightning Transactions. So these will be small transactions and there will be an auction where people can bid for broadcast. If they're sending encrypted communications, then it's a fully encrypted communication. So it's encrypted when it comes to us and encrypted when it goes out over the network so only your recipient could decrypt the message. So it could be a very uncensurable, robust form of communications paid for by Bitcoin with Lightning. The premise of the idea is that if Bitcoin is the foundation of a new worldwide financial system it needs to have redundancy. It cannot just be relying on terrestrial internet. Bitcoin is a consensus critical network so it's dependent on all the nodes in the network being synced and in consensus. So if you're using only terrestrial internet that means that you're prone to network splits when an undersea cable, an undersea internet cable is cut or a country might cut off their internet from the rest of the world. All you really need is a TV dish in the U.S. Direct TV is popular. It's this big. It's a very small satellite dish. So you can find those laying around. A lot of people had satellite TV before. They don't use it anymore. You can buy them for free sometimes. So it really lowers the bar for getting the Bitcoin blockchain because now all you need to do is make a one-time investment of maybe $100 max and you can get all that free which is 5, 6 gigabytes of data a month. According to a new report from Blockchain Transparency Institute 80% of the top 25 Bitcoin trading pair volumes on coin market cap are wash traded. Wash trading is a form of market manipulation in which investors simultaneously buy and sell a certain asset to artificially increase trading volumes and falsely signal interest towards the asset. BTI research showed that most of the surveyed pairs had an actual trading volume of less than 1% compared to the coin market cap data. Among the surveyed exchanges, OKX was leading the manipulation race with all of its top 30 traded pairs allegedly being manipulated. Only Binance and Bitfinex turned out to be clean, as well as liquid. There is a clear reason why the exchanges would artificially increase the trading volume. The average fee that an ICO would have to pay for listing its token is around 50 grand. So the higher the trading volume, the more active it is and as a result, the higher the fee that crypto exchanges can ask for. According to BTI, many exchanges exist solely to collect listing fees while they're bought to run the exchanges. The report shows that some of them made over 1 million dollars only with listing fees this year. Inspired by the popular song The 12 Days of Christmas, Coinbase celebrated Christmas holidays with the 12 Days of Coinbase. Every day from the 10th until the 21st of December the major crypto exchange made a new announcement. Maybe the most important one was that its US-based users will be able to withdraw funds through PayPal. This is not the first time that Coinbase and PayPal have worked together. In 2016 they did an integration to allow users to buy and sell Bitcoin using PayPal but due to technical difficulties, the integration was later terminated. For those who would like to trade crypto but lack the knowledge, the newly announced Earn feature allows them to earn small amounts of cryptocurrency in an interactive and entertaining way. Other announcements include buying Nike and Uber E-gift cards with crypto and Coinbase sponsored crypto donations to support Venezuelan families and Syrian refugees. Nice campaign Coinbase. Next year we expect 8 Days of Coinbase Ponica Crypto Miracle and Coinbase Ramadan a month of pure hotlay. Despite Novogratz's claims last week that people in the crypto ecosystem have sobered up, someone still seems under the effect of this Lambo mania. An alleged crypto millionaire was arrested in Hong Kong this week after making cash literally rain on the city streets. In a video posted on his YouTube channel, the crypto enthusiast has seen asking people if they've ever seen money falling from the sky just before performing that very miracle. He was later reportedly arrested for disorderly conduct in a public place while live streaming with a stack of cash in his hands. This guy seems to be the perfect hero for 2019, which according to the Chinese calendar will be the year of the pay. However for all you hodlers out there, we wish for next year to be the year of the crypto bull. Happy holidays from us at Cointelegraph and as always like, subscribe and hodl. Cointelegraph like, subscribe and hodl.