What is Up With Ether’s Price?

Ether: Chopped Liver, or Calm Before the Storm?

What up with Ether’s Price? If you bought BTC or LTC on Oct. 11, 2017, you saw 10% gains by by the 12th. If you bought ETH, you are lucky to have seen 2%. Why?

TIP: See current Ether price on GDAX.

Here is some speculation and insight (AKA opinions, not investing advice) as to “what is up with that?!”:

• Bitcoin (BTC) is the clear leader of coins and has some upcoming forks (although to be fair, and although its not the same kind, ETH also has an upcoming fork).
• What other coins do aside, given Bitcoin’s historic position as leader, it is not surprising to see it leading the pack with gains.
• Up until September all coins (altcoins) just essentially followed Bitcoin, shadowing it like an older sibling. Almost to an absurd degree.
• Litecoin (LTC) and Ether (ETH) are very popular altcoins, but they are altcoins… and they have a history of following BTC.
• Thus, it isn’t surprising to see one of those two coins follow BTC. Especially LTC since LTC is very similar to Bitcoin in many respects.
• What is odd is that LTC followed Bitcoin and Ether did not. This breaks the pattern that has been happening since the Sept crash.
• Although one can only speculate, it is likely that the fact that about half of ICOs use the Ethereum network. In other words, it could be that people are looking at the growth in BTC, and then thinking “forget about all these countless ICOs and Alts… I’m getting out of the Ether network and back into the BTC blockchain.”

It is hard to say exactly what is going on, but it is an odd event to see LTC start to follow BTC again, while ETH is for the moment left behind. That said, this could all change in a heartbeat.

With all that in mind, there is always a chance that the logic behind all this has much less to do with ICOs and more to do with weather.

Is ETH chopped liver to BTC’s steak? Is LTC filet or ground chuck? Or, are all these digital meats going to the moon?! Hard to say.

UPDATE: The day after writing this article ether went from $300 to $340. In other words, as one might expect, Ether is a grade A choice cut of digital meat (apparently it just needed to age)…. and update again, it apparently needs lots more aging because it went right back to $300. The one plus here is that Ether has kept a consistent price despite BTC’s price going to the moon. This could end up meaning that BTC was overbought and Ether wasn’t, or it could end up meaning that BTC was THE coin. Hard to dismiss the top 2 coin by market cap Ether for a long term win, but for gains in the now, clearly BTC put everything else to shame (likely in part due to the upcoming Bitcoin Gold hard fork).