On Monday (December 16), according to data from CryptoCompare, between 18:20 UTC and 18:30 UTC, the Bitcoin price fell below the $7,000 level for the first time in three weeks.
Here is the 24-hour BTC-USD price chart:
At 18:20 UTC, Bitcoin was trading at $7,126.38. Within 10 minutes, Bitcoin had fallen to $6,945. By 19:20 UTC, the Bitcoin price had reached the intraday low of $6,914. This means that Bitcoin had lost almost 3% of its value in just one hour.
If we look at the Bitcoin price at individual crypto exchanges rather than the average price across a set of exchanges, things look even worse; for example, over at Coinbase, by 19:20 UTC, BTC-USD was trading below the $6,900 level ($6,884).
Since then, we have had a small bounce, and at the time of writing (20:10 UTC), Bitcoin is trading around $6,932.
Crypto analyst/developer Ivan Liljeqvist (@IvanOnTech) and the owner/host of the crypto-focused “Ivan On Tech” YouTube channel, had this to say about Bitcoin’s price volatility:
Bitcoin might seem like an insane and volatile investment.
But if you ignore the crazy peaks and focus on yearly lows, you see the steady amazing growth:
2011👉$0.29
2012👉$3.80
2013👉$12.77
2014👉$275.00
2015👉$152.40
2016👉$350.92
2017👉$751.34
2018👉$3,128.89
2019👉$3,322.19— Ivan on Tech (@IvanOnTech) December 16, 2019
As for what might be causing the price of Bitcoin to fall since reaching $12,913 back on June 26, according to a blog post (based on an excerpt from the Chainalysis 2020 Crypto Crime Report, which is coming out next month) published by Chainalysis earlier today, “the criminals behind the PlusToken Ponzi scheme could be driving down the price of Bitcoin when they liquidate their stolen funds via OTC brokers.”
And this is what crypto analyst/trader and macro economist Alex Krüger thinks about their onchain analysis:
Excellent analysis by Chainalysis. It indicates the Plustoken scam has cashed out ~25,000 BTC since mid April 2019.
That represents about 6% of miner issuance. It is thus reasonable to think Plustoken has been a *secondary* variable pushing price lower.https://t.co/3ud5xhsmPq
— Alex Krüger (@krugermacro) December 16, 2019
30%-40% of Plustoken selling activity preceded price increases, while the remainder preceded price drops. pic.twitter.com/n1JOMKJcXQ
— Alex Krüger (@krugermacro) December 16, 2019
However, he is not convinced that the statistical analysis done by Chainalysis shows a causal link between Plustoken “cashouts” and Bitcoin price drops:
While onchain analysis is excellent, the accompanying statistical analysis is nonsensical and doesn't prove their hypothesis – at all.
=> Showing how, after huobi transfers, “trade volume” correlates with volatility is similar to showing how lightning correlates with thunder. pic.twitter.com/g38T7jEBPo
— Alex Krüger (@krugermacro) December 17, 2019
Featured Image Credit: Photo via Pexels.com
