Bitcoin dropped as much as 15% late Saturday, its biggest intraday drop since February, just days after hitting record highs.
It's unclear what caused the sell-off.
The plunge in the world’s most popular digital coin came after reports attributed the decline to speculation that the U.S. Treasury may take action against money laundering that’s carried out using digital assets, according to bloomberg.
The U.S. Treasury didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment from USA TODAY.
In data recently obtained from Coinmarketcap, Bitcoin Cash is the fifth most valuable cryptocurrency, with a daily trading volume of about $1.4 billion dollars, and a market capitalization at $4.4 billion.
Its price movement has been less exposed to high volatility, unlike its older cousin (Bitcoin). BCH has risen significantly in its price, since March 13th, when it was trading at $152, to its present level at $239.
Bitcoin Cash just recently breached the resistance level of $235, and as it did so, crypto traders and investors moved their focus to BCH breaking the $250 strong resistance level.
BTC vs. BCH. Next, as a case study, we analyzed the mining power changes in BTC and BCH to see if our theoretical analysis matches with actual mining power changes. In this paper, we refer to the Bitcoin system as a coin system consisting of BTC and BCH. We examine the mining power history in the Bitcoin system from the release date of BCH until Dec. 2018 to 1) analyze which equilibrium its state has been moving to and 2) evaluate our theoretical analysis empirically. Our analysis results show that until the BCH mining difficulty adjustment algorithm changed (on Nov. 13, 2017), the Bitcoin state reached a lack of loyal miners for BCH. Therefore, BCH periodically became severely centralized before the update of the BCH protocol. For example, we observe a period when only five miners exist, of which two miners possess about 70 % power. However, since Nov. 13, 2017, the Bitcoin state has been close to coexistence because the change in the BCH mining difficulty adjustment algorithm with a shorter difficulty adjustment time interval (i.e., every block) has affected the game as an external factor.
Nevertheless, we explain that the state would still get closer to a lack of BCH loyal miners if automatic mining, in which miners automatically choose the most profitable coin to mine, is popularly used. Note that the main difference between fickle mining and automatic mining is that fickle miners immediately change their coin only when the mining difficulty changes while automatic miners can immediately change their coin when not only the mining difficulty but also the coin price changes.