Bitcoin nears $10,000 as change looms for crypto mining
Halving occurs on May 12
Draper Associates founding partner Tim Draper was an early investor in Bitcoin and he believes millennials should jump in, too.
Bitcoin is nearing the $10,000 level on Friday as traders brace for the upcoming halving event.
The cryptocurrency climbed as high as $9,996 a coin, its highest since February, before paring some of its gains. Bitcoin was trading up 6.35 percent at $9,890 on Friday morning, according to CoinMarketCap.com, and has gained 36 percent so far this year.
“The best profit-maximizing strategy is to own the fastest horse,” legendary investor Paul Tudor Jones wrote in a recent note to clients, according to Bloomberg, adding that his Tudor BVI may own as much as a low single-digit percentage of its assets in bitcoin futures. “If I am forced to forecast, my bet is it will be bitcoin.”
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Halving, which occurs about every four years and will happen on May 12, reduces the amount of bitcoin mined in each transaction by 50 percent. The so-called mining that generates bitcoin involves algorithmic verification of deals in a digital open-source ledger known as blockchain. More than 18 million of the 21 million bitcoin available have already been mined.
Bitcoin prices have benefitted in early 2020 as central banks all over the world printed money to combat the economic damage caused by COVID-19. Jones calculates that $3.9 trillion, or 6.6 percent of global economic output, has been printed since February.
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“We are witnessing the Great Monetary Inflation -- an unprecedented expansion of every form of money unlike anything the developed world has ever seen,” Jones wrote.
Not all legendary investors are bitcoin believers.
Warren Buffett has been a staunch critic of the cryptocurrency, recently saying, “You can’t do anything with it except sell it to somebody else.”
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Despite bitcoin’s strong start to 2020, the cryptocurrency has yet to reclaim its 2017 high of nearly $20,000, a peak followed by a sharp selloff to $3,400 that led to increased government scrutiny.