Bitcoin fell below $37,000 for the first time in over three months on Wednesday, continuing a major sell-off that began a week ago.
The digital currency was down 20% in the last 24 hours, according to Coinbase. The cryptocurrency hit an intraday low of around $36,189 at 7:30 a.m. ET. It was the lowest level since early February. Bitcoin is down more than 30% in the last week, according to Coinbase.
That means bitcoin has now erased all its gains following Tesla’s announcement that it would purchase $1.5 billion worth of the cryptocurrency. It’s also down about 44% since hitting a record high of $64,829 in mid-April.
Negative news over the past week has dampened sentiment for bitcoin.
On May 12, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the electric carmaker had suspended vehicle purchases using bitcoin, citing environmental concerns over the so-called computational “mining” process. This is where high-powered computers are used to solve complex mathematical puzzles to enable transactions using bitcoin.
Musk’s comments caused over $300 billion to be wiped off the entire cryptocurrency market that day.
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In related news; JP Morgan believes large institutional investors are losing confidence in crypto-currencies and are moving into gold as a hedge against inflation and other potential issues that could weaken the dollar.
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The neat thing about gold is that you can actually look at the stuff. That and a lock box rental at $100/year is infinitesimal compared to the computational costs for maintaining cryptocurrencies.
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