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Bitcoin flirts with $16,000, alarm bells ring louder

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Bitcoin rocketed to a life span high just shy of $16,000 on Thursday soon after climbing some sixty p.c in only in excess of per week, intensifying the controversy about whether the cryptocurrency is in the bubble going to burst.

The biggest U.S. cryptocurrency exchange struggled to help keep up with history site visitors given that the price tag surged, by having an forthcoming start of your very first bitcoin futures contract further more fuelling trader interest.

Proponents say bitcoin is an effective medium of trade in addition to a technique to shop benefit, very like a valuable metal. Additionally they argue it can be preferable to classic currencies because it is far from subject to central lender manipulation.

The supply of bitcoin will finally be capped at 21 million, plus some 16.7 million have now been released.

But critics express that the value run-up is a bubble which includes been pushed primarily by speculation, leaving bitcoin susceptible to some sharp reversal. JPMorgan Chase & Co Chief Executive Jamie Dimon famously called bitcoin a fraud in September.

“Bitcoin remains a major gamble as it is actually very much an asset that remains in uncharted waters, we’ve simply not experienced this before,” said Nigel Green, founder and chief executive of deVere Group.

“Also, an asset that goes almost vertically up should typically raise alarm bells for investors,” he added.

The world’s biggest cryptocurrency has surged fifteen-fold in price so far this year.

The latest surge brought its so-called market cap, its price multiplied by the number of bitcoins in circulation, to nearly $280 billion, according to Coinmarketcap, a trade website. By comparison, the market value of Wal-Mart Stores Inc is around $288 billion.

Analysts said the launch slated for this weekend of bitcoin futures by Cboe Global Markets Inc’s Cboe Futures Exchange, one with the world’s biggest derivatives exchanges, was helping drive up the value on expectations it would draw more investors to the market.

The CME Group will launch bitcoin futures one week later, while Nasdaq Inc plans to get into the mix next year.

Bitcoin climbed as high as $15,995 on the Luxembourg-based Bitstamp trade, up more than 14 percent on the day. It was last at $15,299,97.

Coinbase, the biggest U.S. platform for buying and selling cryptocurrencies, said on Thursday on Twitter that it had experienced an outage due to file targeted traffic. The venue was last up and running.

Some investors said they still see scope for bitcoin to soar even higher.

“It will hit potentially $20,000 because so significantly capital is coming in and it’s the most liquid secure coin out there,” said David Drake, founder and chairman of DLJ Capital, a family office in New York.

Other trading venues showed different prices for bitcoin, which trades in more than 100 cryptocurrency exchanges that are not accountable to any central authority. For instance, at institutional trading platform GDAX, bitcoin topped $19,000, while it hit above $16,000 at itBit.

Those price tag discrepancies could add another level of speculation by introducing the prospect of arbitrage trades between the markets.

STOKING VOLATILITY

Some warned the start of bitcoin futures, which will allow investors to take speculative short positions to bet against the cryptoccurrency, as well as long positions, could spark further volatility.

And while Cboe, CME and Nasdaq offer strictly policed trading environments, the underlying bitcoin market is riddled with exchanges lacking even basic oversight.

The Futures Industry Association, representing some of your world’s biggest brokers, sent a letter on Thursday to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission saying that more safeguards are needed to protect against bitcoin’s high volatility and the risk of manipulation in the spot market.

“Aggressive traders, such as hedge funds and algorithm-driven funds, (will be able) to use this futures market to enter bitcoin trading with high levels of liquidity for aggressive short-selling and knock the prices really low,” said Think Markets analyst Naeem Aslam.

“Players now have an incentive to be on the short side and make profits hedging against the upside.”

Concerns about cybersecurity could also take the shine off of bitcoin.

Slovenian cryptocurrency mining marketplace NiceHash, which matches people looking to sell processing time on computers in exchange for bitcoin, said on Thursday it had lost about $64 million worth of bitcoin inside of a hack of its payment system.

Bitcoin slumped in 2014 when MtGox, then the world’s biggest bitcoin exchange, collapsed immediately after saying it had been hacked and had 650,000 bitcoins stolen.

The price of all cryptocurrencies now stands at nearly $430 billion, according to Coinmarketcap.

Bitcoin has more than tripled in selling price since the start of October, putting it on track for its best quarter since the end of 2013, when it surged above $1,000 for the main time.

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