Bitcoin Price Surges To Record High Value

The crypto currency achieved a high of $3,451.86 (£2,651) per coin in Monday trade, according to the always reliable Coindesk Bitcoin Price Index.

Previously it had never breached the $3,000 mark until last weekend. The total market value of all bitcoins currently in existence has now surpassed $56bn (£43bn).

This surge followed the creation of a new spin-off crypto-currency, Bitcoin Cash, just last week. The new asset is trading well below the peak price of $727.54 (£557) per coin it managed to achieve on 2 August.

Bitcoin Cash’s future does looks more assured after Coinbase, one of the current leading exchange and bitcoin wallet services, promised to support it after previously refusing to make that pledge.

“We are planning to have support for Bitcoin Cash by 1 January 2018, assuming no additional risks emerge during that time,” it stated in a recent blog post.

UK Bitcoin Traders Concern

The trading price of the original Bitcoin experienced big see-saw movement in July. There was concern that there might be a “civil war” over rival plans to speed up the transaction process.

That caused its trading price to dip to $1,938.94 (£1,485) on the 15th July before a compromise scheme called Segwit2x returned it to favour which saw gains. A fresh plan to fork the currency emerged from a group of insiders unhappy with the Segwit2x initiative.

On the 1st August, they offered out to investors a Bitcoin Cash token to match every original Bitcoin token they currently owned. The move then made an incompatible version of the blockchain ledger, which keeps a track of all past transacting movements.

This initiative had the potential to undermine the original Bitcoin crypto-currency, in particular if alot of the current BC miners had jumped ship. Bitcoin miners provide the computer processing power to authorise transactions, and as such Bitcoin Cash was meant to appeal to their interests.

The fact remains that it currently remains more profitable to mine the original Bitcoin’s blockchain than that of Bitcoin Cash so support for the new currency remains limited.

“What this has shown is that Bitcoin is much more resilient to forks than some people thought,” commented Michael Parsons, a blockchain adviser.

“And it appears that there is room for more than one type of Bitcoin to exist.”

A leading bitcoin market watcher ventured that the introduction of Bitcoin Cash had instead contributed to the surge in the original version’s trading price.

“We’ve seen a lot of people selling their Bitcoin Cash in order to buy more Bitcoin,” stated Matthew Newton, leading analyst from the eToro trading platform.

“On top of this, some investors sat on the sidelines last week, waiting to see what happened, these investors are now moving back into Bitcoin.”

The actual market capitalisation for all crypto currencies which includes Litecoin and Ethereum was close to $118bn on Monday according to the CoinMarketCap news and info outlet.