That is not a valid reason from my point of view it is hard predict what function will make it again more hot like before. This coin still has good demand with bigger community which growing much faster than before so that I hope this year will bring more attention and make it more valuable.

Whales need not any reason to push the price upwards. If you look at previous rise and then decline in prices of Ethereum or any other market you can't figure out any specific reason neither for up nor for downwards move. All these are just phenomena that this will increase price or that does, in fact big players decide what and when to come those.

Weak hands sold their coins in blood market, i assure you that they will regret when market will start growing up.
Right now market is stable around $127 billion marketcap but after holidays we will see PUmp or dump.
On the other hand I don't think so ETF will approve very soon because Sec commissioner said that ETF could take days or years.  

I don't care about ETF, so far this year many people think it's the way for bulls. but in reality ETFs have no clarity. I'd rather wait for POS ethereum, because it's more realistic to pump the market. I hope after this update is complete, hopefully POS will be released soon.

Happy new year to everyone may this year brings lot of prosperity and honesty in your life.

Lets begin..

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.

No big news around yet so that it seems price will stay around current range. I am not a financial adviser but this is very hard to predict in bear market where are still and want to see a solid rise to finish this stress phase.

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%   

Well Right now writing time Ethereum at 3rd position, indeed there is a tough competition between XRP and ETH  but i am sure very soon Ethereum will take 2nd position permanently. Prices going upside, upgrade is coming, ethereum price could reach above $200 this week.