Enthusiasts and supporters for bitcoin are attracted by its revolutionary ideals of transparency and a lack of central or official control. But the risks of dealing in bitcoin were exposed in 2013 when Tokyo-based exchange MtGox collapsed after admitting it had lost the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars of investor funds.
Bitcoin is a far cry from those early beginnings.
The $10,000 level is a key turning point for this digital asset and a critical moment for the crypto-currency space in general.
“Investors will be looking to take profits and re-evaluate their positions. There will be some churn as overweight bitcoiners wash into other cryptos searching for yield,” said Charles Hayter, founder and chief executive officer of CryptoCompare, an interactive crypto-currency platform.
Bitcoin took 834 days to top $1,000 from the time that BitStamp started to track the price in August 2011. It was another 1,270 days to hit $2,000 on May 20, 2017. However, the price has surged in the later half of 2017, crossing successive $1,000 milestones with ever increasing speed on its march toward $10,000.
As bitcoin soars, the virtual currency market now has market capitalization -- its price multiplied by the number of coins that have been released into the system -- of more than $300 billion. Bitcoin accounts for more than 50 percent of that market cap.
Bitcoin’s volatility versus other asset markets shows a sharp divergence, with more frequent peaks and sharp declines over the last two years.
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