More people might have read about Bitcoins in the past few weeks than the movement of Dow Jones Industrial Average, or what the outgoing Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen was to say.
That shouldn’t surprise anyone though. The cryptocurrency debuted on the Cboe Global Markets’ exchange last week, surged 25%. It rose from a November low of about $7,000 to a high of more than $17,000 a few days ago, before falling to $16,261, data from Coindesk.com shows. As we write it is at $16,750, and few know how where it will be when the newspaper hits the stand.
As these things happened in the US and elsewhere, the Reserve Bank of India warned against trading in cryptocurrencies which is as worthless as the paper it is written on. The Income Tax officers waded into ‘exchanges’ that trade in cryptocurrencies to figure out how much it can slice away from investor profits.