Bitcoin under $ 5,000, a first since October 2017

(Belga) Bitcoin, the main decentralized virtual currency, fell below 5,000$ a unit on Monday, the first since October 2017 when its value began to take off.

It fell to 4,958.36$ around 16:35 GMT (17:35 in Belgium) against 5,451.72$ Friday at 22:00 GMT, a fall of about 10%, according to figures compiled by Bloomberg. The most famous cryptocurrency had already experienced a severe decline last Wednesday, falling below the 6,000$ mark, a level which he had not moved away since September, and already falling to a low for over a year. It was hard to find the reason for the sudden stall, but some analysts had recently pointed to a drop in interest in the sulphurous asset, while trade volumes in October fell to a record low in a year, according to the trade journal Diar. Some commentators also discussed the quarrel within the bitcoin cash community, another cryptocurrency that is the rival of bitcoin, which resulted in a split into two new virtual currencies last Thursday. Compared to mid-December, when it had temporarily crossed the 19,500$ , bitcoin lost almost 75% of its value. Bitcoin was worth only a few cents at its launch in February 2009 by one or more computer scientists hiding under the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto. In 2017, he hit the headlines, rising from around 1,000$ in January to almost 20,000 by the end of the year. The emergence of this phenomenon, called "bubble" by many officials, has disconcerted many institutions that have marked their distance from it. Last example, last Thursday, the French economist Benoît Coeuré, a member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank (ECB), compared the bitcoin to a kind of "evil emanation" of the financial crisis, while recognizing "a extremely intelligent idea "at the origin. (Belga)

source:
www.rtl.be