Markets Weekly is a weekly column analyzing price movements in the global digital currency markets, and the technology’s use case as an asset class. Though the scaling debate remains in progress, bitcoin enjoyed both price stability and high trading volume in the seven days through 12:00 UTC on 11th March. Market participants traded more than 35m BTC during the seven days through 1:30 p.m. (EST), Bitcoinity figures reveal.
These trends were similar to the prior week , when bitcoin prices fell less than 1% and market participants traded more than 28m BTC.
Elsewhere, bitcoin prices crept higher between 12:00 UTC on 4th March and 12:00 UTC on 11th March, rising from $419.60 to $420.86, according to the CoinDesk USD Bitcoin Price Index (BPI). This represented a 0.2% gain.
The digital currency did experience some volatility during the week, however, as the community continued to debate whether the network was facing capacity issues.
Data from Statoshi.info shows that many data blocks this week were full to capacity with transactions, a move that industry businesses have asserted is the cause of customer complaints . Perhaps accordingly, the currency plunged to $393.18 by 16:00 (UTC) on 5th March, a 7% decline from 12:00 UTC on 4th March, but recovered quickly, rising to $408.90 at 15:00 UTC on 6th March. Bitcoin then broke above $410 at 11:00 UTC on 7th March, hitting $414.39 by 03:00 UTC by 8th March.
For the rest of the week, the digital currency’s price mostly fluctuated between $410 and $420. Blockchain concerns
While differing camps have proposed more than one way to solve the scaling debate, the bitcoin community has yet to embrace any particular solution. Currently, blocks can hold up to 1 MB worth of transactions, and more than one solution has been proposed to increase capacity.
This is a key issue for […]
