For months, the Bitcoin was only worth about $3,000. Now the price has shot up again to 8000 dollars within a few weeks. Who buys Bitcoins, enters however further a large risk: If a major investor sells, the price can suddenly collapse.
Perhaps one should look at the matter from a long-term perspective in order to grasp all the lunacy. Nine years ago, a man named Laszlo Hanyecz bought two pizzas. Admittedly, that’s far from madness. But anyone who knows that Hanyecz paid 10,000 Bitcoins for it is likely to shudder. At that time they were peanuts, but today the Bitcoin sum would be worth 80 million dollars. 80 million dollars for two pizzas? “Thinking like that isn’t really good for me,” Hanyecz said on US television.
The pizza bill shows, however: The Bitcoin seems to have risen from the dead. The Bitcoin enthusiasts had long imagined themselves in a phase they called “crypto-winter”. A phase in which the crypto currency remained frozen in the price cellar around 3000 dollars. Now, however, thaw seems to have set in: Especially in the past weeks the price has shot up – to almost 8000 dollars in the meantime. The first Bitcoin fans are already murmuring about a second digital gold rush.
There are fewer and fewer ATMs in Germany
The decline is mainly felt by people in rural areas: the less a machine is used, the more expensive it becomes for the bank.
If you want to understand the current rise in prices, you have to look where you started. That was on 2 April of this year, in the early hours of the European morning, to be exact. In just a few minutes, the Bitcoin price shot up, investors were surprised. Crypto expert Oliver von Landsberg-Sadie is convinced that a single buyer placed an order for a total of 100 million dollars on three major trading platforms for digital currencies.
For many investors, the $5,000 mark was a kind of invisible barrier. From the beginning of May onwards, they no longer knew how to hold, in just three weeks the Bitcoin first rose above the $6,000 mark, then above the $7,000 mark and a few days ago even above the $8,000 mark. Experts attribute this to a fundamental change: digital coins are no longer just an obscure anarchic dream, but are increasingly arriving in the real world. In the United States, both the organic supermarket chain Whole Foods and Starbucks are now accepting the digital motto.
“This naturally increases consumer confidence in Bitcoin,” says crypto professor Gilbert Fridgen of Bayreuth University.
In the Bitcoin network there are no institutions such as banks.
In addition, one of the world’s largest asset managers, Fidelity, now wants to bring Bitcoin into the financial establishment. The company has announced that it will buy Bitcoin in the future at least for professional clients such as asset managers or hedge funds. Many crypto investors hope that this announcement could flush billions into their market. Another explanation for the rising price could lie densely woven into Bitcoin’s digital network, its technical foundation: so-called prospectors maintain the digital cash book of all remittances at Bitcoin with large computer parks, for which they receive Bitcoin’s reward as a reward.
After all, there are no institutions like banks in the Bitcoin network that could take care of the transactions. “However, the reward for the miners is halved from time to time,” says crypto expert Demelza Hays from the University of Liechtenstein. This built-in brake in the system is intended to prevent the amount of Bitcoin from exploding because everyone is digging wildly. But it also means that the supply of new Bitcoins will not grow as fast as before, and Bitcoin will feel scarcer. “In the past, this has pushed the price a little more than a year ahead,” says Hays.
The next halving is scheduled for May 2020. Although Bitcoin is now back in the headlines, private investors should be cautious. A major investor is said to have sold Bitcoins worth less than $40 million on Friday. This, however, caused the price to drop by almost 2000 dollars for hours. At the Bitcoin market this is normal. The connoisseurs then always call out “whale alarm”, because this is what investors with particularly large Bitcoin stocks are called. “That still gives it a bland aftertaste,” says expert Timo Emden of Emden Research. It should be a warning to private investors.