The price of bitcoin fell again on trading Thursday (23/3/2021), even though one of the "actors" behind the skyrocketing cryptocurrency is back in action. Bitcoin touched an all-time high of US $ 61,780.63 / BTC on March 13. Compared to the position at the end of 2020 to that record, bitcoin price has skyrocketed by more than 113%.
However, after reaching this record, the price of bitcoin declined. In today's trade at 16:28 WIB bitcoin was trading in the range of US $ 52,583 / BTC, down 2.7%, reported Refinitiv data. Previously, it even fell 4.7% to US $ 51,500 / BTC.
Bitcoin Price (US $ / BTC)
This means that from an all-time high to today's low, the price of bitcoin has fallen by over US $ 10,000 or more than 16%.
The price of bitcoin began to shoot up sharply this year after being bought up by Tesla Inc. the electric car maker owned by the world's richest man Elon Musk.
Tesla has bought bitcoins worth US $ 1.5 billion or the equivalent of Rp. 21 trillion. Before the purchase was revealed in early February, Elon Musk in late January changed his Twitter bio to #bitcoin. Shortly after this action, the price of bitcoin shot up, and even higher when Tesla revealed that he had bought bitcoin.
Tesla also plans to start accepting payments in bitcoin for the purchase of its production vehicles while still subject to regulations in each country, which are still limited to date.
The discourse was finally realized, Elon Musk through his Twitter account said that now Tesla cars can be purchased with bitcoin.
"Now you can buy Tesla with Bitcoin," as quoted from Twitter @elonmusk, Wednesday (24/3/2021).
Currently buying Tesla with Bitcoin is valid in the United States (US) only. However, Elon Musk confirmed that payments with this popular cryptocurrency can be made outside the US this year.
What happened to the price of bitcoin?
Sluggish! On Wednesday's trading yesterday, bitcoin fell by almost 1%. Elon Musk's "magic" that made bitcoin prices skyrocket seemed to be disappearing, bitcoin was still continuing its downward trend.
Not only Elon Musk, bitcoin is still continuing even though in mid-March one of the giant banks in the United States (US), Morgan Stanley, in wealth management services, offered access to bitcoin to wealthy customers.
Morgan Stanley became the first major US bank to provide bitcoin services to its customers.
One of the reasons for the continued decline in bitcoin prices is due to profit taking by whales or individuals who have between 10,000 and 100,000 bitcoins sold.
As a result, the number of whales has decreased significantly, even to its lowest level in history. CryptoPotato reported earlier this year that there were 115 wallets that had more than 10,000 bitcoins. Meanwhile at this time, launching FX Street, the number of whales decreased to 89.
Business Insider, citing a weekly analysis from Glassnode, on Tuesday reported that whales had released 307,000 bitcoins since last December. Glassnode said bitcoin was finally reaching "euphoria heights" and the big players were starting to realize their profits.