It appears bitcoin survived its latest Weekend At Bernie’s price hit as the crypto plunged 30% to below $5,600 on its fifth 20% or more pullback this year.
On the hand bitcoin cash soared 400% off of Friday’s price to hit $2,450 for its high, briefly surpassing
Bitcoin has recovered overnight in the Asian markets to trade at $6,500 Monday morning. The crypto is still up over 500% for the year with a market cap of more than $100B.
The cause behind the volatility stems from the canceled fork — asoftware upgrade — and the future launch of bitcoin futures perhaps as early as years end.
Discussion within the community sees the bitcoin futures as a possible price suppression mechanism, comparing it to the precious metal paper market. The launching of an ETF (exchange-traded fund) could have that effect.
However the hash rate — or number of companies mining for cryptos — in bitcoin has fallen, while it has increased for bitcoin cash very recently.
This development more likely comes from the relative ease of finding bitcoin cash code versus the bitcoin code, which already has 16.6 million of the roughly 21 million coins in circulation.
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