Bitcoin saw a small 1.18% price rise today as the cryptocurrency continues to battle to remain above the $6,800 support level. $6,800 had provided significant resistance in March and early April and therefore is expected to provide an equal amount of support moving forward.

However, if the tide turns, and Bitcoin falls beneath $6,800, it could result in the cryptocurrency unwinding back beneath $6,000. Luckily, the bulls have battled to remain above this level over the past 5-days of trading and have been successful thus far.

BTC/USD Daily CHART SHORT TERM

Analyzing the daily chart above, we can clearly see Bitcoin hitting resistance at $7,400 last week and then rolling over to drop into the $6,800 level. More specifically, the cryptocurrency has managed to remain above support at $6,765 which is provided by a short term .236 Fibonacci Retracement level.

The market is also battling to remain above support provided by a rising support trend line after rebounding from here today.

Bitcoin is still bullish but a close beneath $6,800 would turn it neutral.

If the buyers can push higher, the first level of resistance is located at $7,000. Above this, resistance can be found at $7,174 (bearish .618 Fib Retracement), $7,400, $7,500, and $7,676 (1.618 Fib Extension).

On the other hand, if the sellers push beneath the $6,765 support, added support can be found at $6,500, $6,319 (.382 Fib Retracement), and $6,000 (.5 Fib Retracement).

Key Levels

Support:$6,800, $6,500, $6,100, $6,000, $5,911, $5,786, $5,636, $5,600, $5,500, $5,467 $5,200, $5,000, $4,800, $4,672, $4,577, $4,139, $4,000, $3,912, $3,500, $3,436.

Resistance: $7,000, $7,174, $7,400, $7,500, $7,676, $8,000, $8,073, $8,250, $8,461, $8,672, $8,979, $9,000, $9,100.

Summary

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Bitcoin Price Analysis: BTC Bulls Continue Their Struggle To Defend $6,800 With Bears On The Horizon

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Bitcoin saw a 1.18% price increase over the past 24 hours of trading as the cryptocurrency continues to battle to remain above $6,800.The cryptocurrency was trading above $7,000 last week but rolled over before the weekend to drop beneath this support.

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Yaz Sheikh

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Coin Gape

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Bitcoin Price Analysis: BTC Bulls Continue Their Struggle To Defend $6,800 With Bears On The Horizon - Coingape

More analysts than ever are encouraging young people to take advantage of the current market dip and begin investing in Bitcoin for retirement. Whereas this idea is nothing new, current forces in the legacy financial space are making it more appealing. At least one analyst asserts that a mere one Bitcoin will provide a vastly better long-term return than traditional savings.

Over the course of the past forty years retirement plans in developed countries have gradually shifted from fixed benefit programs, such as standard pension plans, to defined contribution programs, such as 401ks. Whereas the wisdom of this transition is subject to debate, there is no question that millions now rely on some form of personal savings for most, if not all, of their retirement income.

For those with ample nest eggs, this arrangement has been fine. However, decades of low inflation and brief recessions have played a role in this success. Should the current global financial crisis result in a surge of inflation, retirees could find themselves in serious trouble.

For those still in the workforce, long term devaluation of fiats such as Dollars and Euros could be devastating. Years of prudent investment could disappear as the earning power of retirement savings evaporates. Analyst Davincij15 has pointed this out in a recent tweet:

Simply put, he acknowledges the wisdom of beginning to save while young, yet notes that all may be for naught if inflation becomes a problem. Not surprisingly, he advocates Bitcoin as a possible hedge.

Much has been said of Bitcoin as a potential safe haven during the current economic meltdown. However, the long-term consideration of this idea is far more notable. The fact that crypto ownership skews toward the young is well-known, and more than ever workers under 35 are choosing to add blockchain assets to their retirement portfolios.

Part of this trend is, of course, related to the belief that crypto will continue to vastly outperform traditional investments. However, these young investors may now be making this choice to protect their retirement from inflation or other economic downturns. In other words, crypto is likely to be added to hard assets like gold and treasury bonds as a component of a properly managed portfolio.

There is little doubt that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are a permanent element of the global financial landscape. Now, more than ever, current events are giving legitimacy to this new asset class.

Do you think Bitcoin is the nest retirement investment option available to us? Share what you think in the comments below.

Images via Aaron Burden from Unsplash, Twitter: @Davincij15

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Is 1 Bitcoin Enough for You to Retire On? This Analyst Thinks Yes - Bitcoinist

Peter Schiff, a well-known economist and renowned author, has taken another stab at Bitcoin. As he commonly compares the digital asset with gold, outlining its lack of intrinsic value, the expert now says that the precious metal will outperform Bitcoin as the latter will simply crash.

Bitcoin is commonly compared to gold in its property to serve as a store of value. In fact, the Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, referred to it as a speculative store of value, just like gold.

