Governments and Banks Push Bitcoin Price to New Levels: SIDDHARTH DEVRAJ

Besides the global influx of new users, government wars and restrictions against Bitcoin appears to be toughening the resilience and character of the cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin has exhibited a very strong price character so far in 2017 despite a number of setbacks. This is expressed by the manner in which its price has always shown good strength in recovery.

Alena Vranova, co-founder of SatoshiLabs / TREZOR, says:

“All those setbacks, hurdles and government restrictions are a blessing, making Bitcoin more resilient. The fact that Bitcoin hit $1000 for the second time in its short history also strengthened its position even more and set expectations quite high for this year.”

Two factors supercharging Bitcoin value
Simon Dixon, BnkToTheFuture.com CEO, believes that Bitcoin’s continued strength as a global store of value has been supercharged by two factors in 2017.

Firstly, Dixon notes that banks and financial instructions around the globe waved the Blockchain flag throughout 2016 and many more are starting to realize that Blockchains are pretty useless without Bitcoin’s proof of work.

The result, according to Dixon has been a wave of Blockchain applications that are worse than their existing solutions and a realization that Bitcoin is actually the only interesting thing about Blockchain.

Secondly, Dixon says that governments are essentially subsidizing the growth of Bitcoin, driving people to it by waging war on their national cash supply and adding more and more friction to fiat money in their war on money laundering that is affecting everyday people that are not laundering anything.

“These two factors are driving more and more people to buy some Bitcoin and experience what it is like to own their own money,” concludes Dixon.

Bitcoin is conquering new levels
Michael Vogel, CEO of Netcoins, describes Bitcoin as having a breakout year in terms of new users and continued adoption on a global scale.

Vogel tells Cointelegraph that 2017 is proving to be a very exciting year for Bitcoin, despite having seen major regulatory uncertainties in China with some exchanges halting withdrawals.

Vogel explains:

“Speaking from my viewpoint at Netcoins, a large portion of our customer base continues to be new customers that are discovering Bitcoin for the first time and have made the decision to load up their new Bitcoin wallet. In fact, January was a record month for traffic at our Virtual Bitcoin ATMs.”

Vogel thinks that the overall upward trend in Bitcoin price is as a result of the influx of new users globally. This is because, despite hiccups and negative press, the global Bitcoin trading and transaction volumes continue to grow. This is reflected in the 2