Get email alerts Bitcoin price hits highest level since August Move suggests investors are moving past a series of high-profile hacks that occurred over the summer Bitcoin has finally shaken off its summer slump.The price of a single coin BTCUSD, +0.33% has climbed above $630 for the first time since August, when reports that hackers had stolen 120,000 bitcoins, then worth more than $65 million, from one of the world’s largest bitcoin exchanges.The theft sent the price of the popular cryptocurrency spiraling lower.At its lowest point, bitcoin had lost $100 in value, though it quickly reversed much of this drop.Read: Bitcoin price plummets after exchange loses $65 million to hackers The hack at Hong Kong-based Bitfinex, which remains one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges, followed another high-profile incident in June, when a hacker stole more than 3.5 million ether tokens—worth about $50 million at the time—from an entity known as the DAO.To recover the stolen coins, Ethereum’s developers engineered a controversial software update that recovered the stolen coins by essentially unwinding part of the Ethereum blockchain.

Initially created as a vehicle to help crowdfund promising startups building on the Ethereum blockchain, the DAO was dissolved after the hack.bitcoin als anlageRead: Digital currency Ethereum nose-dives after $50 million hack Bitfinex issued a newly created coin called the BFX token as a sort of a placeholder for customers who lost coins during the hack.jones gear bitcoinOn Thursday, the exchange announced that it would allow customers to exchange their BFX tokens for a stake in the company, with each coin valued at $1.litecoin buy paypalSecurity remains a concern for many investors, as exchanges have proven consistently that they are vulnerable to hackers.litecoin march 2017Of course the most prominent example of big security issues in digital currencies occurred in February 2014, when Mt.bitcoin faucet hack 2016

Gox, once the dominant bitcoin exchange, collapsed after hackers stole millions of customer bitcoins.litecoin para kazanmaThe news effectively ended the bitcoin speculative bubble of 2013, as the price of a single coin slumped to less than $200, after peaking near $1,200 in November 2013.BitcoinWhy Bitcoin Just Dropped 30%David Z. MorrisSince hitting a record high of over $2700 on Thursday, the digital currency Bitcoin has gone into a sharp correction, losing nearly 30% of its value in just two days, according to numbers from CoinMarketCap.A broad range of cryptocurrencies, including Ethereum, Ripple, Litecoin, Dash, and Monero also declined, in most cases dropping even more steeply.Some analysts have described this as profit-taking, which would suggest the declines will level off.But technical analysts speaking to CNBC say the losses could go as deep as 46.5%, pushing Bitcoin down to $1,470.Get Data Sheet, Fortune’s technology newsletter.A look at history suggests even that might not be the floor.

The cryptocurrency rally of the last six months is strongly reminiscent of a Bitcoin bump that unfolded from October to December of 2013, when the price skyrocketed from under $130 to over $1100.That was followed not just by a correction, but by a long, slow decline that had prices pared back to just over $200 within a year, followed by two years of steady, but slow, growth.It’s unlikely that the same precise pattern will repeat itself, mostly because the ecosystem of startups and services surrounding cryptocurrency is vastly more robust now than it was four years ago.But a vital lesson still holds: cryptocurrency prices are volatile because very few speculators actually understand the technology or its potential, leaving it vulnerable to reactive, emotion-driven swings.For proof, just look at how closely various cryptocurrency tokens' prices are tracking each other, regardless of their often very different realities on the ground.Bitcoin is the first and most basic form of cryptocurrency, with a lot of adoption and stability, but relatively few features.

Ethereum is a robust ‘smart’ system that is already being widely adopted for building complex data-sharing applications.And Ripple is a mostly privately-held solution focused on interbank transfers.Yet the three tokens' charts for the last few months are remarkably similar.That suggests very little close analysis by those buying into cryptocurrency (and likely a lot of purely algorithmic trading).The fundamental reason for these massive price swings is that the promise of blockchain tech is simultaneously so profound and yet so far from fruition.Even if one accepts the idea that blockchains will someday underly everything from health records to insurance, the road to overhauling those systems will be long and winding.We’ll see many more rallies and retreats along the way.by Tyler Durden Earlier this week, we pointed out that after tracking the recent drop in the Yuan (alternatively, rise in the dollar), bitcoin unexpectedly spiked breaking out of its recent rangebound trade and rising to three month highs following news that China had begun a regulatory crackdown on wealth-management products, which indicated that some of the illicit money parked in these shadow bank conduits, which collectively house just shy of $2 trillion in assets, will slowly drift out of the mainland using such capital outflow "proxies" as bitcoin.

The next day we presented readers a report from Needham in which the investment bank explained, in fine detail the "fundamental" cases behind bitcoin going higher, and as a result the bank raised its price target on the digital currency to $848 from $655.Incidentally, Needham agreed with what has been the main catalyst for the surge in bitcoin since last summer, one we explicitly said would send the digital currency soaring last September (when it was trading in the low $200s, and urged readers to frontrun the imminent and panicked Chinese buying that was about to be unleashed).Amusingly, while our correct theory that China would use bitcoin to circumvent capital controls was mocked by both Bloomberg and the FT, both are now solidly onboard.“There is a premium in bitcoin pricing in China as a hedge against the yuan," Jack Liu, the Hong Kong-based chief strategy officer at OKCoin told Bloomberg.“Strength is likely to carry into year-end."Since then bitcoin has tripled, and over the past two days has broken out sharply to the upside once again, now over 10% higher in the just the past week.

The latest round of buying took place overnight with major bids emerging from China, which have taken the price of bitcoin on the most popular US trading platform, Coinbase, to $725 as of this writing.At this point the question is not how high Bitcoin will rise, but how fast: Bitcoin will rise above $700 before year-end amid strong Chinese demand and the possibility of unexpected events, such as Donald Trump winning the U.S.presidency, said Aurélien Menant, chief executive officer of Gatecoin Ltd.“The outcome of the U.S.elections is likely to have an impact, as would the consequence of a Fed rate hike," said Menant.“A black-swan event in the coming months, which seems to be likely, could also drive bitcoin to all new highs.In the meantime, further yuan devaluation and interest among Chinese investors will continue the momentum."And while we know the source of funds, i.e.China, what may be more exciting for bitcoin bulls - at least for those with a technical bent - is that at this rate, the big bitcoin trendline from its all time 2013 high, through the recent July spike highs, is about to be breached, potentially unlocking upside for bitcoin to rise back to four-digit level.