Bitcoin Pushes Above Php 350,000 and Here’s Why
Bitpinas. The price of bitcoin has soared more than 500% this 2017, making it the world’s best-performing currency.
Record Bitcoin Price
With so many all-time highs (dubbed ATH), the usual trend is that traders buy bitcoins when the price is low and sell when the price is high. However, with a record 500% increase, traders seem to be buying more and more and hodling (a cryptocurrency slang which means “holding”), hoping that the price will continue to go up. And yes, it actually did.
Why is the bitcoin price going high?
The decentralized coin’s upward trend is not without cause. There were a number of events that led to the eventual all-time high Bitcoin Price of Php 325,000
The Segwit2x Fork
We briefly covered what is Segwit2x in this article. Simply put, it is a fork that will split bitcoin into two cryptocurrencies. One of these coins will eventually take the name of Bitcoin and the other one as Bitcoin 2x (or whatever name the community will support).
And when the fork happens, whatever bitcoin you have in one fork will be mirrored in the other. Which means, if you have 3 BTC at the time of the fork, you will also get 3 B2X.
So this means that people’s anticipation to get “free” coins on the fork is driving people to buy them right now, despite the bitcoin’s expensive price.
Japan, China, Korea
With legal recognition in Japan, bitcoin use has surged in the East Asian country. Other countries such as Korea, the Philippines, that are establishing guidelines for virtual currencies have effectively allowed people to engage in cryptocurrency investing and trading, with their central banks not prohibiting its use.
At the same time, regulations in China and Russia first raised some alarms. Even still, the price of bitcoin has recovered swiftly even after the Chinese ban.
Other factors and Overall
FundStrat Global Advisor and Co-Founder Tom Lee recently mentioned that one of the reasons for bitcoin’s upward trend is because of the continued introduction of new altcoins. He mentioned:
What we found in our research is that the more coins that are being issued, the more are using bitcoin as their master ledger, which means bitcoin’s value is actually growing as there’s more coins.
And with the upcoming fork and the previous forks before it, it seems the bitcoin’s price is very resilient, leading people to think that forks are good for this cryptocurrency.
As we write this article, Bitcoin is above the Php 350,000 mark and with the current trend, we are expecting it to go higher as the Segwit2x fork comes closer.
