News
Bitcoin Price Briefly Surpasses $69,000, New All-Time High
March 5, 2024
By Joe Tidy and Liv McMahon, cyber correspondent and technology journalist
The price of the world’s largest cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, briefly hit a new all-time high of more than $69,000.
It surpassed the previous record set in November 2021 – even though by 2022, Bitcoin’s value had dropped to $16,500.
The new price surge was driven by US financial giants investing billions in buying bitcoins.
The cryptocurrency climbed to around $69,200 shortly after 1500 GMT on Tuesday before falling back. It was trading around $62,185 at 2100 GMT.
The value of Bitcoin has increased by more than 50% over the past month, according to cryptocurrency market data platform CoinMarketCap.
Carol Alexander, professor of finance at the University of Sussex, said its price could surpass its new record high, but warned that the cryptocurrency was “notoriously volatile”.
“Too often in the past, the price crash has been timed so that ordinary investors buying Bitcoin during the bubble are the ones who lose out,” she told the BBC.
This new record represents another dramatic moment in Bitcoin’s turbulent history.
It was invented in 2009 by one or more people calling themselves Satoshi Nakamoto – their true identities remain a mystery.
Conceived as a way to create money for the internet, its roots lie in an anti-establishment ethic encouraging people to live free from the existing power structure of financial institutions and governments.
However, its new record value is due precisely to the fact that these large companies invested billions of dollars to acquire it.
This was made possible because in January 2024, US regulators reluctantly approved several Bitcoin cash exchange-traded funds (ETFs).
This has allowed giant investment firms like Blackrock, Fidelity and Grayscale to sell products based on the price of Bitcoin.
Between them, they bought hundreds of thousands of bitcoins, rapidly increasing their value.
Professor Alexander told the BBC that these new entrants are “attracting institutional investors to Bitcoin and putting considerable upward pressure on the price”.
But she added that the Bitcoin “halving” event, which is expected to take place in April, could also influence the cryptocurrency’s value.
“In the past, these events have been accompanied by price increases,” she said.
Wild fluctuations
For many Bitcoin holders, this will be a moment of celebration, as their own wealth will have increased significantly.
But history shows that they should prepare for that to change.
Bitcoin’s value fell to nearly $20,000, its lowest level in 18 months, in June 2022 as investors sought to break ties with riskier investments amid a gloomy global economic outlook.
The price of the cryptocurrency fell further later that year when FTX – the massive cryptocurrency exchange founded by self-styled “King of Crypto” Sam Bankman-Fried – collapsed into bankruptcy in November 2022.
Its peaks and troughs continued throughout 2023, but it managed to recover to trade above $40,000 towards the end of the year.
It’s not just companies and individual investors who are closely following these fluctuations.
In Central America, El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele has embraced cryptocurrency.
THE A Bitcoin fan leader has spent more than $100 million of his developing country’s public money to buy nearly 3,000 bitcoins in recent years.
His investment is now worth about 60% more than he paid for it. However, no public documents have been released on the details.