Individuals Flock to Bitcoin and Asian Demand Soars, Pushing Price to All Time High
Bitcoin seems to be going from strength to strength, recording a new all time high of $8725 on Saturday. While this is impressive in itself, investors who held Bitcoin before August 1 are doing even better, as the combined price of Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash has crossed $10,000.
New all time high
After a relatively quiet few days, Bitcoin seems poised to resume its uptrend. The price jumped up from a low of $8,200 to cross $8,700 in under 12 hours. The rally seemed to be driven by retail investors in Asia, with the largest volume being traded on Bithumb and Bitfinex. Bitcoin seems to have shrugged off the $30 mln hacking of Tether, which some had speculated could destabilize Bitfinex and by extension Bitcoin itself. Bitcoin bulls like Ronnie Moas and Mike Novogratz who predicted that Bitcoin would reach $10K in 2017 may be proven correct shortly.
Growing demand from individual investors
The number of users of the popular exchange Coinbase has been growing in leaps and bounds in 2017. Many in the digital currency world have been monitoring the speed with which Coinbase has been adding users, since that can be taken as a measure of Bitcoin’s retail adoption. According to data compiled by Alistair Milne, of the Altana Digital Currency Fund, the number of users of Coinbase has increased from about 5 mln at the start of 2017 to 13.1 mln today.
Over 100k users were added in 24 hours at the start of November, when CME announced that it would launch Bitcoin futures trading. During Thanksgiving weekend, Coinbase again crossed that mark, with another 100k users signed up in 24 hours. Individual investors seem to be afraid of missing out on buying Bitcoin, which might become unaffordable once the institutional money starts flowing in.
Bitcoin + Bitcoin Cash crosses $10K
Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash proponents may not see eye-to-eye on a scaling solution, but they share significant overlap among their user base. Most Bitcoin users, who didn't actively trade after the August hard fork, hold equal amounts of Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. The combined value of Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash has now crossed $10k. If we include the value of other forks like Bitcoin Gold and Bitcoin Diamond, the value would be even higher