By
Chimamanda U. Martha
April 25th, 2024
It seems, that bitcoin finally gains momentum after the succession of equally infamous and disturbing news about China’s decision to ban ICOs and shut down all bitcoin trading.
Bitcoin headstarted at the beginning of this week. The digital coin, which has been sinking almost for the past two weeks due to the uncertainty about cryptocurrencies’ future in China, was trading at over $3,950 per coin Monday evening, September 25.
Reports on September 15, that Chinese authorities have ordered domestic Bitcoin exchanges to cease trading, and immediately notify users of their closure, and the succeeding news that two China’s biggest exchanges OkCoin and Huobi are to stop all trading services for local customers till the end of October, made bitcoin lose nearly $1,000 of its value.
This brought the price of the cryptocurrency to $2958 level for the first time in over month and a half, according to the Coin Market Capitalization Index. The next day, however, bitcoin recouped most of those losses, reaching its pre-fall level of $4000 in another two days, on September 18, 2017.
Over the weekend bitcoin has stayed within the range of about $3,600 to $3,800 per coin, being traded at $3812 maximum, with the minimum level of $3594, as CoinMarketCap shows.
In light of this, some traders appear bullish, feeling rather optimistic about the consequences of infamous China’s new regulations.
For example, Josh Olszwicz, a bitcoin trader, for instance, told Business Insider that the news out of China won’t have a long-term impact on bitcoin as it doesn’t affect the cryptocurrency’s blockchain:
“If it doesn’t affect the protocol, then it’s not a real problem. The bitcoin cash shakeup was much more worrisome from my perspective, but even then the core bitcoin protocol remained unaffected.”
Some experts believe, that China’s ban on Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies may be temporary, executed to indulge international agencies and communist members in the light of the upcoming Communist Party convention. For the record, it’s not the first time when China opts to abolish “threatening” innovations: back in 2011, in advance of 18th Communist Party Convention, official Beijing went after a Variable Interest Entity (VIE), structure that allowed Chinese companies to list their shares in US exchanges through “reverse mergers”.
In fact, already two weeks ago Hu Bing, a researcher at the Institute of Finance and Banking, a Chinese government-supported academic research organization, claimed that the government’s ban on initial coin offerings (ICOs) is temporary. This statement, however, created little stir if any, and didn’t affect bitcoin price.
Indeed, in the long term bitcoin threatens China’s domestic economy, having the potential to replace the yuan in everyday transactions. But at present and in the near future the size of the bitcoin economy is too small to be a real threat to the contry’s government and banking system.
Today the token trades at $3900 level, making $3920 at press time with marketcap constituting slightly more than $65B.