By Yasin Ebrahim
Investing.com – Bitcoin continued to face a battle to hold onto the key $60,000 level on Tuesday, as traders appeared to rein in their bullish bets on the popular crypto amid a slew of negative headlines.
BTC/USD fell 5.3% to $59,739.4, though had briefly dripped below $60,000.
The reason for the slip in bitcoin wasn’t immediately clear, though market participants pointed to profit taking given the more than 100% gain the popular since its slip below $30,000 earlier this year.
Others, meanwhile, blamed the crackdown in China on BTC miners as well as the potential tax drag on bitcoin holders after President Joe Biden signed the $1 trillion infrastructure bill into law. Under the new legislazation, cryptocurrency brokers would be required to report incoming transaction over $10,000.
But the crackdown on China-based miners isn’t new, and Chinese miners have lost their clout in the crypto world as mining power has shifted from East to West.
The U.S. overtook China as leader in global bitcoin mining networks, according to data from the University of Cambridge, published last month.
Amidst the wave of negative headlines, there was some positive news, however, as the Square said its mobile financial platform Cash App would add support for the Taproot Bitcoin upgrade by December.
The taproot upgrade -- collectively made up of a trio of updates, or Bitcoin Improvement Proposals - Schnorr Signatures, Taproot, and Tapscript – went live on Nov. 14 and sought to improve Bitcoin’s core cryptography in three ways: speed, privacy, and programmability.