Yesterday bitcoin’s price touched a high of $11,650.46 and seemed poised to touch $12,000. Today it has reversed course as a bunch of East Coast economists came out against it. At 13:35 UTC, the price of a single bitcoin was $10,901.48, a drop of 4.68% from its price 24 hours ago. Among the top 10 most-traded cryptocurrencies, Monero continued its upward trajectory. The privacy-focused coin is up by 13% since last Friday on the back of investor enthusiasm about its impending hard fork. On a weekly basis, the coin is up by 33%. The hard fork, which is scheduled for March 14, will birth MoneroV. The new coin is expected to solve scaling problems for Monero and will have a limited, finite supply. This is unlike Monero, which has an unlimited supply. NEO continued to shed gains after criticisms about its blockchain’s performance. Still, the China-based coin is still up by 45.7% this year.
Transaction Volumes Decline For Bitcoin
The decline in bitcoin’s price occurred amid low transaction volumes for the cryptocurrency. According to research firm blockchain.info, transaction volume for bitcoin fell to a two-year low of 200,000 this past week. That’s exactly half of the overall transaction volume for bitcoin this past December. The slump in transaction volumes has corresponded with a decline in transaction fees and wait times. It could be due to two reasons: a cooling off of the intense volatility of the past few months or a return to a new normal. The rollout of the lightning network and SegWit initiatives, however, bodes well for a possible future spike in bitcoin’s price and volumes.
Harvard Economist Predicts $100 Price For Bitcoin
Thanks to its spectacular run up in the last couple of years, the range of predictions for bitcoin’s future price cuts a wide swathe. Count Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff among the pessimists. In an interview with CNBC, Rogoff said that it was more likely that bitcoin would be worth $100 than $100,000 a decade from now. “Basically, if you take away the possibility of money laundering and tax evasion, its actual uses as a transaction vehicle are very small,” he said. According to him, the trigger for bitcoin’s decline would be a global framework for regulation. But that will take time to develop as governments around the world want to see the technology grow, he said.
Rogoff’s remarks follow a post by another economist Nouriel Roubini criticizing blockchain, bitcoin’s underlying technology. He called blockchain, one of the “most overhyped technologies ever” and provided a number of reasons for his claim. For example, the transaction validation process for popular algorithms such as Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) is slow because it requires agreement from all nodes on a network. “The required storage space and computational power is substantially greater, and the latency higher, than in the case of a centralized application,” he writes.