Yes we backed off but we were briefly in the #2 position probably have to wait for bitcoin buyers to push up bitcoin tomorrow morning it's still a Holiday today that buying will help drag up eth. The big moves seem to happen in the morning before regular trading right before US markets begin trading but who knows when...

Eth just passed Ripple for the #2 position at coinmarketcap.com just 1 hour after my prediction how about some merits tough crowd! Looks like panic buying has started because of the upgrade coming....thinking about revising my forecast upwards but staying put for now want to make sure I stay well respected and accurate.

2   Ethereum Ethereum   $14,553,401,624   $139.75   $2,106,755,883   104,139,585 ETH   3.91%   
3   XRP XRP   $14,551,610,861   $0.356709   $403,927,790   40,794,121,066 XRP *   0.59%   

I also predict that ETH will pass Ripple at coinmarketcap.com and keep the #2 position by Jan 8th based on the hash rate turnaround and the Jan 15-16 performance upgrade.

My conservative forecast for ETH value and it's my opinion and I try to be accurate based on the recent turnaround of the hash rate and the upgrade Jan 15-16th just sharing my view which I believe to be realistic and reasonable based on real progress, again this is my opinion only how I see it;

       Open    Range     Close
2019
Jan   134   118-218   181   
Feb   181   162-225   210   
Mar   210   210-261    240

More Progress with a stronger ETH coming Jan 15-16th!!!!


****Update**** Etherscan.io has just posted the below, to see it yourself instead of clicking on Announcement to get here just click on "Explorer";

Service Announcement:  Constantinople hard fork at block #7080000, estimated around the 15-16th of Jan 2019



This is all just my opinion, remember I am just one man!

Last year on Jan 1st to Jan 10th 2018 we went from 790 to 1400 for ETH or an increase of 77%, this year we have a productive fork which doesn't split the chain on Jan 15-16th making the network more valuable than last year not to mention the 50,000 new ethereum addresses being created each day. The fact that the chain will not split and have 5 new improvements will provide confidence in my opinion. We are 135 now so 135*1.77 = 239. This does not factor in the upgrade Jan 15-16th so maybe we add 61 for that and call it 300. This is very reasonable compared to how Facebook grew and was valued for its network improvements as it grew larger. The bottom line is this year's New Year rally has real progress and improvements coming on Jan 15-16th and I suspect in my opinion that should be reflective in the value of ETH.

Article below is pasted from internet explaining Jan 15-16th Non-splitting Hard Fork;

On Thursday, December 6th, 2018 during the bi-weekly Ethereum Dev Core Meeting, the team decided to move forward with the launch of the Ethereum Constantinople hard fork. The launch will occur at block number 7,080,000, with an anticipated date of January 15-16, 2019. To learn more about the details of a Hard Fork, check out this article.

High-Level Overview of Ethereum Constantinople

Constantinople brings with it much-needed performance upgrades to the Ethereum blockchain. It also addresses the problems related to the Difficulty Bomb and Miner Rewards.

Constantinople is a very intensive and extensive update. It will break backward compatibility, meaning the update will come into existence as a Hard Fork. However, at this time it is not expected that Ethereum will split into 2 currencies. This Hard Fork should feel more like a system upgrade. Normally, when people hear the phrase hard fork, they feel that the chain will split into 2 and a 2nd coin will be created. This is not always the case. If everyone agrees with the changes and there is consensus on the update when the hard fork happens everyone just switches to the new version.

5 Updates with Ethereum Constantinople

There are 5 major changes that make up the Constantinople update. A majority of the changes are related to performance. This is an area that Ethereum desperately needed to address, as there becomes increasingly more competition from other platforms that are faster.

To address this concern the Ethereum developers are improving the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). You can think of the EVM as the engine behind the scenes that executes the code associated with Smart Contracts.]

Defining EIP

The 5 improvements included in Constantinople are listed as EIP and then a chronologically ordered number. EIP stands for Ethereum Improvement Proposal. Any member of the Ethereum community can write a proposal and submit it for review. If a majority of the community agrees with the proposal, it will be accepted and scheduled into an upcoming release.

