The Bitcoin price continued falling on Tuesday (September 24), going below $9,000 by around 18:50 UTC. As you can imagine, panic selling is also affecting the altcoins, with most currently suffering double digit percentage losses against USD.
Bitcoin started this day at $9,692. By 18:35 UTC, the BTC price had fallen 3% to $9,402. Within 30 minutes (i.e. by 19:05 UTC), the BTC price had fallen another 7.76% to $8,672.
Here is the 24-hour price chart for Bitcoin:
And as you can see in the chart above, the bleeding did not stop there: by 19:46 UTC, BTC-USD had gone below the $8,200 mark, meaning a loss of almost 17% in the preceding 24-hour period.
The last time the BTC price was below $8,200 was June 12, i.e. more than three months ago.
Below, is the six-month price chart for Bitcoin:
As for the altcoins, most are also suffering double-digit percentage losses against USD. Here are a few examples:
- Ethereum (ETH): $160.92 (-23.47%)
- XRP: $0.236 (-17.07%)
- Bitcoin Cash (BCH): $235.71 (-22.02%)
- EOS: $2.62 (-31.99%)
- Binance Coin (BNB): $15.57 (-22.42%)
So, what’s behind today’s panic selling? Here are a couple of events that might explain at least in part why the crypto markets had such an awful day:
- Bakkt’s launch of its Bitcoin futures has been very disappointing to some people, with only 161 monthly contracts traded (as of 20:07 UTC on September 24) since trading went live at 00:00 UTC on September 23.
- Reports came out today about Bitcoin network’s hash rate suggesting that it had dropped from 98 EH/s to around 57.7 EH/s before recovering (with no-one able to come up with an explanation for the alleged incident).
As for the reactions on Crypto Twitter, these are a few of the more interesting observations:
- Economist and Trader Alex Krüger:
Wild $600 wide spreads between Bitmex and Coinbase.
$8150 vs $8750
— Alex Krüger (@krugermacro) September 24, 2019
- Crypto Trader Josh Rager:
Current inverted Bitcoin chart update
Looks very similar to the market bottom before the $1000 candle up to $5k
Except in this case… $BTC makes its way down to $8k pic.twitter.com/dEFLSjToL2
— Josh Rager 📈 (@Josh_Rager) September 24, 2019
- Larry Sermak, Director Research at The Block:
Nearly half a billion in liquidations on BitMEX. Talk about a massive long squeeze 📉 pic.twitter.com/Uc0fnSzN5f
— Larry Cermak (@lawmaster) September 24, 2019
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Christopher Bendiksen, Head of Research at CoinShares:
PSA: #bitcoin hashrate is not a known measure.
It can only be estimated from previous block intervals.
Block times are Poisson distributed which sometimes causes large variance in block intervals. If several slow blocks happen in a row, it makes these estimates spike down.
— Christopher Bendiksen (@C_Bendiksen) September 24, 2019
Featured Image Credit: Photo via Pixabay.com
