No stopping the bitcoin train it seems
Bitcoin was on the backfoot to start the day and threatened a third consecutive daily loss - which would be the first since September.
Nope, not gonna happen it seems.
The sharp drop earlier today it seems was caused by news that Coinbase - one of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchanges - decided to open up its doors to bitcoin cash trading. Speculation is that is has caused a shift from users in bitcoin to that of bitcoin cash.
However, after going live for only four minutes (via its GDAX exchange), Coinbase halted trading of bitcoin cash. It will only reopen trading in bitcoin cash at 1700 GMT later. Apparently, there is some case of insider trading ahead of its announcement - and that caused significant volatility in the price where the order book showed that bitcoin cash hit a high of $9,500.
That's a severe discrepancy from most other exchanges, which values bitcoin cash at about $3,400 (based on coinmarketcap.com).
When the Bitcoin "crash" happened earlier in the day, Gemini - the exchange which works with the CBOE on its futures trading - said that they couldn't process transactions due to problems on the blockchain related.
It just seems that whenever things are going bad, people are having a hard time getting out. Remember yesterday when bitcoin.com co-founder Emil Oldenburg said it took him 12 hours to process the selling of his bitcoins?
He labelled them "virtually unusable" and switched to bitcoin cash instead. That probably raised a few eyebrows and turned some heads. And with Coinbase now also starting to offer bitcoin cash instead, you have to wonder whether more people are going to ponder upon the issue.