EIP 145

The first improvement is EIP 145, which is a technical improvement written by developers Alex Beregszaszi and Pawel Bylica. This improvement adds Bitwise shifting instructions to the EVM. Bitwise shifting is the process of moving the bits of a binary number to the left or the right. With the new instructions, this operation will use approximately 10X less gas. In plain English, this means that running smart contracts will become more efficient and cheaper.ethereum constantinople hard fork cryptocurrency bitcoin blockchain ether eth Bit Wise Shifting EIP 145 Constantinople

EIP 1052

The second update we will discuss is EIP 1052, co-written by Nick Johnson and Pawel Bylica. This update introduces a new operation that allows smart contracts to verify the code of another smart contract more efficiently. Previously, this verification would require that you pull the code of the other contract and verify it. With the new update, a hash of the code is returned for verification rather than the entire code. This becomes very important when you have many smart contracts interacting with one another, using hash verification speeds up the process dramatically.
Hash of Smart Contracts EIP 1052 ConstantinopleEIP 145 and 1052 combined are designed to make the EVM more efficient. This will make it cheaper to run smart contracts on the Ethereum network.

EIP 1014

Next, we will look at EIP 1014, written by the Founder himself Vitalik Buterin. EIP 1014 adds State channels to the Ethereum network. State channels can be easily compared to Bitcoins Lightning network. The main thing to know here is that State channels allow for transactions to be settled in a payment channel away from the main blockchain. This can allow for higher throughput and improve the transactions per second.
State Channels EIP 1014 ConstantinopleFrom the EIP 1014 Github page, the motivation for this update is below:

Allows interactions to (actually or counterfactually in channels) be made with addresses that do not exist yet on-chain but can be relied on to only possibly eventually contain code that has been created by a particular piece of init code.
What this basically means is that the update will allow for the main chain to reference off chain transactions that have not been broadcast to the main chain yet.

EIP 1234

The 4th proposal is EIP 1234, Constantinople Difficulty Bomb Delay and Block Reward Adjustment, Championed by Afri Schoedon. EIP 1234 is the proposal that has been garnering the most attention. The approved proposal has to do with delaying the difficulty bomb and reducing the block reward. A couple of questions here: What is the Difficulty Bomb? and Why would we want to reduce the block reward?

ethereum constantinople hard fork cryptocurrency bitcoin blockchain ether eth

 

Block Reward

Lets’ start by discussing the block reward. Until now, miners on the Ethereum network receive 3 Ether (ETH) as a reward for mining a new block. A new block is created every 15 seconds, meaning that every day 5-6,000 blocks are added to the chain.  With a block reward of 3 ETH, 15-18,000 ETH are being added to the total supply every day.

This can become a big issue, and if you would like to learn more, check out our article on CryptoCurrency Price Inflation.

This new update reduces the mining reward from 3 ETH to 2 ETH which will reduce the yearly inflation of the coin. The goal of this is ultimately to drive the price higher, as we know that when there is less of something it becomes worth more. Bitcoin has a similar, automated mechanism, where the block reward is cut in half every 210,000 blocks.


Difficulty Bomb

EIP 1234 also delays the release of the difficulty bomb by 1 year. But what is the difficulty bomb? It has to do with Ethereums’ plans to move away from the Proof of Work algorithm, and their adoption of Proof of Stake. You can learn about Proof of Stake and it’s importance by reviewing this Deep Dive.

To summarize, right now on the Ethereum blockchain, miners are needed to process transactions and create new blocks. They are compensated for their proof of work with a block reward. With Proof of Stake, however, miners are not needed and will essentially lose their job. When Etereum finally switches to proof of stake, miners can choose to not adopt the new update and keep the old version of the chain going. This would be a true Hard Fork, dividing the Ethereum community in 2 with people supporting both chains.

