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In the last 24 hours, bitcoin has left its erstwhile rivals in the dust, gaining 25% in value while the others have fallen anywhere from 3% to 10%.
What exactly is going on here? As with many things related to bitcoin, it’s hard to know for sure. Even though quants have long been poring over price movements to find correlations between bitcoin and other assets—such as those that exist between equities and Treasuries or airline stocks and oil prices —few predictable patterns have emerged.
Photograph by Thomas Trutschel — Photothek via Getty Images / photomontage Fortune
One guess is that speculators are deciding that even the most popular substitutes will not hold value, and are deciding they want bitcoin or nothing.
As Charlie Lee, the creator of LiteCoin (currently number 7 on the list above) and a good source for digital currency insights, declared on, bitcoin is clearly “the king of crypto.”