Bitcoin Price Blasts Beyond $7k: Wall Street Is Watching
3rd November, 2017
Every time it seems the Bitcoin price couldn’t possibly climb any higher, it exceeds expectations. Earlier this year Bitcoin made headlines, with analysts predicting that it could go up to $3000. It did, much sooner than most people imagined. A few months later, $5000 and up became the norm. This week, a week-long surge culminated in a $7000 Bitcoin price spike on November 2. It is nearing $7300 as of this writing.
It’s not a stretch to take this is a sign that the cryptocurrency is becoming more and more integrated into mainstream finance. One need only look to its growing acceptance by Wall Street financiers and traders.
What triggered this week’s new record was an announcement, a day earlier, from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), the biggest options and futures exchange in the world. CME said it will begin trading in Bitcoin futures by the end of this year. To give you a sense of how big this is, the CME Group owns the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, as well as the Chicago Board of Trade, New York Mercantile Exchange, Kansas City Board of Trade, and is a part-owner in the Dow Jones Indices.
According to Bloomberg, the move by CME made Bitcoin “legit” in mainstream finance. Of course, CME was not the first mainstream player to take Bitcoin seriously. The Chicago Board Options Exchange said two months ago that it will trade Bitcoin options and futures. LedgerX opened its regulated Bitcoin futures market back in July. Such activity has stirred speculation of a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) emerging in the future. Whether this will happen, and what kind of impact it would have on the cryptocurrency market are subject to debate.
Bitcoin as asset and currency: Two sides of the same coin
Bitcoin has come to be seen by many as an asset in part because it can be stored securely and cheaply. It is also easy to transfer, so it has some attractive characteristics in that regard. But from where we sit, on the sidelines of trading and investing, Bitcoin looks too volatile to take either a short or long position. Buying and short selling, or buying and betting the Bitcoin price will rise even higher, or both, is not our thing.
At SpicePay, we believe currency is the role Bitcoin was born to play, in secure, everyday transactions. Those arguing the loudest against its use as currency often pointed to a lack of scalability. They charged that because it could not be scaled, transactions would continue to slow. But as we know, a civil war was waged over this issue, and it has been conquered.
In the meantime, Bitcoin has steadily become much more user-friendly, especially on SpicePay (not that we’re biased). It’s loaded with benefits for user and merchants. If you’re in the EU, you can even store it on an old-fashioned debit card. That’s about as familiar and easy as currency gets.
