Bitcoin Hits Highest Price this Year, Above $10,000, as Fed Chair Powell Discusses Cryptocurrencies

• Bitcoin Hits Highest Price this Year, Above $10,000, as Fed Chair Powell Discusses Cryptocurrencies
  by Arjun Kharpal@ARJUNKHARPAL, https://www.cnbc.com/
  * Bitcoin hit $10,489.78, the highest price it has logged since September 2019.
  * Bitcoin has seen a more than 44% increase from the start of the year and also logged its best January performance in seven years.
  * Industry participants attributed uncertainty around the coronavirus as well as recent comments by Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell to bitcoin’s rise in the past 24 hours.
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  Bitcoin hit its highest level this year and also in five months on Wednesday, jumping above $10,000 and continuing the recent bull run for the cryptocurrency. In the early morning on Wednesday, bitcoin hit $10,489.78, the highest price it has logged since September, according to data from Coindesk. That’s a more than 44% increase from the start of the year. It comes after bitcoin logged its best January performance in seven years.
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  Industry participants have attributed a number of factors to the rise of bitcoin, including some investors viewing the cryptocurrency as a sort of safe-haven asset in times of uncertainty.
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  In his testimony in front of Congress on Tuesday, Powell was asked about central bank digital currencies and the Fed’s view on a digital dollar. He acknowledged that Facebook’s Libra project was a “wake-up call” that a digital currency could come “fairly quickly” and in a way that is “quite widespread and systemically important.” But he said that there are still “many questions that need to be answered around digital currency for the United States.”
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  Libra has faced backlash from politicians and regulators around the world concerned that a private company with over 2 billion users could issue a currency. A number of Facebook’s partners have also dropped out of the project. There have been growing calls for the U.S. to issue a digital dollar particularly as China has acknowledged that it’s working on a digital yuan.
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