The Bitcoin (BTC) price drops to the 3-month lowest price
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Bitcoin fell to a low level of three months late Thursday, amid nervousness over tighter US monetary policy and an internet shutdown in Kazakhstan, the world’s second largest bitcoin mining center.
The price of bitcoin fell to $ 41[ads1],222.41 just after 9 pm ET on Thursday, reaching its lowest level since September 29, according to data from Coin Metrics. It was last traded down 0.6% at a price of $ 42,391.20 on Friday morning.
The world’s largest cryptocurrency began to fall earlier this week after the minutes of the Federal Reserve’s December meeting indicated that the US Federal Reserve would repel the stimulus from the pandemic.
The hawkish comments triggered a sale in global stock markets that spread to cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin bulls often describe it as an asset that is not correlated with traditional financial markets, but experts have noticed increasing parallels in the price movements of bitcoin and stocks.
Other digital currencies continued to slide on Friday, with ethereum falling 2.3% and solana falling 4.7%.
Another news that weighs on cryptocurrency prices is Kazakhstan’s presidential move to shut down the internet service following deadly protests against the government.
The Central Asian country accounts for 18% of the bitcoin network’s processing power, according to the Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance. Many crypto miners fled China to neighboring Kazakhstan because of Beijing’s ban on virtual currency extraction.
Kazakhstan’s Internet shutdown took as much as 15% of its network offline, according to some estimates.
Bitcoin’s computing power “is not directly correlated with the price of Bitcoin, but it does give an indication of the network’s security, so a fall could scare investors in the short term,” said Marcus Sotiriou, an analyst at UK broker GlobalBlock. in a note Thursday.
– CNBC’s Mackenzie Sigalos contributed to this report
