Bitcoin Markets Under Pressure Following Drop in Price and Hash Rate

The combination of weak near term technicals, a dip in hash rate, questions over a secretive miner/Core dev meeting, and sustained interest in ETH/ETC has pushed Bitcoin’s exchange rate down more than $20 over the weekend.
While the drama continues to run high in the Ethereum universe, Bitcoin has its own little bit of drama going on for the time being. First of all, with Segregated Witness rolling out to production in the next Core release and rumors of miner dissatisfaction over the past month, a group of seven large miners and over a dozen Core devs attended a closed-door meeting this weekend. Although details are sparse, speculation is that on-chain scalability is the topic du jour. Also adding pressure is the fact that we have seen a noticeable drop in the hash rate over the past few weeks now that the block reward has been cut in half. Below is a 2-month chart of the Bitcoin hash rate difficulty.

This post was published at Coin Telegraph on 2016-08-01.