It seems that now is the time to be in Bitcoin, after prices surged in the last week. Over the past few days, Bitcoin rose past $5,400, setting an all time record for the cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin goes through the roof
It was thought that the highs of 2 September wouldn't be beaten for quite some time, but a seemingly endless October rally saw Bitcoin smash through the $5,000 barrier. If history has taught us anything, however, we should see a sell-off begin. The last time Bitcoin reached such heights, the sell-off turned into a downturn, thanks to China banning ICOs and cryptocurrency tradings.
Resilience
Despite that, the price of Bitcoin has shown remarkable resilience over the past few weeks and now stands at over $5,600. With Bitcoin accounting for more than 55% of cryptocurrency, its dominance looks set to continue in the coming weeks and months. In fact, leading cryptocurrency economist Tuur Demeester has predicted that Bitcoin will represent 60% of the cryptocurrency market within just three months.
Doubts over SegWit2x
It's thought that a factor in the huge rise in the price of Bitcoin is the doubts surrounding SegWit2x. Many traders believe that it will be executed in November. If, however, it is deployed, then there is still plenty of skepticism over whether the resulting blockchain will be able to compete with the Bitcoin network. A major indicator that SegWit2x will not be deployed in November came in the form of the mining pool F2Pool. After F2Pool became the first mining operation to withdraw their support for SegWit2x last week, many traders took it as an indication that other mining pools would follow suit, effectively killing SegWit2x before it could even get off the ground. On top of that, futures for SegWit2x have performed very poorly since they were introduced by Bitfinex a couple of weeks ago. Although it's still early days, traders look to have called it correctly so far.
