The price of bitcoin rebounded 16 percent on Friday after a week of price drops, in response to new fears of a Chinese government crackdown on the fledgling digital currency which sent it below $400 for the first time since November.
Bitcoin Price Bounces Back After China-Induced Selloff
Bitcoin rebounded above $400 on Friday, but it’s still down more than 60 percent from its high point.
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Jason Del Rey has been a business journalist for 15 years and has covered Amazon, Walmart, and the e-commerce industry for the last decade. He was a senior correspondent at Vox.
Bitcoin was trading at about $420 late Friday morning Eastern Time, after collapsing to $360 yesterday, according to the CoinDesk Bitcoin Price Index. The selloff earlier this week came as Chinese bitcoin exchanges, including BTCTrade.com, announced that they received notice that their banks would stop supporting bitcoin businesses next week.
Even with Friday’s rally, bitcoin is down about 50 percent over the last three months and more than 60 percent since it topped $1100 last year.
Still, a popular belief among bitcoin supporters is that while price volatility does need to decrease for mass consumer adoption to take hold, the media places too much value on it. Instead, they say, the disruption made possible by the decentralized network of computers through which bitcoin moves is much more important in the long run than the price of bitcoin itself.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
