For the first time in 13 months, since October 2017, the value of Bitcoin has fallen below $5,000 (£3,889).The world’s most popular virtual currency losing 12.5 per cent of its value from Friday evening to stand at US$4,914.21 by 1930 GMT Monday.
Bitcoin Cash split off from Bitcoin last year after a dispute about its direction and split again a few days ago in another so-called hard fork. These two are in competition with each other. And some observers have blamed this for creating turmoil in the crypto-currency markets, with many of the digital assets experiencing falls.
The digital currency has hovered around the $US6000 mark for most of 2018 after the entire cryptocurrency market crashed at the start of the year, but many enthusiasts believed it would not drop below $US5000 again.
Ripple, the second largest cryptocurrency, was down nearly 6 per cent at the time of writing, while ethereum had lost nearly 16 per cent.
Bitcoin (BTC) is known as the first open-source, peer-to-peer, digital cryptocurrency that was developed and released by a group of unknown independent programmers named Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008. For reference, bitcoin this year has already lost more than 60 percent of its value.
The impact of a plunging crypto market throughout the year also reflected on the performance of two mainstream chipmakers, AMD and Nvidia. The US companies, which drew out from manufacturing crypto mining equipment citing poor returns, recently posted lackluster sales forecasts for the current period, sending their respective share value to double-digit percentage losses. While AMD stock plunged as much as 11 percent this Monday, Nvidia shares also recorded a 17 percent depreciation in value.
The jittery performance came in light of the poor business relationships between the US and China. The trade war intensified when two countries clashed over the weekend at a Pacific Rim Summit. For the first time in three decades, two of the world’s leading economies could not find common ground on their global trading strategies. The presidents of both the US and China are scheduled to meet later this month at the G20 summit.