The new Chairman of the US Commodities and Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), Heath Talbert, spoke about Ethereum’s status.
“We’ve been very clear on Bitcoin: Bitcoin is a commodity. We haven’t said anything about Ether—until now. It is my view as chairman of the CFTC that Ether is a commodity.”
“It stands to reason that similar assets should be treated similarly. If the underlying asset, the original digital asset, hasn’t been determined to be a security and is therefore a commodity, most likely the forked asset will be the same,” concluded Talbert.
Meanwhile, Vitalik Buterin has been on a roll recently. He has participated in a number of different events, in addition to interviews and statements to different media outlets in the build up to Ethereum 2.0 release. In a recent blog post on research, Buterin wrote about moving ETH quickly from one shard to another shard.
“If we have this mechanism for sending ETH cross-shard, we could also dual-purpose it for general-purpose receipt-sending functionality, creating an enshrined guaranteed cross-shard transaction system,” noted Buterin.
“If full state is not enshrined, one cannot force this at protocol level; but what one can do is add a requirement of the form “in order to include one of your own transactions, you must also provide witnesses for a cross-shard receipt that is in the queue,” concluded his blog post.
When asked about Google’s quantum computer, which reportedly needed only a few minutes to perform a task that would take a supercomputer at least 10,000 years, Buterin commented:
“It proves that the ability to make a big boom exists. What it does not prove is the ability to harness that big boom to create things that are useful."
He also doesn’t seem to share concerns over the future of cryptocurrency in the context of quantum computers.
"It's not true that quantum computers break all cryptography. They break some cryptographic algorithms, but for every cryptographic algorithm that quantum computers can break, we know that we have a replacement […] that quantum computers cannot break."
"We have an upgrade path and we know what the upgrade path is," concluded Buterin on this subject.
When asked to explain the initial challenges he had encountered when building the Ethereum project, Buterin said that the initial team consisted of 8 members, before some of them left due to “creative differences”.
“Some wanted to do for-profit things, some wanted to take Ethereum into a crypto-Google direction. The project is definitely in a better place now, but it took multiple rounds of very challenging situations to get where we are now. Blockchains and cryptocurrencies are even more about the people than they are about the technology.”
Despite the initial difficulties, he is still very much looking towards the future. Buterin publicly challenged developers to go out and try to change people’s lives.
“This time it seems like it’s not just going to be based on hype, but based on things that actually touch a lot of people’s lives. Go out and build something. The nice thing about the Ethereum ecosystem is that there’s a lot of developer materials. It doesn’t matter if it’s a stupid idea that should never be used in the real world, just build something.”
Similarly to Bitcoin, Ethereum has spent the previous week consolidating its gains. The price action has traded in a tight range between $175 and $194 in the previous 8 days, after bursting higher on October 25 and 26 to print the fresh 1-month high of $200.00
ETH/USD daily chart
On the outside, the bulls are aiming to return back above the 100 DMA after a failed attempt to keep the price action above this level in the last week of October. The 200 DMA is located around the $213 mark, and it will act as another target for the bulls. The horizontal resistance below the $230 mark is seen as the ultimate target in the short-term.
As seen in the chart, the price action is trading between two important horizontal levels (the blue lines), which have acted as important support/resistance levels in the past. A break of the horizontal support near the $150 handle would be regarded as a major bearish development, which would in turn facilitate a bigger move to the downside.
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