EMERGING TECH
EMERGING TECH
EMERGING TECH
Bitcoin hits new record high as positive news boosts investor confidence
The price of bitcoin recovered from its plunge Nov. 29 to hit yet-another new record high on Sunday as positive market news drove investors back into the market.
Pushing near $12,000 for the first time, the price of bitcoin hit $11,830.13 at 3:20 p.m. EST before profit takers dropped the price back down to around $11,400. Leading the positive news was an announcement by CME Group Inc. on Friday that it had finally received regulatory approval from the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission and would move ahead to launch bitcoin futures trading on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Dec. 18.
Adding to the hype cycle was a way-out prediction on where bitcoin is heading. The never-shy cybersecurity guru John McAfee (pictured) said on Twitter that he would “eat his dick if bitcoin didn’t reach $1 million by 2020.” McAfee noted that he had previously predicted a bitcoin price of $500,000 by the end of 2020, but bitcoin had accelerated “much faster than my model assumptions.”
Recent bitcoin price predictions have been more modest. Standpoint Research Inc. analyst and founder Ronnie Moas predicted a price of $14,000 by the end of 2018, while famed hedge fund manager Michael Novogratz predicted a price of $40,000 over the same time period.
The positive press relating to bitcoin followed well into the weekend, with multiple news outlets reporting that the Winklevoss twins, best known to the public as the guys who charged Mark Zuckerberg with stealing their idea for Facebook, have become the world’s first bitcoin billionaires.
According to reports, the twins invested $11 million from their $65 million Facebook settlement into bitcoin in 2013, an investment that has grown a hundredfold in the following four years to turn them into billionaires. It’s not known exactly known how much the twins hold in bitcoin today, but they also have broader exposure to the market through their Gemini Trust bitcoin exchange, which according to figures from Bitcoinity was the seventh largest exchange by volume over the last 30 days, with a 4.8 percent global market share.
Photo: gageskidmore/Flickr
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