(New: Bitcoin also rises above $ 39,000. Record high for Ether.)
FRANKFURT (dpa-AFX) – The rush for digital currencies like Bitcoin continues. On Thursday, the oldest and best-known cryptocurrency continued its record hunt, which was accompanied by strong exchange rate fluctuations. On the Bitstamp trading platform, a Bitcoin cost more than 39,000 US dollars for the first time. The high was around $ 39,587. The drastic rise in exchange rates is now also affecting other digital currencies and is causing the total market volume to rise above a trillion dollars for the first time.
Bitcoin has been chasing records for some time. Last year, with a price increase of more than 300 percent, it was one of the investments with the strongest price gains worldwide. Over the year, its course has even increased almost fivefold. Other digital currencies have also benefited from the boom recently. The second largest cryptocurrency by market share, Ether, rose to a record of around $ 1,277.
Above all, however, the massive rise in the price of Bitcoin has pushed the total value of all cryptocurrencies above the one trillion US dollar mark for the first time. The Internet portal Coinmarketcap showed a high of around $ 1.044 trillion on Thursday. The value refers to all currently existing digital currencies. Coinmarketcap currently has 8,200 of them.
Digital currencies such as Bitcoin continue to generate very mixed reactions. Followers see it not only as pioneering technologies such as the “blockchain” transaction chain that has become known through Bitcoin. Internet currencies are also used as an object of speculation and increasingly as a hedge against exchange rate fluctuations in other financial assets. Critics, on the other hand, warn of a financial bubble and complain, among other things, of the sometimes extreme price fluctuations of Bitcoin and other digital currencies. / Bgf / jsl / he
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