Wedbush Revises 12-Month Bitcoin Price Target to $600

China might also be playing a significant role in the upturn, with the country capping the cash withdrawals its citizens can make overseas – making Bitcoin a more favourable way of getting money outside the country.

Bitcoin will become sixth largest global reserve currency by 2030, while banks are set to invest over $1bn in blockchain technology over the next couple of years, according to research carried out by Magister Advisors, a Silicon Valley investment boutique.

Bitcoin, the world’s most popular digital currency, has been on a roll – but no one is really sure why.

Magisters Advisors sees that the estimated $1 billion investment in Bitcoin and blockchain will happen over the next 12 to 24 months.

Partner Jeremy Millar said blockchain, the technology that powers Bitcoin, has revolutionised finance.

A blockchain is a network of computers, all of which must approve a transaction has taken place before it is recorded, in a chain of computer code.

“Banks will initially be unwilling to remove the core infrastructure that handles the process of clearance and settlement, but they will increasingly run parallel blockchain processes”, said Millar. “They’re realizing that this is not a toy or a fad, but a revolutionary new technology with vast implications if it manages to become mainstream”.

“Ironically bitcoin has attracted negative publicity over its short life because attempts to rig it have been flagged by the Blockchain technology that underpins it”, he added. Nobody knows. Keep in mind that prices imploded past year after Mt. Gox, what was then the largest and most ludicrously named bitcoin exchange, announced a massive hacking scandal that led to bankruptcy.

According to Miller, Magister’s interviews with the bitcoin companies gave further credence to the idea that bitcoin is gaining traction especially in vendors and the developing market, which will drive widespread acceptance.

After dipping well below $200 in January, bitcoin traded at more than $410 Tuesday afternoon.

Additionally, many in the bitcoin community insist that the daily price of the cryptocurrency is not a relevant metric, as it distracts from the world-changing potential of the technology. Not having a central authority means that an internet-wide catastrophe would have to occur in order to compromise the integrity of the ledger.

“If you’re looking to introduce applications with distributed ledger technologies to improve the financial markets, you can’t have each participant working to a different pattern”, Christopher Murphy, global co-head of FX, rates and credit at UBS told The Financial Times. “What R3… [is] doing is bringing a consensus which could establish common standards”.