Bitcoin hits a high of $8,000

Bitcoin has begun to get over their tumultuous period by topping out at a massive $8,020 on Bitfinex before settling at $7,900. Not that long ago, the implementation of the SegWit2x hard fork was pulled which caused the price to rise to $7,800. However, within just an hour, the price had ended up in a free fall. Within a couple of days, Bitcoin had dropped to a low of $5,500, whilst Bitcoin Cash had started on an upwards trajectory, hitting $2,600. In this period, a number of Bitcoin’s miners had transferred to Bitcoin Cash causing the number of pending transactions to soar to well over 135,000. The situation wasn’t looking good. Bitcoin had just put the only near-term solution to their scalability crisis on hold. SegWit was adopted back in August, but it will take time to prove its worth as the providers of digital wallets must include the feature and owners of digital currencies must opt to use it. The Lightning Network is the long-term solution to the scalability problem, however, it is still in testing and is certainly not ready for implementation across the entire blockchain yet. It isn’t all bad news, however. As Bitcoin Cash dropped from its high, the miners that transferred begun coming back to Bitcoin, meaning the backlog of transactions begun to clear. This wasn’t the end of the good news for Bitcoin. The Man Group, a British hedge fund, controls over $100bn in funds and has announced that once CME’s futures market launches, they will begin trading in Bitcoin. Just after this announcement, the payments app Square made one of their own: they are going to fully integrate Bitcoin into their payments platform. Following their announcement, Square’s capital grew from $15bn to $16bn, so Wall Street is just as happy with this development as the wider cryptocurrency community is.