Bitcoin’s slump over the last couple days seems to have taken a breather, with a slight recovery on Thursday morning.
The fall started Wednesday after a double-whammy of bad news from Google (which banned cryptocurrency-related ads on its network) and the International Monetary Fund (which urged an international crackdown on the use of cryptocurrencies for money-laundering.)
Bitcoin hits below $8K
First Bitcoin fell below $9,000, then it kept on going, passing $8,000 early Thursday morning. It hit a low of around $7,676—its worst level in five weeks—then bounced back up again. At the time of writing, around 8 a.m. Eastern Time, one Bitcoin was worth around $8,300.
The volatility probably wasn’t all down to Google and the IMF. Wednesday also saw a hearing at the House Capital Markets, Securities and Investments Subcommittee, at which some members of Congress expressed strong antipathy towards cryptocurrencies.
The committee’s chairman, Michigan’s Bill Huizenga, reportedly said that “this Congress is not going to sit by idly with a lack of protection for investors.”
Californian Representative Brad Sherman, meanwhile, called cryptocurrencies “a crock,” adding that “they allow a few dozen men in my district to sit in their pajamas all day and tell their wives they’re going to be millionaires.”
ICO v. IPO
Regarding initial coin offerings (ICOs), a cryptocurrency-related fundraising method that frequently involves scamming people into paying real money for nothing much, Sherman claimed that the term ICO was used “to lie to the public and convey the image that is like an IPO.”
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is in the process of cracking down on scammy ICOs—a fact that has unnerved the cryptocurrency markets before.