Cryptocurrencies plunged on Friday, with bitcoin at one point sliding below $8,000 and headed for its biggest weekly loss since December 2013, amid worries about a regulatory clampdown globally
The currencies have come off their lows but analysts said the sell-off was probably not over.
This week’s slump brought the total market value of cryptocurrencies down to around $400 billion, half the high it reached in January, according to industry tracker Coinmarketcap.com. The market value of cryptocurrencies is calculated by multiplying the number of digital coins in existence by their price, although many question whether that is the right way to value them.
Bitcoin, the biggest and best-known cryptocurrency, fell as much as 15 percent on Friday to a two-month low of $7,625 on the Luxembourg-based Bitstamp exchange BTC=BSP. It clawed back some losses and was down around 5.6 percent at $8,498 in late New York trading.
The virtual currency is down by close to 25 percent this week and almost 40 percent in 2018. It surged more than 1,000 percent though in 2017.
I have a theory about this late string of sells offs. I could be wrong but im beginning to wonder if its less about Govt crackdowns and more about currency manipulation from individuals owning large swaths of the currencies. One possibility could be the HYIP scams and ICO scams, its funny how after sites like Laser Online or Hexabot shut down, scamming thousands of people out of their money, there were major buy ups all the coins. Just saying... the price of BTC got to nearly $20K USD. Notably, there is now a pattern in almost all top 100 cryptos on Coin Market Cap that nearly every coin seems to follow. Every 3 or 4 days til about a week, the prices rise up on most of the coins, then theres a sell off, people then follow suit and sell in panic, then theres about a 20% or so buy up, and a big sell off again. This cant be all the people of the world buy up the same coins and selling them off, over and over again. Maybe Im crazy or paranoid. I just dont think Govt FUD is really underlying reason, it may be a part of it to some extent, but after reading and researching on this im beginning to think its more manipulation of the markets.
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