This situation has happened to Ethereum in the past, which is why we now have Ethereum and Ethereum Classic. The Ethereum developers are trying to make sure this situation does not repeat itself. The solution that they have come up with is to add the Difficulty Bomb into the protocol. The difficulty bomb is a mechanism that makes mining a new block exponentially more difficult over time. The difficulty continues to increase until mining a new block becomes impossible. When blocks can no longer be mined the network is halted or frozen, and this scenario is known as the Ethereum Ice Age. This concept was added to the protocol on September 7th, 2015.
Difficulty Bomb Ethereum Ice Age Graph EIP 1234 ConstantinopleThe Difficulty Bomb accomplishes 2 things. First, it adds pressure to the Ethereum developers to come up with an update for the protocol to avoid an ice age from occurring. Secondly, it forces miners to adopt new updates. Otherwise, they will be stuck mining for a network that is not making them any money. The difficulty bomb is a very good idea, but all good ideas come with their own drawbacks. The idea was introduced in late 2015, and the goal was to make the network almost unusable by the end of 2016. The thinking was that the migration to Proof of Stake would have already taken place. Obviously, that did not happen, and we are now left with EIP 1234 which delays the difficulty bomb 1 year. This puts the anticipated start date of the difficulty bomb on January 15-16th, 2020.

EIP 1283

Lastly, we have EIP-1283, which is based on an earlier proposal EIP 1087 that was authored by Nick Johnson. EIP-1283 is called, Net gas metering for SSTORE without dirty maps. A long, confusing sounding EIP name that makes it possible for multiple updates to use the same storage slot within a transaction to reduce cost. This can be done because the transaction doesn’t write to disk until the end of a transaction.

Conclusion

As mentioned above, this will feel more like a system upgrade rather than a hard fork. This hard fork does begin to lay the groundwork for additional upcoming forks including Plasma and Casper. All with the goal of migrating the network from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake. If you have enjoyed reading this article, please consider leaving your feedback below.

Hash rate bottomed Dec 17-18th soon after Joseph Lubin of ETH stated the bottom is in look at the chart yourself its back on a growth trajectory;

https://etherscan.io/chart/hashrate

The hashrate of ETH is either caused by the rapid expansion and growth of the ETH mining sector or the expectations of investors in the cryptocurrency market that major digital assets will soon recover from their drops. The reduction from 3 to 2 mining reward for ETH should accelerate upside price on the upgrade Jan 15-16th.

More confirmation below, exciting!!! Any late in the year selling in ETH should be over by tomorrow evening...then why would you sell?


Afri 🌩️ Jan 16
@5chdn
 We are on track! Constantinople will most likely activate on Wednesday, Jan 16th, probably around  7am UTC. Current average block time is 14.48 seconds. 104407 blocks to go (6975593/7080000).

259
2:22 PM - Dec 29, 2018
Twitter

All,

The Jan 15-16th helps improve performance of eth and also sets the stage from POW to POS, the future change to POS is very positive and does the following things;

With PoS there will be less of a need to sell for covering electricity/hardware costs.

Ether earned from staking will probably be added to the stake rather than sold.

As mining is expensive as mentioned above, you can’t blame miners for selling the coins they earn which causes price volatility. The reason why a PoS would give you price stability is because it gives the person more incentive to keep the coin than to sell.

Ethereum is also designed to actually be able to LOSE ETH coins after PoS. Meaning instead of the supply constantly appreciating, it could depreciate, hence driving value up even more.

Like Joseph Lublin of eth recently stated the future is bright (he also stated the bottom is in)

The US dollar is weakening just like last January and that adds support to Bitcoin and ETH. If you look at the chart of the US dollar it hit 97.5 five times and failed to go higher now it has turned down. In theory as the dollar drops if your holding bitcoin or ETH you might be better protected so things are lining up pretty well for an early January rally in crypto in my opinion and ETH with the upgrade showing real progress should lead the crypto pack in my opinion. I wouldn't be surprised to see some Institutional buying through Coinbase in January because they probably didn't want it on their books for 2018 but 2019 is a different story they may fear they will get left behind in my opinion. Facebook in the early days didn't stay down for long because the network effect kept growing same here applies.

****Update**** Etherscan.io has just posted the below, to see it yourself instead of clicking on Announcement to get here just click on "Explorer";

Service Announcement:  Constantinople hard fork at block #7080000, estimated around the 15-16th of Jan 2019



This is all just my opinion, remember I am just one man!

