Neither the multitude of Bitcoin forks, nor the increasing popularity of ‘altcoins’ seems to be damping the spirits of Bitcoin investors, as the world’s leading cryptocurrency seems to gaining in strength by the day. On Monday, the world’s most popular cryptocurrency inched ever-closer to the $10,000 mark, hitting a record high of $9,705 and attaining a market-cap over $162 billion. According to Brian Kelly, the founder and CEO of investment firm BKCM, the current bull run is almost entirely “retail driven”, meaning, individual investors are finally starting to take note of cryptocurrencies, possibly paving the way for them to become mainstream in the coming days.
On Monday, the world’s most popular cryptocurrency inched ever-closer to the $10,000 mark, hitting a record high of $9,705 and attaining a market-cap over $162 billion.
With the value of Bitcoin soaring in recent times, the largest bitcoin exchange in the U.S., Coinbase, reported adding about 100,000 accounts between Wednesday and Friday, taking their total to 13.1 million. However, all this exuberance about cryptocurrencies may be creating a dangerous bubble with the value of Bitcoin leapfrogging from around the $800 mark last January. According to experts and leading Wall Street investors, many of whom have been long-time skeptics, the fact that cryptocurencies are the unregulated Wild West of the 21st-century e-commerce landscape is what troubles them about the technology more than anything else.
One of the skeptics happens to be the ‘Oracle of Omaha’, Warren Buffet. The Billionaire investor was one of the first to predict the dotcom bubble burst back in the late nineties and has often expressed his reservations about the entire cryptocurrency landscape. In a recent interview to the U.S. media, he dismissed the current enthusiasm about Bitcoins as “a real bubble … I think it’s going to implode”. While Buffet’s warning will be dismissed by many as the rantings of a long-time Crypto skeptic, the recent surge has also made several Bitcoin enthusiasts question the legitimacy of the current situation.
According to a CNBC poll held last week, forty-three out of ninety-seven chief financial officers (CFOs) on the network’s Global CFO council said the cryptocurrency is “real but in a bubble”, while only 14% said that the currency is “still going higher”. 27.9% dismissed Bitcoin as a “fraud” outright. Yet others, like chief financial officer of Solvay, Karim Hajjar, believes that the “jury is still out on bitcoin”.
