Today I am going to share my 2 cents on ethereum and eth prices,

Ethereum Development

Metropolis

ELI5:

• A new hard fork to simplify the protocol (easier for devs to start developing in ethereum).
• Possible for recipients to pay gas cost for transactions (used to be sender only).
• More secure light client (light clients allow transactions without running full wallet, so you can sync the blockchain much faster).
• Introduction of PoS (proof-of-stake consensus, ultimately solves scalability issues).
• Solve difficulty bomb exponential growth rate problem with new algorithms.
• Lots of other features in the roadmap, you can check latest dev log here
• Metropolis dev log - release around 3rd quarter of 2017

There are some exciting ethereum projects such as Raiden worthy of a thorough long post, I'll try to cover these projects at a later time.

Ether price

Psychological point of view

Moon/Lambo/You got more of those cheap xxx ETH hodlers
The hype has slowed down with dips happening from time to time, as opposed to strong consensus that ETH will head straight to the moon without stops. FUD sells will happen, lets face it, there's a lot of dumb money in ETH right now (ELI5: people buy ETH in hopes to get rich overnight, without any knowledge of ethereum as a technology). These hodlers got a taste of the sweet, most of them are winning, taking profit is generally an easier decision to make than cutting losses.

Reality check: ETH price today already reflect technology that is to happen tomorrow (31B market cap as of this writing), we have not yet seen any killer apps with wide adoption to justify this valuation. Although, I am highly optimistic that the bright folks on the ethdev team will roll out revolutionary solutions to all these difficult problems. Check Vitalik's presentation on Hard problems in Cryptoeconomics. Also follow Vlad Zamfir's Twitter for a more realistic capability of ethereum today.

What I think can bring ETH to yet another ATH

• Major EEA announcement with significant members joining the alliance (eg. EEA China)
• A killer app that gets widely adopted (there are a lot of experimental work going on w good potentials, I'll follow up on this one as well later)
• Flippen happens, gaining major media coverage

Ultimately Ethereum still needs more visibility to the general public, more developers joining, more eth traders, especially those who missed out on BTC, coming in w FOMO mentality. These factors can drive Eth prices significantly higher.

Technical analysis point of view (based on ETH/CNY market)

Day chart showing price dipped to land on MA10 days support

30 min chart showing resistance from both MA5 and MA10, unable to break through

trading volumes are relatively high on these dips, if next dip breaks these support lines, we're looking much lower at around 1800CNY support. It is not healthy from technical point of view to go 5000% up without a significant correction, and that has yet to happen for ETH. If it happens, it's going to be quite scary, so my suggestion is to adjust your positions, I currently hold 30% of my total positions, sold the other 70%. Unless of course you're a long long term hodler, then just ignore my suggestion.

We're also seeing a major premium on Chinese exchanges, compared to other markets. I am not sure what this tells, if arbitrage bots are in play, can we assume that they'll just come meet around half way?

About the author -

I own some BTC/ETH and some other altcoins. I'm not a day trader, I am not a moon hodler, I trade based on facts.