Last year on Jan 1st to Jan 10th 2018 we went from 790 to 1400 for ETH or an increase of 77%, this year we have a productive fork which doesn't split the chain on Jan 15-16th making the network more valuable than last year not to mention the 50,000 new ethereum addresses being created each day. The fact that the chain will not split and have 5 new improvements will provide confidence in my opinion. We are 135 now so 135*1.77 = 239. This does not factor in the upgrade Jan 15-16th so maybe we add 61 for that and call it 300. This is very reasonable compared to how Facebook grew and was valued for its network improvements as it grew larger. The bottom line is this year's New Year rally has real progress and improvements coming on Jan 15-16th and I suspect in my opinion that should be reflective in the value of ETH.

Article below is pasted from internet explaining Jan 15-16th Non-splitting Hard Fork;

On Thursday, December 6th, 2018 during the bi-weekly Ethereum Dev Core Meeting, the team decided to move forward with the launch of the Ethereum Constantinople hard fork. The launch will occur at block number 7,080,000, with an anticipated date of January 15-16, 2019. To learn more about the details of a Hard Fork, check out this article.

High-Level Overview of Ethereum Constantinople

Constantinople brings with it much-needed performance upgrades to the Ethereum blockchain. It also addresses the problems related to the Difficulty Bomb and Miner Rewards.

Constantinople is a very intensive and extensive update. It will break backward compatibility, meaning the update will come into existence as a Hard Fork. However, at this time it is not expected that Ethereum will split into 2 currencies. This Hard Fork should feel more like a system upgrade. Normally, when people hear the phrase hard fork, they feel that the chain will split into 2 and a 2nd coin will be created. This is not always the case. If everyone agrees with the changes and there is consensus on the update when the hard fork happens everyone just switches to the new version.

5 Updates with Ethereum Constantinople

There are 5 major changes that make up the Constantinople update. A majority of the changes are related to performance. This is an area that Ethereum desperately needed to address, as there becomes increasingly more competition from other platforms that are faster.

To address this concern the Ethereum developers are improving the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). You can think of the EVM as the engine behind the scenes that executes the code associated with Smart Contracts.]

Defining EIP

The 5 improvements included in Constantinople are listed as EIP and then a chronologically ordered number. EIP stands for Ethereum Improvement Proposal. Any member of the Ethereum community can write a proposal and submit it for review. If a majority of the community agrees with the proposal, it will be accepted and scheduled into an upcoming release.

EIP 145

The first improvement is EIP 145, which is a technical improvement written by developers Alex Beregszaszi and Pawel Bylica. This improvement adds Bitwise shifting instructions to the EVM. Bitwise shifting is the process of moving the bits of a binary number to the left or the right. With the new instructions, this operation will use approximately 10X less gas. In plain English, this means that running smart contracts will become more efficient and cheaper.ethereum constantinople hard fork cryptocurrency bitcoin blockchain ether eth Bit Wise Shifting EIP 145 Constantinople

EIP 1052

The second update we will discuss is EIP 1052, co-written by Nick Johnson and Pawel Bylica. This update introduces a new operation that allows smart contracts to verify the code of another smart contract more efficiently. Previously, this verification would require that you pull the code of the other contract and verify it. With the new update, a hash of the code is returned for verification rather than the entire code. This becomes very important when you have many smart contracts interacting with one another, using hash verification speeds up the process dramatically.
Hash of Smart Contracts EIP 1052 ConstantinopleEIP 145 and 1052 combined are designed to make the EVM more efficient. This will make it cheaper to run smart contracts on the Ethereum network.

EIP 1014

Next, we will look at EIP 1014, written by the Founder himself Vitalik Buterin. EIP 1014 adds State channels to the Ethereum network. State channels can be easily compared to Bitcoins Lightning network. The main thing to know here is that State channels allow for transactions to be settled in a payment channel away from the main blockchain. This can allow for higher throughput and improve the transactions per second.
State Channels EIP 1014 ConstantinopleFrom the EIP 1014 Github page, the motivation for this update is below:

Allows interactions to (actually or counterfactually in channels) be made with addresses that do not exist yet on-chain but can be relied on to only possibly eventually contain code that has been created by a particular piece of init code.
What this basically means is that the update will allow for the main chain to reference off chain transactions that have not been broadcast to the main chain yet.

