Decentral Block Post

Bitcoin (BTC) continues to frustrate traders who have been predicting a breakout on either side but investors should keep a close watch because the longer the time spent inside the range, the stronger is the eventual breakout from it.

The July jobs report released on Aug. 4 was a mixed bag, hence it could not shake out Bitcoin from its range. The report showed an addition of 187,000 jobs, fewer than the 200,000 expected by economists. But the average hourly wages remained strong, showing an increase of 0.4% for the month against expectations of a 0.3% rise.

Although the price remains stuck inside a range, analysts are putting out bullish projections for the second half of the year. A recent report from Matrixport projected a target of $45,000 by the end of this year and $125,000 by the end of 2024.

Bitcoin’s long-term story remains intact but traders should keep a close eye on any possible shocks from the regulators as that could cause a knee-jerk reaction to the downside. What are the important support and resistance levels to watch out for in Bitcoin and altcoins? Let’s study the charts of the top-10 cryptocurrencies to find out.

Bitcoin price analysis

Bitcoin’s price is getting squeezed between the 20-day exponential moving average ($29,523) and the horizontal support at $28,861.

Last month, a team of South Korean scientists claimed they engineered a superconducting material, dubbed LK-99, that works under ambient temperature and pressure. In layman's terms, the team allegedly created a material allowing electrical currents to flow without resistance or energy loss. Previously, such types of materials were only thought to have functioned at absolute zero temperatures.

But the new supposed breakthrough, which has since been replicated by at least one other research team, is already causing a stir among the scientific and perhaps crypto community. Within days of its publication, several LK99 memecoins have already been listed on decentralized exchange Uniswap (UNI). One such coin, the ERC-20 LK99 token, was listed less than 24 hours ago and has already surpassed $3 million in total trading volume, at the time of publication. 

Memecoins have been wildly popular among crypto enthusiasts for much of this year, with tokens being created based on concepts of Pepe the Frog, Milady's nonfungible tokens collection, and even ERC-20's Bitcoin "competitor" BRC-20. Despite their often meteoric rise and falls in price, many of the tokens' developers have warned that the meme tokens they created have "no intrinsic value." 

However, there's now a consensus among the scientific community that superconductor technology has immense value. For starters, superconductors are necessary for the construction of large-scale quantum computers. Before the yet-unverified invention, it was thought that such devices could only operate under absolute zero conditions for superconductivity. 

Thus, room-temperature superconductivity would greatly help scale or accelerate the development of quantum computing. Previously, blockchain experts, such as QAN Platform CTO Johann Polecsak, stated that quantum computers would eventually be able to inverse the encryption method of current cryptocurrencies in the coming decades — assuming no technological upgrades are made to such a blockchain.