Touching $34,000: Bitcoin trades near all-time high

Bitcoin prices have been trading north of $33,000 since this afternoon, fluctuating close to the record level of more than $34,000 they reached earlier this month.

First launched in 2009 as a digital currency, Bitcoin was for a while used as digital money on the fringes of the economy.

It has since become mainstream. Today, it’s used almost exclusively as a kind of “digital gold”. That is to say, a scarce digital asset.

In response to the risk of economic collapse due to COVID, governments around the world have flooded global markets with money created by central banks, in order to boost spending and help save the economy.

“As we’ve repeatedly seen, particularly in the absence of other technical trading data, the BTC price is attracted to round numbers,” the MD of Digital Capital Management Tim Enneking told Forbes.

“Now that the price is so high, it’s [in the] ten thousands, rather than the individual thousands, which are receiving this sort of attention. That’s clearly true at $30k and it will probably be even more true at $40k.”