Bitcoin goes down on downbeat news from the IMF and Google

On Wednesday, the price of one Bitcoin headed south below the $9,000 level for the first time this week, reacting to a bunch of downbeat news for the crypto community.

The first news was a blog post from Christine Lagarde that uncovered that the head of the International Monetary Fund urged watchdogs around the globe to clamp down on crypto assets’ potential to become a key money laundering machine as well as the financing of terrorism.

Lagarde rolled out the example of the so-called AlphaBay “darkweb” marketplace that was employed for laundering over $1 billion before it was neutralized. She added that the excessive volatility of crypto-assets could generate fresh weak points in the financial system.

Then Google’s announcement showed up on Wednesday, telling it’s going to ban ads for crypto assets as well as initial coin offerings. A similar move had been made by Facebook earlier in 2018, so both the two number one ad players are openly hunting down the crypto world.

Nevertheless, Facebook’s attempts have appeared to be less than successful. It’s because some folks simply make use of so-called off-brand spellings. For instance, they write “bitc0in” instead of normal “bitcoin” for the purpose of evading the social network’s filters. However, even without such tricks, it feels like a few suspicious ICO-related pitches are actually making it onto the leading social networking website.

While the recent news might not be so positive for some in the crypto world, nevertheless it wasn’t so bad. For example, Lagarde told that the blockchain technology, which is the cornerstone of cryptocurrencies could be employed for regulatory purposes. She stressed that better employment of data by authorities could help to free up many resources for other more crucial needs and even diminish tax circumvention.