This doesnt seem to be the opinion of Peter Schiff, though, as hes been known for refuting Bitcoins value.

He reiterated his views today, once again saying that Bitcoin will ultimately crash back to earth.

Being asked to short Bitcoin as means of putting his money where his mouth is, Schiff explained that hes already betting against the popular cryptocurrency.

I own no Bitcoin and am long lots of gold and silver, and even larger positions in precious metals mining stocks. Thats effectively a big bet against Bitcoin becoming the new gold, or taking a safe have/store of value market share away from gold. He said.

Having many qualities relative to gold, Bitcoin is also commonly referred to as digital gold. Indeed, the cryptocurrency is mined in a sense that it takes work to produce more of it, hence the Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus algorithm.

Furthermore, Bitcoin is also scarce just as gold. Both assets have a predetermined amount. Theres only so much gold in the earth and so many bitcoins that will be minted. The difference is that we know how many bitcoins there will be (21 million), but not how much gold is left unmined.

Yet, an interesting point was brought up in Schiffs Twitter thread, outlining that gold is archaic, and it used to work for non-digital societies, which ours is not. To that point, Schiff argued that gold only became money about 700 BC. So its actually pretty modern. Plus, its a metal, not a rock. Bitcoin will never be money. Not even cavemen would be dumb enough to accept it.

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Peter Schiff: In The Next Years Gold Will Rise More Than Bitcoin Because Bitcoin Price Will Crash - CryptoPotato

BTC/USD has a lack of healthy support levels on the downside. On the upside, there are two strong resistance levels at $7,000 and $7,200. The former has the one-week Fibonacci 61.8% retracement level, one-day SMA 10 and 15-min SMA 100. In comparison, the $7,200-level has the one-week Fibonacci 61.8% retracement level, one-day Pivot Point resistance-one and 4-hour Bollinger Band middle curve.

ETH/USD faces two strong resistance levels at $160 and $168. $160 has the one-hour Previous High,15-min and one-hour Bollinger Band middle curves, one-hour SMA 5 and 15-min SMA 10. $168 has the one-week Fibonacci 23.6% retracement level, one-da Pivot Point resistance-one, 0ne-day SMA 5 and one-hour SMA 100.

XRP/USD has no resistance levels of note on the upside. However, the price is supported by a strong level at $0.176, which has the one-week Pivot Point support-one, Previous Year Low and 4-hour SMA 200.

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Top 3 Coins Bitcoin, Ethereum and Ripple Price Prediction: Damage control begins after Fridays bloodbath - FXStreet

If the privacy and scaling upgrade Schnorr/Taproot makes it into bitcoin (BTC), it could pave the way for advanced and heretofore impossible projects. That is, as they say, good for bitcoin.

Schnorr/Taproot has made a great deal of progress recently, moving from a theoretical privacy and scaling idea into actual code. But while the community is very excited about its future, the change is rather confusing. Why? Because it bundles together several different technologies proposed over the years and each one is technically and conceptually unique.

First, there are Merklized Abstract Syntax Trees (MASTs), a smart contract technology developers have been talking about since 2013. Then we add Schnorr signatures, a scaling change first proposed in 2015 by Pieter Wuille, and finally Taproot, a privacy technology built on top of both, proposed in 2018 by Greg Maxwell.

Privacy and scaling are two things bitcoin still lacks. But as badly as these changes are needed, massive updates like this one are hard and, as such, are few and far between in bitcoin.

One thorny issue is simply deciding what would go into the upgrade.

"I think the biggest struggle in the process was to come up with the exact set of features to deploy at the same time," Blockstream researcher Tim Ruffing told CoinDesk.

Here's a rundown of what changes made the cut, and what didn't.

How big is this update?

First, we must remember this update is helpful but it's not a magic pill that instantly morphs bitcoin into a super-scalable and private currency, as experts debated on Twitter recently.

"It's the right thing to do these improvements but they won't suddenly make bitcoin a private currency," Ruffing said.

There will be some clear improvements. First, more complex types of transactions will be easier to use. In the most typical transaction, one person "signs" a transaction, proving he or she owns the bitcoin and can send it. "Multi-signature" (multi-sig) transactions, on the other hand, require more than one person to sign a transaction. This update will make it easier for multi-sig users.

"It's likely that more wallets will support multi-sig because it's cheaper and more private with BIP-taproot," Blockstream researcher Jonas Nick told CoinDesk.

Multi-signature has many important use cases. First, the multi-sig dependent lightning network could potentially speed up and scale payments for bitcoin, solving massive issues with the digital currency. If lightning proves to be the future of bitcoin, this improvement could have a large impact by making these transactions smaller in size and cheaper to process.

