Bitcoin’s big surge continued on Sunday when the price per unit of the digital currency briefly broke the $3K mark.
That figure comes care of CoinDesk’s Bitcoin Price Index — rival currency index CoinMarketCap calculated the peak exchange rate at just a few cents short of $3,000. Because prices for bitcoin tend to vary across exchanges, there are slightly different ways to calculate the exchange rates — hence the variation.
Whether it hit, or almost hit, $3K, however — it is undeniable that bitcoin has been on a “epic run” for about the last six weeks or so. Bitcoin’s price hit $1,400 in early May and has been on a steady upward climb ever since, despite the now-frequent protests that this latest spike in the price of bitcoin is a bubble.
Billionaire Mark Cuban managed to briefly throw some cold water on the price surge by noting his concerns about a bubble. And those fears are not just for crypto-currency naysayers — central figures in the bitcoin community were warning of a bubble from the stage at the Consensus blockchain conference in May.
The enthusiasm is driven by the idea that bitcoin and its enabling technology, the blockchain, can bring data security innovation to a wide variety of fields from health care record management to supply chain tracking. Hence, bitcoin is not the only digital currency seeing a spike — the tide is also lifting rival blockchain-based currencies like Ethereum, Dash, and Litecoin, which are mostly rising in tandem with bitcoin.
But a speculation-driven market is also an emotionally fragile market, and as bitcoin has shown in the past, rapidly cooling sentiment in bitcoin land can cool the price of coins as quickly as increased passion can raise them.
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So what’s next? With bitcoin, it’s always hard to say. This time next month we could be writing about how the bubble burst — and bitcoin is back to $200 — or we could be writing that bitcoin has broken $4K.
We’ll keep you posted either way.
