Bitcoin has continued its surprising and meteoric rise in price in the new year.
The cryptocurrency was all the rage a few years ago and everyone was rueing the day they didn't invest in it when it was in a slump.
But, if you managed to hold on during all those months of the Bitcoin price plummeting you'll be absolutely cheering now.
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At the time of writing, the price of a single Bitcoin has surged to nearly AUD$42,567 ($32,801).
According to the BBC, the huge recent jump is being credited to 'big investors seeking quick profits'.
While the virtual currency didn't attract the same amount of headlines last year as it did in 2017, its price managed to soar 300 per cent. It started 2020 at just USD$7,000 and began 2021 at a little more than $30,000.
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Many turned to cryptocurrencies during the pandemic amid uncertainty with local banks and rates.
In addition to Bitcoin's huge surge, the second largest cryptocurrency, Ethereum, jumped 465 per cent.
On Sunday (January 3), Bitcoin jumped past the USD$30,000 mark for the first time and then just hours later it was through the $32,000 mark.
There has been a bit of skepticism from experts about whether Bitcoin can be trusted as a regular payment method.
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Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey issued a caution last year about it.
"I have to be honest, it is hard to see that Bitcoin has what we tend to call intrinsic value," he said. "It may have extrinsic value in the sense that people want it."
JPMorgan's CEO Jamie Dimon echoed those sentiments in 2017 when he said Bitcoin is a 'fraud...worse than tulip bulbs' and reckoned it 'isn't going to work'.
He added that if JPMorgan traders were trading cryptocurrency, he 'would fire them in a second, for two reasons: It is against our rules, and they are stupid, and both are dangerous'.
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Despite this, it seems like Australians are more inclined to adopt it.
Coindesk compiled data about people's attitudes Down Under and found almost one in five Aussies owns one form of cryptocurrency. Even more incredibly was that 91.4 per cent of people had heard about it.
Only 17.3 per cent reckon it's a scam, compared to 21.3 per cent back in 2019. There has also been a huge surge in people applying to be registered to buy and trade Bitcoin.
Featured Image Credit: PA