Bitcoin is higher for a second straight day on Tuesday, trading up 3% at $1072 per coin as of 7:28 a.m. ET. The tw0-day win streak has tacked on about 13% and follows a Wall Street Journal report out over the weekend suggesting the cryptocurrency's developers are threatening to set up a “hard fork,” or alternative marketplace for Bitcoin. That platform would be incompatible with the current platform, thus creating a split and two versions of the currency. That news sent bitcoin crashing 20% over the weekend to about $950 a coin, its weakest since January.
2017 has been a volatile year for the cryptocurrency.
It gained 20% in the first week of the year after soaring 120% in 2016 to become the top-performing currency for the second year in a row.
Bitcoin then crashed 35% on news that China was going to consider clamping down on trading.
But managed to rip higher by more than 50% even in the face of several pieces of bad news.
First, China's biggest bitcoin exchanges said they were going to start charging a 0.2% fee on all transactions (previously there was no fee). Then, China's biggest exchanges said they were going to block withdrawals from trading accounts.
In the face of all of that, bitcoin put in a record high of $1,327 a coin on March 10 as traders piled in ahead of the US Securities and Exchange Commission's ruling on the Winklevoss twins' bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF). That day, the SEC denied the ETF, sending the price crashing by 16%. However, bitcoin managed to quickly recover those losses.
There are two more SEC rulings on the way, the next being on March 30. Neither one is expected to pass.
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March 21, 2017 at 04:31PM
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