2016 has already seen a fair deal of significant bitcoin price activity. Following a steady resurgence after a low of $360 in January, the price of the cryptocurrency scaled past $400 for the first time in February.
The Bitstamp Price Index (BPI) struck $400 for the first time this month yesterday at 10:50 AM UTC. Trading saw Bitcoin price reach a high of $405.83 toward the end of the Sunday. Eventually, the BPI struck a high of $407.44 in the early hours of Feb 15th today.
At the time of publishing, bitcoin was trading at $399.97.
While the bitcoin community remains divided in the controversial block size debate, the recent steady swell could arguably be attributed to the stand taken by key bitcoin exchanges and miners. The Bitcoin Roundtable – a community of miners, exchanges, wallets and businesses published a letter to announce their rejection of Bitcoin Classic, a hard-fork. The statement from mining pools that collectively make up the majority of the bitcoin network’s hashing rate could have had a telling effect in the price of bitcoin.
Another reason that is likely to have an influence on price is the opening of Chinese markets today following a week-long Lunar Year Near holiday. Furthermore, as CCN.com resident analyst Venzen Khaosan notes, the pausing of the Fed funds rate hike also sees Bitcoin emulate gold in a price rally.
This year, Bitcoin price has reached a high of $457 on January 7 before a volatile month saw bitcoin trading end January at $368.49 in the Bitcoin Price Index. The plunge in price came soon after former core developer Mike Hearn’s post where he announced his departure from the Bitcoin space.
The developer, now working at the private-blockchain consortium R3, deemed bitcoin a “failed experiment”. He also pointed to Bitcoin Classic and Bitcoin Unlimited as the two forks looking to fix the cap concerns of the blockchain. Bitcoin Classic recently released its new code that could potentially double the size of a block to 2MB. The last time Bitcoin scaled the $400 mark this year was on January 24.
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All time references are in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).
Featured image from Shutterstock.