Further, multi-sig transactions using the new technology will look the same as normal transactions. So even though the bitcoin blockchain is public and anyone can easily look up a particular transaction, with this technology viewers will have no idea that these transactions actually represent lightning channels.

"Lightning channel openings and cooperatives are indistinguishable on the blockchain from normal payments. This also means that opening a lightning channel is just as expensive as a normal payment," Nick said.

Finally, the change would pave the way for other improvements that weren't possible before. One such possible next step is the addition of "cross-input aggregation," another way of scaling bitcoin by as much as 25 to 30 percent.

Schnorr for more efficient signatures

Understanding these upgrades requires some understanding of how bitcoin works. Only with the right "private key" (like an access code) can someone "sign" a transaction, thereby sending bitcoin to someone else. This process produces a "signature" that is attached to the transaction. The beauty is that anyone in the world can verify that this signature was produced by the right key

We touched on a more complicated version of this, multi-signature transactions, where more than one person is required to sign a transaction. When such a transaction is signed using ECDSA (bitcoin's current signature algorithm), it produces a separate signature for each person.

But this might be unnecessary. With the help of Schnorr signatures, it is possible to squash all of this data into a single signature using key aggregation.

The biggest struggle in the process was to come up with the exact set of features to deploy at the same time.

This makes the special type of bitcoin transaction smaller in size -- to the tune of 30 to 75 percent, according to Bitcoin Optech, an organization that helps bitcoin businesses adopt new scaling technologies like Schnorr/Taproot.

These sorts of scaling technologies are important because downloading the full bitcoin blockchain is the most secure and trust-minimizing way of using bitcoin. But that process requires more than 300 gigabytes of storage space.

Schnorr signatures also allow for something called "batch validation," making it possible to verify that multiple signatures are valid, saving time.

But just as important is what this upgrade leaves out in terms of Schnorr.

Developers have long proposed using "cross-input signature aggregation" to build Schnorr signatures into bitcoin transactions. Usually, each transaction requires more than one signature, one for each "input," which is roughly equivalent to one bill out of a handful of them passed over to a cashier.

But what if we could squash all these signatures for every transaction together?

Schnorr signatures theoretically allow for this. But this feature will have to wait for another time, as developers are still working through some security problems with adding this to bitcoin. Though with Schnorr added as a signature option in bitcoin, this kind of functionality will be one step closer.

"This could be done in a future upgrade," Ruffing said.

MASTs: better smart contracts

Merkelized Abstract Syntax Trees (MASTs) aren't in the name of the upcoming bitcoin upgrade, but it's still a cool technology that developers have been talking about for a long time.

MASTs improve smart contracts in bitcoin, making it easier for users to set more complicated conditions for a transaction.

Think back to the multi-signature option we talked about earlier, where two people instead of just one need to sign a transaction. Then imagine a situation in which you want to say a bitcoin can't be retrieved until after a certain date. A user might want to combine these conditions at once. That's where MASTs come in.

Right now, when one of these scripts is "redeemed" the full script is squashed into a transaction, taking up a lot of room and showing the whole world what conditions the user used to lock up the bitcoin.

MASTs arrange these conditions in a new way that looks like a tree. Each branch of the tree holds a different condition a user could meet to spend the bitcoin. Then, only a hash of the tip of the tree is included in the bitcoin blockchain instead of all the script conditions.

This is more private because only the script used will hit the blockchain. All in all, MASTs make it much easier and cheaper to lock up bitcoin with these more complicated rulesets.

Taproot gives a privacy boost

Taproot builds on MASTs and Schnorr to create smart contracts with better privacy.

Generally, right now, transactions with complex scripts using MAST would really stand out on the blockchain. Even if MAST itself is more privacy-preserving, the format is a bit different for these transactions so it's easy to tell if someone is using a script or not.

Using the magic of signature aggregation Schnorr provides, Taproot would make these transactions look just like normal transactions.

But it doesn't work for every MAST contract, only for cooperative spends, where one branch of the Merkle tree is a multi-sig transaction, which is successfully used. If any of the other branches are used, then this privacy benefit disappears.

That said, developers expect the cooperative spend use case will be the most common use.

Then there's Tapscript, which could make it easier to make further improvements to the scripts we've talked about in the future. "While the BIP-tapscript changes don't immediately benefit the average bitcoin user, they are designed to make updates to the script system easier in the future," Nick said.

Right now, developers are battle testing this bundle of new technologies. So far no major problems have been found, but developers are making it the best they can before they try to add it to bitcoin with a soft fork.

"Just recently we've suggested a few minor changes to make the Schnorr signing algorithm more resistant to implementation mistakes and physical attacks," Nick said. As developers grow and expand bitcoin's technology, its changes like these that will truly make the platform usable for developers and financial professionals alike.

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Schnoor/Taproot Could Improve Bitcoin Privacy and Scaling - CoinDesk