Finance & economics | Back to the moon

Bitcoin’s price is surging. What happens next?

The cryptocurrency is up by 63% this year

Illustration: Satoshi Kambayashi
|Washington, DC

For a brief moment, everyone who owned bitcoin had made money from it. On March 5th the crypto token rose to an all-time high of just above $69,000—a level sure to delight the meme-loving crypto-crowd—before slipping back a little. The record capped a remarkable comeback from the dark days of November 2022, when interest-rate rises were crushing risk appetite and ftx, a crypto exchange, had just gone bust. Buying bitcoin on such exchanges seemed like little more than a fun and novel way to get robbed.

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This article appeared in the Finance & economics section of the print edition under the headline “Back to the moon”

From the March 9th 2024 edition

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