EIP 1234

The 4th proposal is EIP 1234, Constantinople Difficulty Bomb Delay and Block Reward Adjustment, Championed by Afri Schoedon. EIP 1234 is the proposal that has been garnering the most attention. The approved proposal has to do with delaying the difficulty bomb and reducing the block reward. A couple of questions here: What is the Difficulty Bomb? and Why would we want to reduce the block reward?

ethereum constantinople hard fork cryptocurrency bitcoin blockchain ether eth

 

Block Reward

Lets’ start by discussing the block reward. Until now, miners on the Ethereum network receive 3 Ether (ETH) as a reward for mining a new block. A new block is created every 15 seconds, meaning that every day 5-6,000 blocks are added to the chain.  With a block reward of 3 ETH, 15-18,000 ETH are being added to the total supply every day.

This can become a big issue, and if you would like to learn more, check out our article on CryptoCurrency Price Inflation.

This new update reduces the mining reward from 3 ETH to 2 ETH which will reduce the yearly inflation of the coin. The goal of this is ultimately to drive the price higher, as we know that when there is less of something it becomes worth more. Bitcoin has a similar, automated mechanism, where the block reward is cut in half every 210,000 blocks.


Difficulty Bomb

EIP 1234 also delays the release of the difficulty bomb by 1 year. But what is the difficulty bomb? It has to do with Ethereums’ plans to move away from the Proof of Work algorithm, and their adoption of Proof of Stake. You can learn about Proof of Stake and it’s importance by reviewing this Deep Dive.

To summarize, right now on the Ethereum blockchain, miners are needed to process transactions and create new blocks. They are compensated for their proof of work with a block reward. With Proof of Stake, however, miners are not needed and will essentially lose their job. When Etereum finally switches to proof of stake, miners can choose to not adopt the new update and keep the old version of the chain going. This would be a true Hard Fork, dividing the Ethereum community in 2 with people supporting both chains.

This situation has happened to Ethereum in the past, which is why we now have Ethereum and Ethereum Classic. The Ethereum developers are trying to make sure this situation does not repeat itself. The solution that they have come up with is to add the Difficulty Bomb into the protocol. The difficulty bomb is a mechanism that makes mining a new block exponentially more difficult over time. The difficulty continues to increase until mining a new block becomes impossible. When blocks can no longer be mined the network is halted or frozen, and this scenario is known as the Ethereum Ice Age. This concept was added to the protocol on September 7th, 2015.
Difficulty Bomb Ethereum Ice Age Graph EIP 1234 ConstantinopleThe Difficulty Bomb accomplishes 2 things. First, it adds pressure to the Ethereum developers to come up with an update for the protocol to avoid an ice age from occurring. Secondly, it forces miners to adopt new updates. Otherwise, they will be stuck mining for a network that is not making them any money. The difficulty bomb is a very good idea, but all good ideas come with their own drawbacks. The idea was introduced in late 2015, and the goal was to make the network almost unusable by the end of 2016. The thinking was that the migration to Proof of Stake would have already taken place. Obviously, that did not happen, and we are now left with EIP 1234 which delays the difficulty bomb 1 year. This puts the anticipated start date of the difficulty bomb on January 15-16th, 2020.

EIP 1283

Lastly, we have EIP-1283, which is based on an earlier proposal EIP 1087 that was authored by Nick Johnson. EIP-1283 is called, Net gas metering for SSTORE without dirty maps. A long, confusing sounding EIP name that makes it possible for multiple updates to use the same storage slot within a transaction to reduce cost. This can be done because the transaction doesn’t write to disk until the end of a transaction.

Conclusion

As mentioned above, this will feel more like a system upgrade rather than a hard fork. This hard fork does begin to lay the groundwork for additional upcoming forks including Plasma and Casper. All with the goal of migrating the network from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake. If you have enjoyed reading this article, please consider leaving your feedback below.

We are back to real growth, the 14 day Ethereum Transaction History just broke out to the upside, just click
On the "Explorer" tab below Announcement to view for yourself, the more transactions the more valuable Ethereum is....we should be trading 980 minimum on this growth news...

