After failing to breach the $10,000 mark, the price of Bitcoin has slumped, briefly breaking below the $9,000 mark. On Binance, the price fell as low as $8,950.
Bitcoin's price has since recovered to its current value of $9,090, but it's still touch and go.
The selloff started yesterday when 50 Bitcoin, mined during Bitcoin's first month of existence, was transferred. Rumors spread that the transaction may have been from a wallet owned by Satoshi Nakamoto, who invented Bitcoin. Since Nakamoto mined a huge supply of coins, were he or she to sell them, it could crash the market. When the news hit, the price of Bitcoin dropped $200, falling from $9,800 to $9,600 in half an hour.
Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao tweeted yesterday, "Feds print a few trillion, nothing happens. Someone (most likely NOT Satoshi) moves 40 early BTC, market panics."
Feds print a few trillion, nothing happens.
Someone (most likely NOT Satoshi) moves 40 early BTC, market panics.
😂
— CZ Binance 🔶🔶🔶 (@cz_binance) May 20, 2020
But the price drop hadn't finished just yet. It slid all the way to $9,300. In the hours that followed, the price rose back up to $9,500 but then stalled.
Today the prices have dropped again. At the moment, Bitcoin is on course for its biggest weekly decline since March, unless there's a sharp turnaround.
But there are other problems besides the price. As Decrypt reported, the Bitcoin network is slowing down as a result of the recent halving (when block rewards for miners were cut in half). Blocks are taking longer to be produced, transactions are taking longer to get into blocks, and fees are rising. These issues should be sorted within a matter of weeks—but will the price bounce back too?