Bitcoin is back. That's right, the bulls, wolves and hyenas are running while the bear licks his/her/its wounds.
Today, Bitcoin hit a NEW RECORD PRICE of no less than US$5856.10, pushing its market cap up to US$93.27 billion.
As the graph below incontrovertibly demonstrates, the dog days are, in the immortal words of Florence and the Machine, over, the dog days are done.
The dog days are overThe dog days are doneCan't you hear the horses'Cause here they come
That's right, the great Segwit sweat of August, the great Jamie Dimon knifing of September and the great Chinese back-stabbing of recent weeks are all distant memories now. Amusing distant memories ...
(By the way, I'm not really sure if the Florence and the Machine song is really about happiness ... it has, perhaps appropriately, a dark dimension. In fact, after reading this, it may not be an appropriate reference at all. But I'm keeping it in this article because it's brilliant ...)
Looming, of course, is the great second segwit2x sweat of November when the currency may or may not "hard fork", leaving one half in the ditch.
But even that seems to be resolving itself fluently and the market appears to be shrugging it off.
Because you asked, this from newsbtc:
Earlier this year, a group of 58 companies led by Digital Currency Group (DCG) that represent 83.28 percent of hashing power and 20.5 million bitcoin wallets agreed on a proposal known as SegWit2x, to activate the Bitcoin Core development team’s scaling and transaction malleability solution Segregated Witness (SegWit) and increase the Bitcoin block size to 2MB shortly thereafter.
But, the Bitcoin Core development team, the Bitcoin open-source development community, businesses, investors, and most users have condemned the strategy of the group of companies to run a hard fork in November without reaching consensus as a community. Some analysts and developers including Jameson Lopp, the engineer for BitGo, stated that some aspects of the SegWit2x codebase such as its replay protection can be considered “as a type of attack on Bitcoin”, because it intends to confuse Bitcoin users and investors deliberately with the purpose of evolving into the majority Bitcoin blockchain.
Translation: The greedy bastards who want to hive off a chunk of Bitcoin for themselves are being foiled at every turn.
What appears to be pushing this surge is the growing pressure on investment houses to get their clients in on the action. Goldman Sachs announced it was looking into exactly this a week or so ago. Nobody wants to be the sucker sitting in bonds when kids on skateboards are returning 480% (Bitcoin's advance so far this year).
From an amusing outsider, crypto currently has become a R171 billion market cap behemoth with Bitcoin making up more than half of that.
Consider this sharp observation made by a writer at RT about just how large Bitcoin has become:
Its market capitalization is approaching $97 billion. If bitcoin were a company, its market cap puts it in the same league as some of the world's biggest corporations.
The cryptocurrency would be 77th in PwC's list of the top 100 corporations, bigger than Bayer, Goldman Sachs, UPS, Nike and Mitsubishi.
Once institutional investors begin to make allowance for crypto, you can expect its price to rise. Although, there is always the chance they might be outflanked by nervous regulators and it might fall. Your call.
* The ill-informed ramblings in this article can in no way, shape or form be considered investment advice, okay?
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