The recent trend downward is being blamed by traders on numerous factors. Lately, it's chique to point to news articles that are promoting Fear Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) and blame that for the negative market sentiment.

It's difficult to say how Bitcoin markets respond to news. During the turmoil in Cyprus and the Greek economic crisis, bitcoin was incredibly volatile. When a correlation this strong is observed, it's hard to discount it. But often times good news leads to price declines, or bad news leads to price increases, or the market just doesn't respond at all to news.

Bitcoin's controlled supply feature where the number of bitcoins that can be mined is capped has a gradual timeline. However, a major milestone in this timeline is coming up in the summer of 2016: the bitcoin block reward halving, or simply The Halvening.

The Bitcoin Block Reward Halving Countdown site provides a useful countdown to when the reward for each block that is mined every 10 minutes goes from 25 bitcoins to 12.5 bitcoins. This occurs every 210,000 blocks, which means the halvening after that will come in another 4 years, summer of 2020. 

So this is not an event that should be taken lightly. This is a World Cup, something we only see every four years and is very special. In fact, it's so special it is unprecedented. We do not even know what the effect could be on market prices of bitcoin. Will BTC/USD break all-time-highs (ATHs) due to the reduction in supply increases as a result of the reward falling? It's hard to tell.

Miners are the obvious first losers in the reward change. They will not be able to earn as much from their activities, and thus some will drop out, the difficulty will drop, and the remaining miners will demand a higher fee. Thus, we could all be paying a bit more than the standard 0.0001 btc that is used today. At $320 for BTC/USD the current transaction fees are still dust, but if price increases and the amount needed to get timely confirmation increases, it could squeeze people who are at the margin.

But is it that simple? Will price increase just because supply increases from mining will be smaller? Or will the change have some unforeseen consequences for price?

The economics of the bitcoin ecosystem will not likely be affected in any adverse ways. For one, this block reward halving has been baked into the protocol, people have known this and it's been well-built into market participants' expectations. That said, there will be media attention surrounding the event, surely. And this could generate more hype. Together with more exciting bitcoin projects and startups releasing services in 2016 could make for a bullish cocktail going forward.

The precise date of the bitcoin block reward halving is not possible to determine, but the current estimated day is July 24, 2016. Technically this is the second halving, the last one was in October 2012, which was also the "first" halvening. As there will be more halvenings roughly every four years. Visit the halving countdown clock to get the most updated estimate.

Traders of all sort know that the most important characteristic in the game is integrity. Bitcoin traders would not be confident making trades if they thought their counterparty would flake on them on a whim, or if their profits would just be reversed later arbitrarily.

Well this is what happened this week, when Gemini had a customer who market-bought the orderbook up to $2200 on BTC/USD. Shockingly and unprecedentedly, Gemini chose to reverse the trades which were purely user-error, or "fat-finger" in industry terms.

This is a grave mistake by Gemini management. Why would anyone want to provide liquidity to thicken their orderbook, when there is now a high risk of them being reversed if they are filled? This kind of policy of reversal in the event of user error serves nobody's interest but the single customer who made that mistake. It harms all the counterparties to that customer's market-buy while damaging the reputation and the expectations that bitcoin traders will have now on Gemini. 

An exchange is worth nothing if it doesn't have liquidity and volume, and Gemini has struggled heavily with both. By not forcing its customers to honor their trades executed from their platform when the case involves purely the trader's error, they are incentivizing future complaints in volatile market conditions and undermining liquidity provision.

Gemini, you said you wanted to attract institutional investors, serious traders. Well, we are big boys. Forcing us to honor our trade commitment is central to holding together the integrity of the market and facilitating trust in exchanges. Your decision to reverse trades that were legitimately executed will live to haunt you in the Bitcoin exchange space.

This was originally posted this on reddit and I acquired the rights to it, which now links here. Full rights to Bitcoin Futures Blog contact owner if any questions.

OKCoin.cn has been under attack during this bitcoin price bull-run. As the weekend rolls around and we know volatility can get heavy, the possibility of an attack on OKCoin.com servers which would disrupt the Futures market seems ever higher. Luckily, you can access the trading engine directly using OKCoin's WeChat account.

The guys at OKCoin have recently taken the effort to translate and explain in English how their WeChat order system works. However, I feel like it is lacking a bit in walking through how to execute the orders, so this is for those who are still struggling to get going with OKCoin WeChat order execution.

