By
Bhushan Akolkar
April 19th, 2024
Not all-time high, but close: Bitcoin price surpacess the $18 thousand mark once again.
This December seems to be lucky time for the most popular cryptocurrency: Bitcoin price goes above $18,000 for the second time during the month. Today Bitcoin reached the high of $18,153 at 12.15 UTC. After that the price started to decrease, but it still stays close to $18,000.
This year brought Bitcoin lots of good news: it has soared more than 1,500%. On January it cost less than $1,000, on December it set all-time high of $18,353. Still, it looks like the maximum price of Bitcoin in 2017 can exceed that number.
After the previous reaching of the $18,000 level Bitcoin faced an incredible rise of volume, but less than in a week it lost about $5,000. The situation today reminds of the events in the end of November.
Just like now, Bitcoin set new high of over $11,000 extremely fast, lost more than $2,000 in the next few days only to set new records in a week. Soon we will have a chance to find out whether this scenario would reoccur.
This rise in Bitcoin price has also brought back the optimism about CBOE Bitcoin futures. The start was great: the maximum price reached $18,850. Nevertheless, the very day traders got allowed to bet against it, Bitcoin futures faced devastating drop: the minimum was as low as $16610. But the rise of Bitcoin price helped CBOE Bitcoin futures to retake its positions and now the price is about $18,000.
The rise in price of Bitcoin led to a massive discussion. Financial experts used the opportunity to remind of the high volatility of the currency and a lack of trust in it. For example, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen said that bitcoin “plays a very small role in the payments system”, also adding that it’s not a “stable store of legal tender.”
Bitcoin has also become a hot topic for a new report from Deutsche Bank AG. The report reminds of the specificity of cryptocurrencies: “the risk of incurring losses greater than margin is higher than in normal foreign-exchange trading, due to high intraday volatility.” But that was not the most interesting part of the official position of Deutsche Bank AG.
The bank sees the reason of exponential growth of Bitcoin in the fort quarter of the year in ‘Mrs. Watanabe‘ that is a term used to describe an archetypical Japanese retail investor who is now a housewife who keeps a thorough track of family’s finances.
It was expected that Mrs. Watanabe would avoid cryptocurrencies because of its high risks. But the fact is that cryptosphere is seen as a logical continuation of forex trading. And there are some numbers that can prove that Mrs. Watanabe is really into bitcoin frenzy: yen is the currency of denomination of about 40% of all cryptocurrency trading.
Analysts led by Masao Muraki clarified: “We think that retail investors are shifting from leveraged foreign-exchange trading to leveraged cryptocurrency trading.”
However, Deutsche Bank AG is not only worried about the risks of cryptocurrency trading. Bitcoin price moves up setting new highs and lots of people have optimistic expectations about its future. But the bank’s report brings up the question of the impact of bitcoin bubble’s burst while bitcoin tries to win new high.