Bitcoin on Sunday climbed back to surpass the psychological $10,000 per bitcoin mark. The last time it was above that mark was on September 23, 2019, as per CoinMarketCap. However, experts believe that prices will increase further to a higher level. “Nothing can stop me, I’m all the way up! Slow and steady wins the race. Let’s take the staircase up to #bitcoin $20k,” Co-founder and CEO at BitMEX tweeted. “Bitcoin just hit $10,000. I still think that Bitcoin will hit $100,000 by the end of December 2021. Fixed supply. Increasing demand. Time will tell,” tweeted Morgan Creek Digital Co-founder and Partner Michaël van de Poppe. Bitcoin in Indian currency is currently priced at Rs 7.25 lakh per bitcoin.
The increase in bitcoin value is perhaps because of the upcoming bitcoin halving event in May this year as the new bitcoin that flows in the market every year will be declining in number leading to the lesser supply of bitcoin and higher prices. There are only 21 million bitcoins that can be mined while around 18 million of them have been mined. The halving event will “cut its supply further to a rate of around 1.7 per cent per annum,” according to Cointelegraph.
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In India, during the Supreme Court hearing last, the Reserve Bank of India said that cryptocurrency is not banned in India and that it only fenced the regulated entities such as banks from risks involved in dealing with trading cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin.com reported. The Central bank had in 2018 announced banking restrictions on all financial institutions from offering services to cryptocurrency exchanges. Minister of State Finance Anurag Thakur had also last year in July informed in Rajya Sabha that “Cryptocurrency can be used for secret and illegal activities, but there is no data to corroborate that it is primarily being used for such activities.”