Tech
The price of Bitcoin briefly surpasses $69,000, marking a new all-time high
March 5, 2024
By Joe Tidy and Liv McMahon, IT correspondent and technology reporter
The price of the world’s largest cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, briefly reached a new all-time high of more than $69,000.
It surpassed the previous record set in November 2021, although by 2022 Bitcoin’s value had fallen to $16,500.
The new price surge was spurred by US financial giants investing billions in buying bitcoin.
The cryptocurrency rose to around $69,200 shortly after 3pm GMT on Tuesday, before tumbling. At 21:00 GMT it was trading around $62,185.
According to cryptocurrency market data platform CoinMarketCap, the value of Bitcoin has increased by more than 50% in the past month.
Carol Alexander, a finance professor at the University of Sussex, said its price could surpass its new record, but warned that cryptocurrencies are “notoriously volatile.”
“Too often in the past the price collapse has been timed so that ordinary investors who bought Bitcoin during the bubble were the ones who lost out,” he told the BBC.
The new record represents another dramatic moment in Bitcoin’s turbulent history.
It was invented in 2009 by one or more people calling themselves Satoshi Nakamoto: their true identity remains a mystery.
Conceived as a means to create money for the Internet, its roots are in an anti-establishment ethos that encourages people to live free from the existing power structure of financial institutions and governments.
However, its new all-time high value was reached precisely because established companies invested billions of dollars to acquire it.
This was made possible thanks, in January 2024, to US regulators reluctantly approved several spot funds Bitcoin Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs).
This has allowed giant investment firms like Blackrock, Fidelity, and Grayscale to sell products based on the price of Bitcoin.
Overall, they purchased hundreds of thousands of bitcoins, rapidly increasing their value.
Professor Alexander told the BBC that these competitors “are attracting institutional investors into Bitcoin and are putting significant upward pressure on the price.”
But he added that Bitcoin’s “halving” event, expected in April, could also affect the cryptocurrency’s value.
“In the past, these events have been accompanied by price increases,” he said.
Wild fluctuations
For many Bitcoin holders, this will be a moment to celebrate, as their wealth will have increased significantly.
But history suggests they should be prepared for change.
Bitcoin’s value slumped to 18-month lows of nearly $20,000 in June 2022 as investors sought to cut ties with riskier investments amid a bleak global economic backdrop.
The price of the cryptocurrency collapsed further in the same year, when FTX – the huge cryptocurrency exchange founded by the so-called “crypto king” Sam Bankman-Fried – it collapsed into bankruptcy in November 2022.
Its highs and lows continued throughout 2023, but it managed to recover to above $40,000 towards the end of the year.
It’s not just companies and individual investors who are closely following these fluctuations.
In Central America, El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele has embraced cryptocurrency.
THE Bitcoin-loving leader has spent more than $100 million of his developing country’s public money to buy nearly 3,000 bitcoins in recent years.
His investment is now worth about 60% more than he paid for it. Although no public documents have been released on the details.