Bitcoin Price Soars Above $450 and Continues to Climb Rapidly

Update (7am, 13 November): In the last 12 hours the price of bitcoin has continued to rise, and is now valued at over $450.

Original article (6pm, 12 November)

The price of bitcoin has surged by more than $70 (£25, €32) in the last 24 hours to $431 (at time of publication), taking it to its highest levels since September.

The remarkable recovery has brought bitcoin's market cap back up above $5 billion and has caused a significant amount of positive movement across other cryptocurrency markets.

Litecoin, often referred to as silver to bitcoin's gold, has risen by 7% since Tuesday, while meme-inspired cryptocurrency dogecoin rose in value by more than 8%.

"Bitcoin's price is up more than 25 percent since its brief foray to under $300 at the start of October," Michael Terpin, co-founder of BitAngels and creator of the CoinAgenda conference, told IBTimes UK.

"It's increasingly clear in this current run-up that bitcoin is oversold, with a great many more investors bullish long term and seeking the right entry point than short-term traders running out of coins to sell.

"I predicted during Money 20/20 that we could go as high as $600 by year's end and I'm sticking to that prediction."

Bitcoin Bull Run

The surge follows several weeks of stagnating and steadily declining prices that saw the price of one bitcoin fall to as low as $305 in early October.

It comes almost exactly one year after bitcoin's biggest price rally to date, when its value peaked at over $1,000 before a series of unfavourable regulatory moves and the collapse of the biggest exchange MtGox caused prices to plummet.

The reason behind bitcoin's sudden upturn in fortunes is unclear, though it comes at a time when black marketplaces on the dark web like Silk Road 2.0 are being seized and taken down. This also mirrors bitcoin's last major surge, which followed the FBI take down of the original Silk Road.

"You'd have thought (the dark site's) closure would have affected bitcoin negatively. But that hasn't happened," Dominic Frisby, financial writer and author of 'Bitcoin - The Future of Money?', told IBTimes UK. "Maybe it's a case of sell the rumour, buy the news.

"People talk about the Industrial Revolution or the Agricultural Revolution. We are at the beginning of the Financial Revolution!"

Bitcoin's volatility

Bitcoin's price is famously volatile and many detractors have claimed that its price remains over-inflated. However, one fund manager recently claimed that the value of one bitcoin could rise to as much as $1 million.

"I did some analysis a while ago," Raoul Pal told Real Vision Television. "(It) was to try and create a valuation framework that gives some value to bitcoin because nobody really knows that it's worth.

"So I said OK well let's assume it's something like gold. There's a finite amount that's been mined. The rest is underground. We kind of know how long it's going to take before all the gold is mined or before all the bitcoins.

"Put them in the same kind of equation we get a value of bitcoin and that value is a million dollars. Now, you'll never hear an analyst say this—but I don't mind this—I could be wrong by 90%, and it's still worth $100,000."