The beginning of the year is still difficult for the cryptocurrency market. This effect seems accentuated at the beginning of the year 2018 because of the explosion that will have experienced the market at the end of 2017. Thus, on the day of February 1, 2018, the market for cryptocurrency has seen its global valuation lose more than $ 100 billion from $ 518 billion to $ 408 billion!

Worse still, the fall continues on Friday, February 2, 2018 with a bitcoin fell well below the symbolic bar of $ 10,000. The 10 most capitalized crypto currencies experiencing a decline in their price between -15 and -30%! The Ripple trading at $ 3.75 on January 4, 2018 saw its price plunge to $ 0.74.

•  What are the reasons behind this fall? 

The nature of the cryptocurrency market makes it extremely volatile and the most seasoned cryptocurrency investors are not surprised by this type of large-scale falls. Nevertheless, everyone is looking for the reasons that can explain the acceleration of this decline over the last 24 hours. For example, Bitcoin saw its biggest drop in 1 month in January 2018 losing nearly 120 billion dollars of valuation!It was enough for the economists to rush into the breach by reminding that Bitcoin was, for them, a real speculative bubble and that its fall was to happen sooner or later after a year 2017 when his course has taken more than 1300% even up to 200,000 dollars. Bubble speculative or not, there are other more factual explanations that can justify this vertiginous fall in prices that we currently know.

 Prohibition of Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies in India 

 In  our point on the taxation of Bitcoin abroad, we pointed out that India  was exploring various possibilities for the taxation of Bitcoin and  currency cryptos with a possibility, it seems time, to simply ban crypto currencies on its territory.
Bitcoin banned in Indi

The  statement of Indian Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on February 1, 2018  will have the merit of clarifying the position of the Indian  authorities. The  latter has indeed told some investors that the authorities planned to  eliminate, eventually, the use of virtual currencies as a payment system  in India. His statement helps to better understand the risks that the Indian position poses to the cryptos market:

"The  Government does not regard cryptocurrencies as having legal value or as  legal tender and will therefore take the necessary measures to  eliminate the use of cryptocurrencies in the financing of illegal  activities or as a payment system".

Nevertheless, he made it clear that this did not put into question the will of India to invest in the Blockchain:

"The Government will proactively explore the use of Blockchain technology in the digital economy". The  Indian position is therefore quite clear: yes to Blockchain technology,  which is a real revolution as we saw in "The Blockchain for Dummies",  but not to Bitcoin and crypto currencies. Let's hope that this negative view of the cryptocurrency world will not be emulated by other G20 countries. 

•   Facebook prohibits advertisements around crypto currencies 

Last major point of concern in the world of cryptocurrencies in early February 2018, Facebook's recent statements stating that the platform now banned advertising promoting crypto currencies. Mark Zuckerberg's new advertising policy states that this ban is part of a ban on "promoting financial products and services frequently associated with misleading promotional practices".