Earlier today, the BTC exchange rate continued its way down to new local lows. In particular, it temporarily dove below the psychological threshold of 9000 dollars per 1 BTC. According to Coinmarketcap, the current local low is 8720 USD/BTC.
As I'm typing this, the exchange rate is 8780 USD/BTC. At the same time, NordFX experts report that the world's first and most expensive cryptocurrency has already lost over 13% of its value over the last 24 hours.
According to Valery Smahl, Chief Editor of Happy Coin Club, the entire cryptocurrency market gets instantly washed away as soon as something bad or strange starts happening to Bitcoin. Indeed, all the TOP 30 cryptocurrencies in terms of market capitalization instantly followed Bitcoin. Some of them lost even more than Bitcoin. For instance, Ethereum lost 15,7%, Ripple - 24,19%, Bitcoin Cash - 19,38%, а Cardano - 29,61%.
Earlier this morning, Bitcoin saw its market cap drop down to 147,8 billion dollars. This is just 50% of the record-high market cap seen in 2017.
There is another interesting fact to keep in mind. the thing is, Bitcoin's market share in the global cryptocurrency market keeps on going down. In January, Bitcoin's market share dropped to the lowest level in history - 32,6%. For the sake of comparison, in March 2017, Bitcoin used to have at least 70% of the market or even more. This is when the market share peaked and has been going down ever since.
Apparently, apart from being rather expensive, Bitcoin has seen a lot of new rivals over the last few months. In late 2017, there were slightly over 1100 cryptocurrencies registered with online exchanges, now there are over 1500 of them.
