Bitcoin traders are losing confidence in the rally – MarketWatch

As Bitcoins price is creeping back toward its all-time high, speculators are growing increasingly wary of the notion that its astonishing gains can be sustained.

The size of the total outstanding long positions on Bitfinex, one of a handful of large cryptocurrency exchanges that allows customers to buy and sell on margin, has shrunk to its lowest level since Sept. 15.

Meanwhile, the price of a single coin BTCUSD, +0.23% was hovering around $1,245 on Monday, leaving it within $40 of an all-time high reached in early March, when hopes that the Securities and Exchange Commission might soon approve the first bitcoin exchange-traded fund were still running high.

Since then, the agency has rejected two bitcoin ETF proposals. It is expected to issue a ruling on a third contender, the Grayscale Bitcoin Investment Trust, early in the third quarter.

Bitcoin has been largely stable even as support for a controversial software update called bitcoin unlimited has receded dramatically as developers have identified another bug in its code. The update would, if passes a threshold of 95% of the networks hashing power, increased the amount of transaction data that can be stored in each block of the bitcoin blockchain.

Bitfinexs customers are now long nearly 12,967 coins, while 18,775 coins are being held short. Positioning data like these are widely viewed as a counter indicator; that is, when bets against the currency rise, it raises the likelihood that any gains could be amplified as vulnerable investors scramble to buy back coins held short.

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Shorts surpassed longs earlier this month for the first time since February. The last time this happened, it preceded a nearly $300 rally in the price.

The blockchain is the cryptographically secured digital ledger that records all bitcoin transactions. A copy of the blockchain is stored by each computer node running the bitcoin software, and each transaction must first be independently approved by every node in the network before it can be confirmed.

After spending two years in the doldrums, bitcoin came roaring back in 2016 as the price more than doubled. The currency is up more than 30% so far this year.

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Bitcoin traders are losing confidence in the rally - MarketWatch