LONDON: Bitcoin jumped on Tuesday to its highest in six months, pulling smaller cryptocurrencies up with it in a move that traders and analysts ascribed to technical forces with no apparent news catalysts at play.
The original and biggest virtual coin climbed as much as 4.5 percent in early trading to top $5,600 briefly, touching its highest since Nov. 18.
Other major cryptocurrencies that tend be correlated to bitcoin such as ethereum and Ripple’s XRP also gained.
Bitcoin was last up 3.1 percent. It has gained more than 35 percent in April, due largely to a 20 percent jump that caused puzzlement among traders and underscored flaws in cryptocurrency markets.
About Bitcoin
Bitcoin is a consensus network that enables a new payment system and a completely digital money. It is the first decentralized peer-to-peer payment network that is powered by its users with no central authority or middlemen. From a user perspective, Bitcoin is pretty much like cash for the Internet.
For a user, Bitcoin is nothing more than a mobile app or computer program that provides a personal Bitcoin wallet and allows a user to send and receive bitcoins with them. This is how Bitcoin works for most users.
Behind the scenes, the Bitcoin network is sharing a public ledger called the “block chain”. This ledger contains every transaction ever processed, allowing a user’s computer to verify the validity of each transaction.
The authenticity of each transaction is protected by digital signatures corresponding to the sending addresses, allowing all users to have full control over sending bitcoins from their own Bitcoin addresses. In addition, anyone can process transactions using the computing power of specialized hardware and earn a reward in bitcoins for this service.