Major catalyst events include Bitcoin recovering back up to 15500 where it was when futures started trading. This recovery will pull up Ethereum all year. Also there will be an announcement soon that Ethereum will now trade futures, Bitcoin had a 57% run up when that news came out.

Short term rally in Bitcoin is because people want free Bitcoin Private on Feb 28, it's a 1 to 1, this should drag up eth this coming week also...

Not seeing much downside as Spring arrives especially since hundreds of millions of Americans are getting a big tax cut on avg an extra $1000 and you know where some of that 200b is going right?

Below is Ethereum price forecast for Ethereum from the respected Economic Forecast Agency, as you can see the time we spend below 1000 is running out, activity on the Ethereum Blockchain is expected to accelerate in a truly global borderless way like nothing else before except maybe the model T Ford and the iPhone, it's just too powerful of an invention, almost like the light bulb, the dawn of a new age is here, Welcome to the Beginning....

Month   Open   Low-High   Close   Mo,%   Total,%
2018
Feb   1117              562-1158   1032    -7.6%   -7.6%
Mar   1032                   642-1293   1155          11.9%   3.4%
Apr   1155                 1155-1434   1340           16.0%   20.0%
May   1340              1340-1663   1554   16.0%   39.1%
Jun   1554                  1554-1929   1803           16.0%   61.4%
Jul   1803                  1679-1931   1805             0.1%   61.6%
Aug   1805                  1410-1805   1516           -16.0%   35.7%
Sep   1516.             1516-1882 1759   16.0%   57.5%
Oct   1759                   1375-1759 1478   -16.0%   32.3%
Nov   1478                   1478-1834 1714   16.0%   53.4%
Dec   1714                   1714-2127 1988   16.0%   78.0%
2019
Jan   1988                   1988-2467 2306   16.0%   106%
Feb   2306.            2306-2862 2675   16.0%   140%
Mar   2675                   2675-3320 3103   16.0%   178%
Apr   3103                   3103-3851

Too much activity this spring for eth to be trading under 1000 in my opinion, so much potential should be worth more than 500b plus market cap of Facebook as Icos continue to roll out and apps being built and the increase in the games and collectibles market is growing nicely too. What does Facebook have a bunch of online people with fake advertising ads. Ethereum is building real applications and creating interesting ico projects and jobs. Does Facebook create jobs? Not really....

Here's proof things are accelerating;
We started with cryptokitties
Don't look now but crypto countries is taking off where like that board game Risk you can buy a country and you lose it only when someone else pays a higher price but you get the profit, wow the potential here is limitless.
There is cryptocelebrities, crypto-all stars, and now etherbots with Lamborghini-inspired robot-parts.

Just like when The first Apple iPhone came out this is a great start, everything will improve over time.....

And listing on better exchanges like binance
Bittrex  and kucoin

Cashaa now listed on coinmarketcap.com
Congrats to the Cashaa Team. Baby steps and now
we go forward. Looking forward to the exchange this
summer like kucoin. It's just taking time because of
the market shake out we are at .11 and most are in
at .10 so no damage to eth supply.  We now need
development updates and as we get them we should
see a rise in price

Below video even mentions the 257 IQ but I got it from another source and it was also 257
https://steemit.com/crypto/@icedrum/vitalik-buterin-s-iq-will-leave-you-speechless

And do those platforms have a leader with an IQ of 257 like Vitalik Buterin when Albert Einstein and Bill Gates both had an identical IQs of 160? The saying goes whatever the other platforms can do we can do better, why bet on less intelligence?

Stephen Hawking (IQ score of 160).
Marilyn Vos Savant (IQ score of 228) ...
Christopher Hirata (IQ score of 225) ...
Kim Ung-Yong (IQ score of 210) ...
Edith Stern (IQ score of more than 200) ...
Christopher Michael Langan (IQ score between 190 and 210) ...
Garry Kasparov (IQ score of 194) ...
Philip Emeagwali (IQ score of 190)
Vitalik Buterin (IQ score of 257)

Do you see my point?

Congratulations to Giancarlo and his three crypto loving college kids and his friend Jay Clayton, two men I now respect a lot that are not afraid to go where no man has gone before, I support you, you two are very sensible and deserve your positions at futures and the SEC