Background

This system was put into place because OKCoin has had problems with DDoS attacks in the past, which has left their webservers unable to process orders, either through RESTAPI/WebSocket, or the website, leaving users stranded in positions they cant get out of, or missing opportunities they would have gotten into.
WeChat is China's biggest messaging service. Their servers' capacity massive, and the resources it would take to attack WeChat for the purpose of disturbing OKCoin are prohibitive in magnitude, making disruption of this unlikely. So OKCoin set up an order execution system for their Futures Exchange using WeChat to link to their trading engine. This allows users to smoothly execute orders even if okcoin.com webservers are totally smashed, as long as their trading engine is still intact and communicating with WeChat.

Install WeChat on your mobile phone

WeChat is a mobile app connected to your mobile number, which is connected to your OKCoin account. So when the OKCoin WeChat receives messages from you in a particular format, it will know your WeChat id is connected to your account and process them as order requests as long as you have enabled WeChat Trading under “Security” in the account.

Start trading through WeChat

Once you have added the user “okcoin” in your WeChat app (which, by the way, can be accessed through the web on your computer if you dont feel like typing into your phone), you're ready to execute orders. It may be intimidating that the OKCoin account in WeChat is in Chinese, but don't worry, all code is in English underneath, so the execution is using English as well.
The commands are sent just as if you were sending a normal message to someone on WeChat, except you'll be sending it to OKCoin and in a particular format so it knows you're issuing commands.
The indicative format is as such (dont use this format, its only descriptive):

<Bitcoin/Litecoin>,<Weekly/Biweekly/Quarterly>,<Open/Close>,<Long/Short>,<Price>,<Number Contracts>,<Leverage Amount>(Optional, only if Fixed Margin)

In parametric form -- remember the order of the command is very important, and this is how you will be sending the commands:

<B/L>,<W/N/Q>,<O/C>,<L/S>,<Order Price>,<Integer>,<10x/20x>(only if in fixed margin)

When you send, it will be without the <>'s brackets. The different options for each parameter are separated by the slashes, and the commas separate the arguments and must be included in the command

EXAMPLES
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Let's look at a couple of examples so you can get the idea:
Say I'm in fixed margin and I want to go long 1 contract of Bitcoin futures at 20x with a price of 275 on the BiWeekly contracts, then all you have to do is send a message to the OKCoin WeChat account with:

• B,N,O,L,275,1,20x

And you will get executed and see a message similar to this.

Try a small example for yourself as a test, just 1 contract, while your web client is open so you can see just how fast the order executes.
Now let's look at an example of closing the position. Very simple, just click the keyboard, in the message with okcoin, enter the format for execution, and send the message to complete, just like in this image:

• B,N,C,L,300,1,20x

So the B indicates Bitcoin, the N indicates Biweekly Futures, C is for close, L is for long, 300 is the price, 1 is the contract, and 20x is the leverage you used to open the contract in first place.

One final example now, let's mix it up and say you're using Cross Margin and trading Litecoin futures instead, on Quarterlies, and you want to open a short at 3.5 for 100 contracts, then just send:

• L,Q,O,S,3.5,100

L = Litecoin, Q = Quarterly, O = open, S = short, 3.5 = price, 100 = # contracts.
Note since it's cross-margin it is not necessary to include 10x or 20x.
And after sending you you will be executed on the trade.

Additional commands

In addition to the order execution commands, you can also check Price by just sending “P” to OKCoin. You can also cancel all your orders by sending “C”.

Concluding remarks
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The responses to your commands will be in Chinese. But you can actually translate them on the fly within WeChat. Also, you will get used to what responses are errors and which are success. So as long as you have the account balance to cover it and you dont make a typo, it will execute correctly.
You will likely only use WeChat execution in times of stress (i.e., you can't execute in Web UI or over API and use WeChat as last resort). Thus I highly recommend you practice using this system so that when the time comes you are not scrambling to figure out the format. It's simple enough that it just takes a half hour or so of your time to get acquainted with, and could save you lots of money in the future.
I hope this clarifies what is confusing for some people who could not quite get into doing it just based on OKCoin's blog post. Feel free to leave questions or if anything needs clarifying or if something I have written here is wrong.