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Bitcoin nears record $100bn value

bitcoin

Bitcoin

The world’s most prominent digital currency was on track to mark a fresh milestone on Friday, with bitcoin rallying and putting the cyber currency in position to hit a total market value of around $100bn.

An online business journal, Marketwatch.com, reported that such a valuation would place the number one cryptographic currency above or on par with blue-chip companies on the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, +0.57 per cent like United Technologies Corp UTX, +1.00 per cent with a market value at $96bn, American Express Co AXP, +0.43 per cent at $82bn, Caterpillar Inc CAT, +0.44 per cent at $77bn and Travelers Cos Inc TRV, -0.29 per cent at $36bn.

The report stated that it was questionable to draw value parallels between the asset and more traditional companies, but it highlighted the stratospheric rise of bitcoin BTCUSD, +4.49 per cent, which did not exist a decade ago.

A single bitcoin also broke above a milestone of $6,000, reaching an intraday high of $6,003.81 on Friday afternoon, according to research and data site CoinDesk.com.

Bitcoin also boasted a market value of roughly $99.7bn, according to data site Coinmarketcap.com.

The move came just as the Dow cleared its own psychologically important level of 23,000 on Wednesday.

The Dow has enjoyed an impressive run-up of 17 per cent year to date, the S&P 500 index SPX, +0.45 per cent has climbed nearly 15 per cent so far this year, while the Nasdaq Composite Index COMP, +0.40 per cent has charged up more than 23 per cent thus far in 2017.

However, those paper gains pale in comparison with bitcoin’s run-up. The cyber unit had surged a mind-numbing 520 per cent over the past nine months from $968.23 on December31, 2016.

The Managing Director at the UK’s eToro, a trading platform, Iqbal Gandham, said continued buying in bitcoin ahead of October that would create another version of bitcoin was helping to stimulate investment.

He also stated that the so-called Bitcoin Gold, designed to address challenges mining for bitcoin using computers to solve complex problems, would be launched on October 25.

Then on November 18, bitcoin will face a second version of Segregation Witness, or SegWit2x.

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