Volatile Bitcoin takes a dive

The volatility of cyber currencies, now in wide use in the online gambling industry, was dramatically illustrated Friday as Bitcoin prices plunged over 30 percent, triggering a domino-effect among other crypto-currencies available on the unregulated market.

The Telegraph newspaper reported that Coinbase, a major cyber currency exchange, has temporarily disabled buying amid a massive sell-off following Bitcoin’s price plunge.

“Due to today’s high traffic, buys and sells may be temporarily offline,” the exchange informed its users Friday. “We’re working on restoring full availability as soon as possible.”

The epic Bitcoin dive came after the cyber currency topped $20,000 – an all-time record – last Sunday; by Friday morning it had tumbled down to $12,560.

Techcrunch reported that the losses have been severe, commenting that the price plunge represented the highest percentage loss of value that bitcoin has seen this year. Other Friday free falls in the crypto-currency market included Ethereum (down 20 percent), Bitcoin Cash (down 30 percent), Litecoin (down 21 percent).

The cryptocurrency was valued at just $998 on January 1 2017.

When we went to press Saturday morning analysts were still debating on the safety of the cyber currency, with the more pessimistic suggesting the crash could herald the bursting of the Bitcoin bubble.

Others opined that the virtual currency was on the cusp of a bear market, whilst some took a more bullish view, pointing to the historical volatility of the decade-old currency and speculating that short term speculators were bugging out, but that many investors in it for the long haul were still in positive ROI territory and would remain in the market.

“We see the exit of short term speculators and we have seen it before. The fundamentals are still in place and there is no reason why the bitcoin ecosystem should not continue to develop,” one analyst commented.

Despite plenty of opinion and speculation, no one seemed to be able to identify a specific and credible reason for the sudden panic.