Back in the summer of 2015, one tracked the euphoria of the Chinese stock market bubble by the number, usually in the hundreds of thousands, of new brokerage accounts that were opened on any one given day.
And while that bubble has long since burst, the tradition of measuring new account openings has remained, and nowhere more so than in the biggest momentum instruement of the day, bitcoin.
Following a 7x increase in the price of bitcoin this year alone, which earlier today topped $7,000 for the first time ever (before sliding as much as $600) the broader public is now truly on board, and as one of the world’s biggest US cryptocurrency exchanges reports in its daily usage update, there were 11.9 million Coinbase users as of November 1, shortly after the CME announced it would introduce bitcoin futures by the end of 2017.
This number is notable because according to data collected by Alistair Milne, an investor in the Atlanta Digital Currency fund…
Coinbase added 100,000 users in the past 24hrs
Data: https://t.co/R9B63J2d6Q#bitcoin— Alistair Milne (@alistairmilne) November 2, 2017
… the number of users was 11.8 million yesterady, meaning that in one day Coinbase added a record 100,000 users, i.e., bitcoin traders.
Such a parabolic shift into bitcoin will likely raise some eyebrows, not least because as Bloomberg reports, Coinbase’s GDAX platform drew scrutiny from the CFTC last month over the June 21 flash crash that erased most of the value of ether, the second-largest cryptocurrency, in a matter of milliseconds.
Another consideration: Fundstrat’s Tom Lee, who has previously called for bitcoin to hit $6,000 by the middle of 2018 and $25,000 by 2022, today turned cautious after the recent rally “on contemporaneous fundamentals.” The uberbitcoinbull says the 60% surge in the past month to over $7,000 is a result of multiple factors, including the CME announcement to offer bitcoin futures and Amazon acquiring crypto domains. As a result he recommends waiting for a pullback, and buying bitcoin in the $5,500 range. He is less concerned about the long-run, however, and sees the cryptocurrency hitting $25,000 by 2022.
Ironically, it was none other than Lloyd Blankfein who had some interesting observations on the value of bitcoin. Speaking to Bloomberg today, the Goldman CEO said that he while he doesn’t hold any investments in the digital coin, he can see a world in which bitcoin is a form of currency.
“I read a lot of history, and I know that once upon a time, a coin was worth $5 if it had $5 worth of gold in it,” Blankfein said in an interview Thursday with Bloomberg TV. “Now we have paper that is just backed by fiat…Maybe in the new world, something gets backed by consensus.”
“I’ve learned over the years that there’s a lot of things that workout pretty well that I don’t love,” he said today. Bitcoin certainly has been doing well in 2017, rising more than 600 percent since the start of the year and surpassing $7,000 for the first time.
“I don’t have an investment in it, but I’m not willing to pooh-pooh it and that’s why I say I’m open to it,” he concluded.
via http://ift.tt/2zf3Hva Tyler Durden