The price of Bitcoin took quite a leap this morning, and it managed to spike almost $300 in less than a minute.
This happened at precisely 1:00 UTC when BTC leaped from $6,466 to $6,745 during a single one-minute candle on Bitfinex, and the bitcoin price continued to increase from there, and it went above the $6,800 mark, peaking at $6,899 before settling back down.
Bitcoin’s surge might be related to BitMEX going offline
Early signs suggest that the price action which we have to admit came during a period of low0trading volume in the cryptomarkets may not be simply organic.
It may be related to BitMEX because it occurred at the exact moment when the crypto trading platform which handles billions of dollars worth of contracts on a daily basis went offline for its scheduled maintenance.
Shortly after, BitMEX was beginning to resume services, though it had not yet re-enabled trading. So, we still have to wait and see whether the market will sustain these gains throughout the early morning hours.
At the time of writing Bitcoin is trading in the green at $6,705.51 on CoinMarketCap.
the moment @BitMEXdotcom went offline pic.twitter.com/OxppDispgb
— Camelul (@camielul) August 22, 2018
Bitcoin has increased utility compared to gold
In other news, just recently Paul Krugman the famous crypto skeptic, recently addressed his views on Bitcoin and the blockchain.
He said that even if he is concerned that the Bitcoin mining process uses a lot of energy, he believes that BTC already has a more increased utility than gold.
“Gold is dead… Bitcoin has more utility than gold. There is some chance for Bitcoin to be valuable in the future.”
When he compared the utilities of Bitcoin with the ones of fiat currencies, he said that his primary problem is the cost of transactions that are used to transfer BTC.
He believes that if those fees could somehow be reduced, this would practically eliminate the central problem of the cryptosphere.