Gold bug Peter Schiff has tweeted out that bitcoin hodlers can “take comfort” that BTC isn’t the worst performing asset of the decade so far, as oil is failing behind the flagship cryptocurrency.
Schiff’s tweet came at a time in which the price of bitcoin dropped below the $6,000 amid a massive cryptocurrency sell off that saw BTC’s price drop over 25% in only 24 hours. At press time bitcoin has seemingly started to recover, and is trading at $6,095, falling 21% in said period.
Other top cryptocurrencies are down anywhere between 20% and 35%, with Bitcoin SV, a fork of the Bitcoin Cash blockchain, seeing the worst performance dropping 35.5% to $121. Ethereum, the second-largest altcoin by market capitalization, is down nearly 27% to trade at $139.
Source: CryptoCompare
The sell-off came shortly after U.S. President Donald Trump addressed the people of the United States from the White House’s Oval Office, and revealed he was suspending travel from Europe to the U.S.
Moreover, the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 a pandemic, which further saw the top equity indices in the U.S. drop. These entered bear market territory for the first time in a decade this week, and are in today’s trading session dropping: the S&P 500 is down 7.7%, while the Nasdaq is down 7.6% and the Dow 30 is down 8.7%.
As #Bitcoin crashes below $6K, down almost 20% this year, hodlers can take comfort in Bitcoin not being the worst performing asset of the decade. For now, that distinction belongs to oil, which is down by 50%. But at the rate Bitcoin is falling this comfort may not last long.
— Peter Schiff (@PeterSchiff) March 12, 2020
Schiff pointed out, however, that oil is performing even worse than the flagship cryptocurrency. The price of the commodity plunged this year after Russia and Saudi Arabia – two of the biggest producers in the world – announced they would abandon OPEC production quotas and increase production, at a time in which demand has been suffering over the coronavirus outbreak.
As a result, oil is down over 50% so far this year as Saudi Arabia has declared it would cut its official selling prices for April by between $6 and $8 per barrel, while raising production to a record-high of 12 million barrels per day.
In response to his tweet, some pointed out that while gold did go up over the last few weeks, in today’s trading session it’s down by over 4%. In today’s sell-off, the crypto market has already lost $50 billion.
Featured image by Aleksi Räisä on Unsplash.
