Bitcoin has broken through the R100,000 per token mark on Luno, the largest South African Bitcoin exchange.
The price rocketed to over R111,000 on ICE3x in the early hours of the morning before returning to around the same levels as Luno. Bitcoin was also trading at R100,000 on Altcoin Trader.
The latest price surge follows a recent spike in the international price of Bitcoin to over $6,400 – following the Bitcoin Gold fork and leading into the Segwit2x hard fork later this month.
Segwit2x will be the culmination of a compromise that was set in motion earlier this year, through “The New York Agreement” and a document called BIP91 (Bitcoin improvement proposal 91).
The next fork will see the adoption of the “2x” portion of “Segwit2x”, doubling the block size of Bitcoin to 2MB.
Despite the consensus achieved through BIP91, increasing Bitcoin’s block size remains a controversial change.
As with the Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Gold forks, it may result in a new blockchain being created.
Segwit2x will activate after the 494,784th Bitcoin block is mined, which is predicted to happen on 16 November.
Huge increase
Bitcoin has seen huge growth since the start of 2017, with the token trading at around R12,000 at the beginning of the year.
The price rise has been driven, in part, by news of increased
Bitcoin adoption globally.
CME Group announced this week that it will introduce trading in Bitcoin futures by the end of 2017. This comes a month after it said it does not foresee listing Bitcoin futures soon.
The graph below shows how the price of Bitcoin has increased on Luno in the past year.
