Bitcoin in the News : 2019-12 More++

For the third year straight -- see Bitcoin in the News : 2018-12 More++ for the previous edition -- I'll summarize all of last year's monthly price charts in a single chart.

As I've already noted in several previous posts, the first half of the year showed a rising trend, the second half of the year a falling trend. The two previous years followed a similar pattern for longer periods: 2017 rising [the great bull market], 2018 falling [the great bear market]. The trend is your friend? December [2019-12] was flat.

In last week's post, Bitcoin in the News : 2019-12 Price, I wrote,

I'll come back to [those high-volume periods] when I look at other news sources in next week's '2019-12 More++' post.

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Later: After updating that post, I was left with a few more December stories worth noting -- all of them somehow negative. For example, two involved Ponzi schemes:-

• 2019-12-11: Cryptocurrency rocked by massive Bitcoin fraud (yahoo.com) • 'US prosecutors have arrested three men while investigating an alleged $722 million Bitcoin scam. The Justice Department has branded the activities of the 'BitClub Network' as a 'high-tech Ponzi scheme' that lured victims with fake Bitcoin mining profits while taking money from investors who were rewarded for recruiting new members.'
  
  
• 2019-12-19: That $2B Ponzi scheme caught dumping Bitcoin just moved its $105M Ether stash (thenextweb.com) • 'Just days after cryptocurrency analysts suggested that a $2 billion Chinese Ponzi scheme was stifling Bitcoin‘s price, its enormous Ethereum stash is on the move. [...] Earlier this week, Hard Fork reported that the PlusToken Ponzi scheme had sought to liquidate $2 billion worth of cryptocurrency swindled from unsuspecting investors.'

That second story is badly written and incoherent, but might be worth keeping in mind. The next story, from a veteran bitcoin analyst, is better written.

• 2019-12-21: A U.S. Fed Official Made A 'Significant' Bitcoin Warning (forbes.com) • Lael Brainard, Federal Reserve governor;'One study estimated that more than a quarter of bitcoin users and roughly half of bitcoin transactions, for example, are associated with illegal activity.'

I keep coming back to the same question: Why would an honest person want to mingle with the type of people involved in crypto currencies?