Bitcoin price crash: Cryptocurrency drops below $200 mark in 25% tumble over 24 hours

Bitcoin has lost a quarter of its value in the space of 24 hours, as the world's most valuable cryptocurrency falls below $200 (£132, €170) for the first time since November 2013.

The price crash has been driven by an increasing amount of sell orders at major exchanges that began at the start of this week when the price of bitcoin first began to tumble.

Bitcoin reached as low as $170 overnight and currently sits at around $182, according to the Coin Desk price index.

Sell orders are still dominating at Bitfinex, OKCoin and the recently reopened Bitstamp, suggesting the price could continue to tumble.

Other major cryptocurrencies, including dogecoin, litecoin and darkcoin, have followed in bitcoin's lead and seen their values slide by a similar 25% margin since yesterday.

At its peak towards the end of 2013, bitcoin's market cap was around $13 billion. Today's market cap is less than $3bn.

Such a significant drop has come as no surprise to some analysts, who cite similar bubbles with gold in 2012, real estate in 2007, and tech stocks in 2001, as patterns that the bitcoin market will most likely follow.

Market analyst Martin Tillier suggested that the price of bitcoin will continue to fall until its pre-bubble levels.

"Why would the bitcoin bubble of 2013 be any different?", Tillier asked in his Nasdaq trading blog column on Tuesday. "If anything, when looked at it as a deflating bubble, the drop in price has been fairly slow.

"Should the decline in exchange value continue to a point below the roughly $150 level that marked the last period of relative stability throughout most of 2013, then a case could be made that the real, underlying value of BTC was questionable before the jump."

Taking into account the $1 trillion pumped into the US economy through quantitative easing since 2013, together with the amount of new bitcoins that have entered circulation through mining operations, Tillier predicts the true value of bitcoin is somewhere around $140.