Investing.com – Bitcoin fell on Friday, as the popular digital currency’s efforts to test its recent all-time high failed while bitcoin cash rose to a nearly two-week high.
On the U.S.-based Bitfinex exchange, bitcoin fell to $5,764.9, down $125.1, or 2.12% after falling from a session high of $6020, just shy of its $6,190 peak.
Bitcoin’s attempt to test its recent all time high comes amid comments from prominent investment manager Warren Buffet who described bitcoin as a “real bubble”, adding that it’s difficult to value bitcoin because “it’s not a value-producing asset."
Meanwhile bitcoin’s newest rival, bitcoin gold continued to trade near its lows falling 10.40% to $134.63. The arrival of Bitcoin gold, follows a fork or split of bitcoin’s blockchain earlier this week as concerns grew over mining monopolies in the bitcoin network.
Proponents of bitcoin gold argue that the newly minted cryptocurrency will decentralize the Bitcoin network, which has become crowded by a handful of miners - users who help maintain the system by validating transactions on the network - using expensive computer hardware called application-specific integrated circuits.
“Bitcoin Gold is the brainchild of Jack Liao and is launching as a hard fork of Bitcoin”, said prominent Bitcoin developer Jimmy Song. “The idea [of Bitcoin gold] is to give mining back to the users who can start using CPUs and GPUs to mine.”
The rapid adoption of application-specific integrated circuits, or ASICs, computer chip cards capable of mining bitcoin 50 times faster than traditional video graphics cards – and are considerably more expensive – has led to a concentration of bitcoin miners.
The top six mining pools by global processing power are Chinese, making up more than two-thirds of computational power or hashrate on the bitcoin network, according to blockchain.info.
In the other crypto trade, bitcoin cash rose 4.35% to $350.60 while Ethereum, the second largest cryptocurrencies by market cap, added 0.25% to $295.83.