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Bitcoin (XBT) prices fell 8% on Friday and plunged around 36% in May, their worst monthly performance since September 2011. Tesla CEO (TSLA) Elon Musk did an about-face on bitcoin, recently telling customers that the electric car giant is no longer accepting bitcoin as a form of payment for its vehicles due to concerns about the environmental impact of mining for bitcoin, which is extremely energy intensive. China has also stepped up its crackdown on crypto, and the US Treasury Department has unveiled new plans to tax bitcoin more heavily while the Federal Reserve has hinted at the possibility of a digital dollar.
May has been brutal for many cryptos
The bitcoin crash has also spread to other cryptocurrencies. Binance coin, XRP and Polkadot suffered massive losses this month.
Other cryptos, notably Ethereum, the second largest after bitcoin and the backbone of many popular non-fungible token (NFT) transactions have held up better. The ether only dropped about 6%. Meme dogecoin token, which Musk has tweeted on multiple times, is down slightly in May. So-called stable coins, such as Tether and USD Coin, which are linked to government-backed currencies, lived up to their name and are stable for the month.
Bitcoin is notoriously volatile, and prices remain up over 25% this year despite the May collapse. So longtime fans, or HODLers as they like to be called, have taken this route many times before.
“It’s really easy to be a crypto investor. It’s extremely difficult to be a crypto trader,” said Peter Smith, CEO of Blockchain.com, a research, investment and lending startup. crypto, valued at $ 5.2 billion. “It’s a very volatile market and it can crush you easily.”
Bitcoin prices fell from nearly $ 20,000 in December 2017, which was a high at the time, to less than $ 3,500 at the start of 2019 before rebounding.
And bitcoin’s nearly 40% drop in September 2011 was actually the middle of a three-month drop from August to October that year, where prices fell more than 35% each month.
Anyone who has been through this tumultuous time has the final say. Bitcoin prices hit a low of $ 2 in October 2011 and are now trading at around $ 37,000.
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