SAN FRANCISCO — What goes precipitously up, often comes crashing down to earth.

So it was with bitcoin on Thursday, when the price of the digital currency plunged 19% — its steepest drop in more than two years — after a record run. The volatility remained on full display late Thursday and, as of Friday evening, bitcoin rebounded to $2,484.59.

The cryptocurrency, which flirted with $3,000 on Monday, sunk as low as $2,076.16 in intraday trading early Thursday amid a confluence of bad omens. Tech stocks have recently taken a thumping over concerns about their lofty valuations. Ominous reports from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley suggested bitcoin was due for a reversal in price and required government regulation. The Federal Reserve hiked interest rates Wednesday.

Compounding worries, digital currency exchange Coinbase experienced an outage Monday because of high-trading volume. Another exchange, Bitfinex, on Tuesday said it was under DDOS attack.

Meanwhile, prices for digital currencies ripple and NEM declined the past week, though Ethereum, the second-largest currency, has soared 20% on speculation it will be the top currency. At $371.36, it lags far behind bitcoin in value.

CryptoCurrency Market Capitalizations

"Bitcoin and other digital currencies are experiencing rapid growth these days," says Guy Zyskind, CEO of Enigma, a start-up in cryptocurrency investing. "For this to be sustainable over time, the market has to correct itself from time to time."

The market's wild ride this week underscores "the ebbs and flows of an entirely new asset class," says Bill Barhydt, CEO of Abra, a peer-to-peer payment service.

"While the bitcoin price will likely recover and continue to rise, what we should see in the future is bitcoin becoming a solid store of value, much like gold," says Mihir Magudia, executive director of LEOcoin Foundation. "It will be relatively easy to liquidate but will not be used to commonly pay for goods and services."

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2017/06/16/cryptocurrency-prices-likely-continue-wild-ride/102882738/

Bitcoin is no longer for micro payments because of the current status of high transaction fees. That's why now it has become a store of value. Most likely a small portion of casual investors are likely holding on our bitcoin and not easily selling if they are price dip and panic selling. And bitcoin is more convenient to store as compare to gold. And we all know that bitcoin price is likely to go moon in the future specially if mass adopted. So hold on your bitcoin.

But for some "newbies" like me, I find it frustrating as time having to used bitcoin and then wait for long confirmation. I don't know if Satoshi has initially design his bitcoin to be used for such small payments, but if he did they the purpose was already defeated because of this high tx fees that we have experiencing now.

Satoshi can't, and shouldn't be blamed. Back in the days 1MB was more than enough (more precisely said, it was far too much) to efficiently allow the network to cope with all the transactions. Also, Bitcoin eventually would lose it's micro/cheap payment advantage anyway. Bitcoin is set up in a way that due to the block halvings, miners will more and more depend on the income they generate from fees.

Satoshi's last activity here dates from December 2010. Perhaps that was the moment he left, or a little later, but after that Satoshi was no longer involved in how Bitcoin was developing further. Back in the days the space in blocks that was being used almost never exceeded the 10KB mark. Now you again.

Stop spreading false information. Look for yourself how many transactions fit in one single block. http://blockr.io/block/list/