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Bitcoin is going to the Moon – again. Twelve years after its launch at the hands of pseudonymous coder Satoshi Nakamoto, the original cryptocurrency has been skyrocketing in price to unprecedented heights.
After starting 2020 at about $8,000 a unit, and slumping to just over $5,000 in March, the decentralised digital currency has been on a roll since mid-December. On December 16, exchanges priced bitcoin at $20,632, an all time high; since then, it has kept growing, amid new peaks and the occasional trough: at the time of writing, you can buy or sell one bitcoin for $41,000.
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We’ve been here before. Back in 2017, bitcoin – and crypto at large – grabbed headlines as the fledgling sector ballooned into a distinctive bubble (or, for the more sophisticated, tulip) shape. Fuelling that rise was a frenzy surrounding a new cryptocurrency-based crowdfunding method called initial coin offering or ICO, in which self-styled startups funded their future projects and apps by peddling to the public “tokens” of cryptocurrency, which would supposedly provide services once the projects were built.