The price of Bitcoin has skyrocketed to new highs, trading above $4,000 per coin. This is an increase of about 7 percent, or nearly 50 percent since the beginning of August 2017. This raises the total value of all Bitcoins to more than $70 billion.
It took only a week for Bitcoin to hit this milestone as it passed $3,000 for the first time the previous week.
The price of the virtual currency Bitcoin has been climbing steadily for the last year as investors around the world have shown an interest in the unusual characteristics of its technology, which allows money to be held and moved on a network of computers without any central authority or involving any banks.
But with Bitcoin reaching the $4,000 milestone has also been caused by a a long-disputed update to the network’s software and rules.
Bitcoin has also locked in SegWit, a code modification that fixes malleability issues and frees up space in blocks, allowing for more transactions to be stored in each one.
The price of Ethereum has also been rising this month, but more slowly than Bitcoin and it remains below the record high it reached in June. On Monday, the price was around $300. Bitcoin Cash, the cryptocurrency that was split off from bitcoin, is also going up strongly.
As the ecosystem for cryptocurrencies are getting stronger. People can have more places to spend them. And as more regulators thinking about the right infrastructure, more investors are also learning about the asset. Speculation is rightly moving away from price and focusing on use cases.