The first decentralized peer-to-peer payment system, bitcoin, has broken through the $10,000 mark on South Korea’s Bithumb, one of world’s biggest exchanges for cryptocurrencies. The price of bitcoin this year has jumped more than 10-fold. The digital currency is still unrecognized or regarded as an asset by most central banks. It started the year at below $1,000. Now, according to the PwC rating of the 100
largest companies, the turnover of all bitcoins is worth more than Citigroup or the economy of Qatar.Bitcoin is now facing legal recognition, and Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) is interested in listing futures in the cryptocurrency. The legal acceptance of virtual money, however, may limit bitcoin’s growth, warns Sergey Kostenko, an investment analyst at Global FX. READ MORE
