MI
Bitcoin
is closing in on its all-time high.
The price of the red-hot currency was up more than 4% on Monday
above $4,800 a coin, less than $200 shy of its all-time high of
$4,983, according to data from Markets Insider.
Bitcoin hit nearly $5,000 at the beginning of September, but
quickly saw its price decline amid news of a
crackdown in China on the cryptocurrency and regulatory
uncertainty around initial coin offerings, a cryptocurrency-based
fundraising method. After bottoming out near $2,900 per coin on
September 15, it has since rallied.
That’s despite mounting criticism from some of Wall Street’s most
powerful players.
It all started on September 12 when
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon called bitcoin “a fraud”
and said it was “worse than tulips bulbs” in the
1600s.
In a recent interview with Bloomberg News, Larry Fink, the head
of BlackRock, the world’s largest investor with $5.7 trillion
under management, said he thinks
the explosive growth of bitcoin points to nefarious
behavior.
“It just identifies how much money laundering there is being
done in the world,” Fink said. “How much people are trying to
move currencies from one place to another.”
Kenneth Rogoff, the former chief economist of the
International Monetary Fund,
weighed in on bitcoin Monday, saying “in the long
run, the technology will thrive, but that the price of bitcoin
will collapse.”
Get the latest Bitcoin price here.