Bitcoin rises as much in a month as Toronto Real Estate did in 12

Bitcoin hit a record high and major psychological barrier this morning, May 8th, 2017. The price of bitcoin broke $2,194 CAD, an increase of nearly 33% over the last month. This continued rise has persevered through tough topics such as the AntBleed exploit that we covered recently.

There have been strong improvements in bitcoin’s stature as a currency, however. Japan passed a law which accepted bitcoin as a legitimate currency. The Japanese law went into effect on April 4th, 2017 and seems to have resulted in a significant increase in trading volumes--based on Japanese Yen exchanges accounting for as much as 43% of the total volume, according to CryptoCompare.



While this acceptance may come at a cost of some level of anonymity due to KYC and AML legislation it shows that the world governments and public at large are beginning to take bitcoin and other applications of blockchain and cryptocurrency technology more seriously. With fiat currencies, there’s a point in time where cash and customer are linked; ultimately though, some other entity ends up with the cash and the changes of hands that took place in between are unknown. Cash and Bitcoin both remain pseudo-anonymous in spite of KYC/AML policies, with Bitcoin being slightly less so because the number of—but not identity of parties in—swaps between parties is public.

While buying pressure cannot last forever, it has led bitcoin to end high many times so far, and some are expectant of yet another bull run for bitcoin and potentially even higher highs than we have seen so far. As of writing, the bitcoin seems stable at just over $2,194 CAD on average across all exchanges.