New record for bitcoin on his birthday

The most famous cryptocurrency surpassed the $ 34,000 valuation mark on January 3, on this very date the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto released the system in 2009

It's been a year of almost continuous climb, the 2020 of bitcoin, which in less than nine months has multiplied its price by about six times, from a minimum of almost 5 thousand dollars (on March 17) to the 28,768 dollars with which it closed the year. To then indulge in a 12th birthday with a bang just three days later: on January 3, the most famous cryptocurrency reached $ 34,544, its highest peak ever. In its volatile nature, bitcoin lagged (Coindesk data) back below 30 thousand dollars, in the following 24 hours. Now the market cap is around 550 billion dollars (CoinmarketCap data), two thirds of the total of around 800 billion represented by all cryptocurrencies. As soon as December 22, the market capitalization of bitcoin was around $ 300 billion.

It was January 3, 2009 when the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto first released the blockchain-based system to the public which through a system data-mining certifies payment transactions from one user to another. The first quotation placed a dollar equal to 1,309.03 bitcoin, however today the purchase of bitcoin takes place with the tether, another cryptocurrency called "stablecoin", whose exchange rate is almost constant around one dollar.

Based on a principle of scarcity, bitcoin is a limited resource, in fact around 21 million will be produced by 2140 at an increasingly slower speed (so far 18.5 million have already been mined). This may explain the token's current valuation growth as central banks have opted for a massive injection of liquidity in the context of the pandemic crisis.

The current rally would be at least in part different from the feverish run-up of winter 2017, when from a peak of $ 19,700 it collapsed to just 3,500. Payment in cryptocurrency this year will be progressively introduced internationally by PayPal, which has already activated it in the United States for exchanges regulated by bitcoin, ethereum, litecoin and bitcoin cash. At the same time, several investors have been interested in bitcoin transactions, often compared by observers more to gold than to fiat currencies.