Bitcoin Price Surges Past $15,000, Highest In 34 Months: What Happened?

Bitcoin surged to a new 2020 high as uncertainty in the recent U.S. elections remains and new developments reinforce the benchmark cryptocurrency’s value over time. Analysts believe there is potential for more upside, but a pullback could be a healthy development in this uptrend.

Bitcoin opened at $14,161 and went as high as $15,775 before closing at $15,608 on Tuesday, one day after the U.S. elections. This is an increase of 10%, something Bitcoin last achieved on July 27, when it plowed past $10,000 to close at $11,000 — a $1,000 increase in one day.

Bitcoin has not been at $15,000 since January 2018, one month after reaching an all-time high of just below $20,000. Since then, Bitcoin began a long decline culminating in March 2020, when the cryptocurrency fell to $3,800.

Last October, when Bitcoin was still trying to break $13,000, Katie Stockton, founder of financial firm Fairlead Strategies, said $14,000 is the next key resistance in line with a retracement level based on the Fibonacci Golden Ratio. “There is also room to overbought territory based on the weekly stochastic RSI,” she said.

Stockton, in an interview with Business Insider, noted the final resistance will be at $19,500, which is just around the level of Bitcoin’s previous all-time high. However, she admitted that the recent price rally is showing some exhaustion. “But we would see this as healthy from a technical perspective,” she concluded.

Many analysts also said that besides the U.S. presidential elections, another major news is that the Department of Justice has seized $1 billion worth of Bitcoin obtained from a Bitcoin wallet that was being passed around the hacker community for two years.

When the wallet was finally cracked and the Bitcoins inside got transferred — considered unprecedented because of the difficulty in brute forcing a Bitcoin wallet protected by cryptography, there was speculation on Twitter on how it was possible and who the individual who cracked it was.

The U.S. government turned out to be the recipient of the Bitcoins from a wallet believed to be connected to Silk Road, a darknet marketplace that the FBI shut down in 2013.

According to news firm Axios, this is important because of the size of the government seizure and the fact that a significantly large amount of Bitcoins (around $70,000 BTC) is now out of circulation.