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Bitcoin prices fall to lowest in months

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4 years ago

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The massive Central Asian country has been hit with political unrest this week, as citizens took to the streets to protest against rising fuel prices. Fatal violence followed as demonstrators – which the country’s leaders paint as “rioters” – seized buildings in the largest city, Almaty.

Kazakhstan is thought to process nearly a fifth of all Bitcoin “mining”, as the process is called, due to its usually cheap electricity. And an internet shut-down earlier this week appeared to hit the processing power of the entire Bitcoin network.

  • Bitcoin started the week at a price above $47,000 per coin
  • That began to slip by mid-week to around $46,000
  • On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve minutes were released
  • By Thursday, the price fell sharply to around $42,000
  • It hit a low of nearly $41,000 at one point on Thursday before recovering slightly

The dip means Bitcoin has hit its lowest price since September 2020, down from a November peak of more than $60,000.

Other crypto-currencies have also seen price falls. Ethereum saw its value drop by more than 4% in 24 hours, from approximately $3,800 to under $3,200.

Matthew Dibb from Singapore-based crypto-company Stack Funds told Reuters news agency: “We are seeing broad risk-off sentiment across all markets currently, as inflationary concerns and rate hikes appear to be at the forefront of speculators’ minds.”

He also warned that “there is risk of a retreat back to the mid-30s on the short term”.

Crypto-currencies, and particularly Bitcoin, continue to face criticism.

The Mozilla Foundation – the group which makes the Firefox web browser among other open-source software projects – announced it would no longer accept crypto-currency donations after pushback from users.

The group has accepted crypto-currency donations for years, but a recent tweet reminding people of that fact led to an angry response, as the digital currency’s energy use and unregulated nature continue to be controversial among many critics.



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