Bitcoin Blasts Past $12,000

Another morning, another bitcoin record.

Another big rally from bitcoin put the value of the cryptocurrency above $12,000 — a record high, even in a backdrop of investors and experts wondering if bitcoin can possibly live up to these values — or if the bubble is just getting dangerously large at this point.

Bitcoin jumped Friday after an announcement via the main U.S. derivatives regulator that it would allow CME Group Inc and CBOE Global Markets to list bitcoin futures contracts. That is good news for bitcoin, as it indicated additional mainstream acceptance — and because the futures contracts will make it easier to trade the new asset class. However, it will also mean that bitcoin will be facing more government regulation — and that it will now be open to something it has never had to deal with before: short investors.

And bitcoin, despite its tenfold-plus increase from its $1,000 price point at the beginning of 2017, still has some very vocal detractors.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has said the cryptocurrency should be outlawed.

“It took a long time to establish the methodology and the way bitcoin was traded. The original appeal came from the fact they were unregulated. However, it’s clearly moved out of those shadows and into center stage,” said Michael McCarthy, CMC Markets’ chief market strategist in Sydney.“We are in the throes of a bubble market, and one of the characteristics of a bubble market is that there is no way to know when the bubble will burst.”

As of this morning — in pre-dawn trading — the price of bitcoin was $12,878. So check back in — we might just have a headline about bitcoin breaking $13,000 sometime soon.