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| Image source: Bitcoin | Tech Crunch |
The price of the digital currency bitcoin is up 50% in the past month and 300% in the past year. It hits a new all-time high every few days. At the time of writing, it’s trading at $1,745. Bitcoin is flying, and if you’re a cryptocurrency newbie, you might be wondering why.
There are always multiple explanations for bitcoin price hikes—it’s almost never one single source. Here are four reasons why bitcoin keeps hitting new highs
1. Japan
On April 1, Japan officially recognized bitcoin as a legal form of payment; one month later, the coin is still seeing a price benefit from that good news. The news means that bitcoin exchanges in Japan will be regulated under anti-money-laundering (AML) and know-your-customer (KYC) frameworks.
Yes, there’s an irony to the fact that legitimacy and regulation would boost the bitcoin price, considering that many of the early bitcoin believers got involved in the space specifically because of its anti-government, anti-regulation appeal. This philosophical push and pull continues to play out in the bitcoin world, especially as Wall Street types and financial institutions gravitate toward blockchain technology.
Charts from CryptoCompare show that 32% of bitcoin trading activity right now is happening in the Japanese yen, more than the activity in any other currency (normally No. 1 is either the US dollar or Chinese yuan), which supports the notion that Japan’s law is the biggest factor stoking the bitcoin price now.
2. Bitcoin fork / Litecoin
The bitcoin blockchain, the decentralized ledger that records all bitcoin transactions, has slowed down in the last year under the weight of heavy transaction volume. What that means is the speed in which it processes “blocks” (bundles of transactions) has slowed. At some times, transactions are taking two hours to go through—still much faster than international money transfers through traditional wire services like Western Union, but far slower than the bitcoin blockchain used to run.
The problem has led to an internal debate in the bitcoin world (so heated that many have called it a bitcoin “civil war”) over how to raise the block size allowed on the bitcoin blockchain and also decrease lag time. The likely result of the debate will be a “fork” to bitcoin’s code—the blockchain would split into two chains with different software and rules. The premise is called a “hard fork.”
While that debate has caused price fluctuations, recently a much smaller digital currency, litecoin (market cap: $1.6 billion vs. bitcoin’s $29 billion), successfully pulled off its own “soft” fork by enacting a proposal called “segregated witness.” It’s a workaround where transactions are split up into a form where they appear smaller to the ledger (and thus more of them can be processed at a time) without having to overhaul the software. After the success of the litecoin fork, there is some renewed optimism around a bitcoin fork and that has helped buoy the price.
3. BATS appeal to the SEC
After the SEC’s harsh rejection of a Winklevoss bitcoin ETF in March, the price of bitcoin tumbled after a steady rise. But at the end of March, the Bats global exchange, where the Winklevoss brothers seek to list their bitcoin fund (under the ticker COIN), filed an appeal to the SEC, which will soon rule on that appeal.
This means that the Winklevoss bitcoin ETF may get off the ground after all, and some believe that is contributing to the current price hike, albeit to a lesser extent than Japan and litecoin.
4. Uncertainty
The one factor always at play when the bitcoin price is rising quickly is also the simplest: general market uncertainty. Digital currency is seen by many as a safe haven investment class when a country’s fiat currency or economy is unstable. People turned to bitcoin during Greece’s banking crisis; people turned to bitcoin when China cracked down on capital controls. Because of this trend, Donald Trump’s presidency is thought to be a boon to bitcoin; the price is up 90% since he took office.
However: it isn’t the case that bitcoin only rises when there’s uncertainty. That is: if the mainstream market is doing well, that doesn’t mean digital currency can’t also thrive. Rather, bitcoin is an uncorrelated asset.
Nick Tomaino, an investor who spent two years at bitcoin wallet company Coinbase and now writes a bitcoin blog, prefers this explanation above all others for bitcoin’s ongoing ride: simple longevity. The longer bitcoin is around, the more seriously investors take it. “As distrust in institutions across the world increases,” he says, “people will gravitate towards [bitcoin]… interest will compound and so will price.”
— Daniel Roberts is a writer at Yahoo Finance, covering fintech and sports business. Follow him on Twitter at @readDanwrite.
Source: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/4-reasons-bitcoin-keeps-hitting-new-highs-194804004.html
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