Bitcoin COLLAPSES as experts suggest 2017 surge was caused by market manipulation

The bitcoin boom looks well and truly over as the digital currency slumped to a new low this week.

After the meteoric rise towards the end of 2017, the peer-to-peer currency has been falling away in the last six months.

At its peak, one bitcoin was worth $19,511 in December but it’s now lost 70% of its value.

“Things have changed for Bitcoin and the crypto space,” Craig Erlam, senior market analyst at online trading firm Oanda Corp. told Bloomberg .

“There doesn’t seem to be as much hype, or positive news. Every time we get a negative news story now – after a period of consolidation – we don’t see bullish sentiment come in to support it. It’s almost as if people are waiting to sell it.”

It’s also been suggested that the meteoric rise in value last year was a byproduct of market manipulation.

John M. Griffin and Amin Shams from the University of Texas used algorithms to analyse blockchain data – which forms the basis of bitcoin.

In a paper…