>>3444530This is typical volatility for the bitcoin market. You get major spikes and major sags, and sometimes the price changes by 100% and stays there for weeks. Since most of bitcoin's users (not investors) immediately trade it for cash, it doesn't impact them very heavily.
The strengths of bitcoin are:
* No central transaction authority to stop your transactions going through
* Incentive for currency holders to keep the currency valuable. (The richest in bitcoin are miners, who profit more from higher value, and early adopters who can't cash out quickly because of limited trading volume)
* Relative trust in the security of the system.
The weaknesses are:
* Slow transaction speeds (exchanges mitigate this for speculators, but no one else. The combination of small trading market volumes and a typical 6-hour transaction verification makes trading bitcoins outside exchanges a relatively painful process compared to other options)
* Inefficient transaction cost (~$30 of bitcoins is paid to miners for every transaction overall)
Those weaknesses combine to make bitcoin's price highly volatile, since any strong change in interest or favorable outcomes forces a huge portion of the market to trade at once. During periods of confidence this causes a spike, which then falls off and oscillates. During periods of panic this causes a dip, which sometimes doesn't recover for 4 years.
https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/price/Check out bitcoin's price between 2014 and the start of 2017 for a great example of how bad market panics can get.
