Bitcoin has once again beaten all of its own records for the value of a single unit of cryptocurrency by breaching the $4,000 mark. This latest surge follows a month-long climb back to new heights after it dropped to a quarterly low of around $1,900 as a new-generation of graphics card miners began dumping their newly acquired number-crunching hardware.
The price of Bitcoin has a history of rising to new highs, crashing in the aftermath of reduced confidence, and then slowly building up to even greater highs. That pattern is evident if you look at multiple year graphs of the cryptocurrency’s value, and was highlighted in our recent chat with a few experts about Bitcoin’s past and future.
This latest peak is astronomically high, though. It’s more than twice the value the currency held in mid-May and at the time of writing sits at $4,308. It’s rising so quickly in fact, that we’ve updated that total twice just while writing this story. That rise has pushed Bitcoin’s market cap to $70.6 billion, which is tens of billions more than it was a mere few months ago.
This is perhaps more impressive since there was some consideration earlier this month that Bitcoin could become the lesser of two currencies, after a “hard fork,” saw the creation of “Bitcoin Cash.” Although essentially merely an alternative, or “altcoin” much like many other cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin Cash was the first to attempt to use the recognizable name of Bitcoin for its nomenclature. Despite its promises to deliver a more consumer friendly experience than its parent though, Bitcoin Cash has fallen from its $640 peak to $300 per unit at the time of writing.
Although it’s possible that Bitcoin Cash will gather more steam in the future, for now it’s Bitcoin, not its young upstart, that is seeing monumental growth, more than eight years on from its debut.
One other cryptocurrency that is in vogue, Ether, has also recovered from its valuation tumble in late July. It’s now reached close to $300 again itself, following a similar trend to Bitcoin in rises and falls that gradually trend upward. The trend could end up skyrocketing once again if the AMD Vega graphics cards turn out to be as good at mining it as they are predicted to be.