As in the "crypto winter": Bitcoin falls to 80,000 US dollars
Just over a month ago, one Bitcoin cost around 110,000 US dollars. After a dramatic week, it is now down to just over 80,000 on Friday.
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The price of one Bitcoin has temporarily fallen below the USD 80,000 mark, and since its peak just over a month ago, the price has plummeted by more than 25 percent. In the past 24 hours alone, more than 7 percent of its value has been lost. At the beginning of the week, one Bitcoin was still worth over 96,000 US dollars, but since then the price has been on a clear downward trend. According to Bloomberg, the background to this is the expectation that US President Donald Trump is now really serious about imposing tariffs on products from Canada and Mexico. All major cryptocurrencies have been affected by the price slide, with Ethereum also losing 24% of its value recently. The last time something like this happened was during the "crypto winter", the financial news agency quotes an expert as saying.
Disappointed by Trump
Bitcoin rose to its previous record high of USD 109,356 on the day of Donald Trump's inauguration as US president on January 20. Since then, the price has fallen again almost continuously. Even before the Republican's election victory, the most important cryptocurrency was trading at USD 70,000, followed by a price rally. Many had hoped that Trump would return to office with regulations that would benefit the crypto industry. After all, it had previously financed his election campaign on a massive scale. In return, Trump announced that he would look into setting up a national reserve for Bitcoin & Co. as demanded by crypto fans. However, things have been quiet since then.
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The price of cryptocurrencies is also being depressed by the biggest crypto theft and biggest theft in history. At the end of last week, digital goods with a total value of 1.5 billion US dollars were stolen from the service provider Bybit. According to the FBI, cyber criminals from North Korea were responsible. Bybit itself has called on the industry to help in the attempt to recover the loot and has offered a reward of 10 percent for each secured tranche. In the first few days, stolen cryptocurrency worth 42 million US dollars was frozen. This is less than 3 percent of the loot, but Bybit believes that this underlines "the maturity and resilience of our ecosystem".
(mho)
