{"id":215427,"date":"2017-12-08T07:25:26","date_gmt":"2017-12-08T05:25:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=215427"},"modified":"2017-12-08T07:28:48","modified_gmt":"2017-12-08T05:28:48","slug":"bitcoin-surges-past-16000","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/banking\/215427\/bitcoin-surges-past-16000\/","title":{"rendered":"Bitcoin surges past $16,000"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Bitcoin surged past $16,000 for the first time on Thursday, with frenzied demand to trade the cryptocurrency buckling one of the largest exchanges just days before the first US futures contracts begin trading.<\/p>\n

Bitcoin\u2019s rally of more than $3,000 in the past 24 hours continues to defy its legions of skeptics, as mainstream demand for the world\u2019s largest cryptocurrency explodes. Investors flocking to open new accounts or place orders Thursday left Coinbase, the largest US exchange, warning of outages and slow transactions.<\/p>\n

Trezor, a wallet service, tweeted that it\u2019s having \u201cminor issues\u201d with its servers, while Bitfinex, the largest bitcoin exchange in the world, said on Twitter that it has been under a denial of service attack for several days and that it recently got worse.<\/p>\n

Bitcoin listed at $16,395 as of 1:15 pm in Bloomberg pricing that is a composite of exchanges.\u00a0That takes its rally this year past 1.500% and its market capitalisation is now at $274 billion. On Thursday it topped out at $16,777.08 after starting the day at $13,363.25.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is irrational exuberance,\u201d Royal Bank of Scotland Chairman Howard John Davies said in an interview on Bloomberg TV on Thursday. \u201cThis is a very, very unusual market, that shows we\u2019re not in a normal two-way trading market.\u201d<\/p>\n

Daily price swings of that magnitude and weakness at the exchanges underscored concerns raised Wednesday by\u00a0some of the world\u2019s biggest brokerages, which told regulators the contracts have been rushed to market without enough due diligence.<\/p>\n

The new bitcoin derivatives products are slated to begin trading this month and are expected to boost mainstream demand.\u00a0On a day such as Thursday, trading would pause under proposed daily price-swing limitations.<\/p>\n

The slowdown on exchanges also highlighted the disparate pricing that can occur. The surging demand on Coinbase sent prices as high as $19,697 at 11:23 am, higher by more than $3,000 than other exchanges.<\/p>\n

Coinbase added at least 300,000 users since just before the Thanksgiving holiday. The company had 13.3 million users as of Nov. 26, up from 13 million on Nov. 22 and 10.6 million two months ago.<\/p>\n

Davies agreed with the brokerages\u2019 concerns that exchanges which are set to offer bitcoin futures and options have failed to get enough feedback from market participants on margin levels, trading limits, stress tests and clearing. Those warnings were laid out in an open letter via the Futures Industry Association on Wednesday.<\/p>\n

Cboe Global Markets Inc. has said it will start trading bitcoin futures on Dec. 10, while CME Group Inc\u2019s contracts are set to debut on Dec. 18. Nasdaq Inc is planning to offer futures in 2018, according to a person familiar with the matter.<\/p>\n

Cantor Fitzgerald LP\u2019s Cantor Exchange is creating a bitcoin derivative, and startup LedgerX already offers options.<\/p>\n

ASX Ltd,\u00a0the main exchange operator for equities and derivatives in Australia, on Thursday said it will start using blockchain, the technology that underlies bitcoin, to process equity transactions. The digital currency also got a boost from a successful test of a technology that will attempt to ease congestion in purchases of the digital currency.<\/p>\n

Lightning Network, as the technology is known, was conceived to move some transactions away from the blockchain, by allowing buyers and sellers to transact privately and later broadcast their activity to the public network.<\/p>\n

The price of bitcoin cash fell on the news, slumping 9.1% to $1,342.86, according to prices on coinmarketcap.com. The cryptocurrency rival offers a separate solution to bitcoin\u2019s congestion issue.<\/p>\n

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Read: $60 million worth of bitcoin stolen in NiceHash hack<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bitcoin surged past $16,000 for the first time on Thursday, with frenzied demand to trade the cryptocurrency buckling one of the largest exchanges just days before the first U.S. futures contracts begin trading.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":194070,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[961],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-215427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-banking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215427","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=215427"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215427\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":215433,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215427\/revisions\/215433"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/194070"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=215427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=215427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=215427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}