Crypto’s Been Going Crazy; Here’s Why

By now we all know that crypto went on a true bull run last week, when Bitcoin broke above $13,500 for the first time since January 2018. With Bitcoin making up 61.5% of crypto’s total value, it was no surprise that the overall crypto market hit a 12-month high at the same time. Per Coinwatch.com, the total market cap of crypto peaked above $365 billion on June 26; it has since slipped to $316.50 billion. At this writing, BTC is trading at $11,075, and has a market cap of $196.21 billion.To make sense of everything, we’ll take a step back for a longer look. The three-month chart for BCT shows clearly that the coin has been on an upward trend since this past April 1, and equally clearly that this week’s volatility includes the steepest losses during that time.BTC 3-Month Price ChartBut BTC remains at 15-month highs, and the losses in recent days look like classic profit taking. The sharp peaks and valleys are reminiscent of Bitcoin’s chart pattern during the runup and dropdown from November 2017 to April 2018. So, volatility is baked into BTC, but we already knew that. As Forbes Magazine's Caitlin Long reminds us, Bitcoin is designed to present investors with a stable system, rather than stable prices.And this brings us to the second major point in to BTC’s recent price surge: as it rose in price, it attracted more miners as well as more buyers, and in blockchain, more miners means greater security. Bitcoin’s hashrate, the ...