Thursday, January 07, 2021
Value doubled in three weeks
Bitcoin cracks the next sound barrier
Hardly any other investment developed as well on the stock exchanges in the Corona year 2020 as Bitcoin. Some investors already see the digital currency as an alternative to gold. But critics see good reasons to be careful.
The rush for digital currencies like Bitcoin continues. On Thursday, the oldest and best-known cryptocurrency continued its record hunt, which was accompanied by strong exchange rate fluctuations. On the Bitstamp trading platform, a Bitcoin cost more than 40,000 US dollars for the first time. In the high, the price rose by more than twelve percent to around $ 40,330. The drastic increase is now also affecting other digital currencies, which is why the total market volume rose to over a trillion dollars for the first time.
Bitcoin has been rushing from record to record for some time. It wasn't until January 2nd that it climbed to $ 30,000 for the first time. He broke the $ 20,000 mark for the first time on December 16. Its value has therefore doubled within three weeks. In the past year, with a price increase of more than 300 percent, it was one of the investments with the strongest gains worldwide. Over the year, its course has even increased almost fivefold.
Total value of $ 1 trillion
There are several reasons for the price explosion. The image of Bitcoin had recently improved significantly. In addition, the payment service PayPal enabled its US customers to trade in cryptocurrencies. This year, transactions in Bitcoin and other digital currencies, of which there are now thousands, should also be possible.
Other digital currencies have also benefited from the boom recently. Ether, the second largest cryptocurrency in terms of market share, rose to around $ 1,277, the highest level since the beginning of 2018. Above all, however, the steep rise in the price of Bitcoin drove the total value of all cryptocurrencies above the one trillion US dollar mark for the first time. The Internet portal Coinmarketcap posted a high of around $ 1.044 trillion on Thursday. The value refers to all currently existing digital currencies. Coinmarketcap currently has 8,200 of them.
Digital currencies like Bitcoin continue to generate very mixed reactions. Followers see it not only as pioneering technologies such as the "blockchain" transaction chain that has become known through Bitcoin. Internet currencies are also used as an object of speculation and increasingly as a hedge against exchange rate fluctuations in other financial assets. Critics, on the other hand, warn of a financial bubble and complain, among other things, of the sometimes extreme price fluctuations of Bitcoin and other digital currencies.
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