Bitcoin price growth surpasses fiat currency, even Google and Apple's stock prices can't match it

Bitcoin has gained nearly 30 percent so far this year, while the world’s first decentralized cryptocurrency has managed to escape regulatory woes and internal political problems.

Surpasses almost all fiat currencies and stocks

Why do we need an ETF when we can buy Bitcoin directly? Since 2017, the price of Bitcoin has increased by nearly 30%, and the recent rise in the price of the currency is just the beginning.

Since January, the world’s first decentralized cryptocurrency has not cared less about ETF rejections, Chinese exchange crises, and hard fork panic, once again outperforming all global fiat currencies.

Bitcoin price growth has even outpaced stocks of most companies including Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Google.

Bitcoin wasn’t even the best performing cryptocurrency in the first quarter of 2017. According to blocklink.info data, Dash, Ethereum (ETH) and Monero were the top performers.

In the traditional financial sector, only MoneyGram (50%) and Tesla (41%) have seen their share prices exceed the price of the cryptocurrency. In addition, the price of an ounce of gold was on par with the cryptocurrency in early March. During this period, gold also rose by 11%, also surpassing the growth of all fiat currencies in an environment of extremely high global economic uncertainty.

The top three currencies with the highest growth this year are the Mexican peso (11%), the Russian ruble (10%) and the Japanese yen (6%).

Traditional investors have no reason to ignore this fact: in the eight years since Bitcoin was launched, its price has exceeded that of national fiat currencies in seven of them. The price of the currency has only fallen in one year, which was 2014.

New heights of coin prices in 2017

There are many reasons driving the rise in Bitcoin prices. However, the most important factor seems to be the increased possibility of Segregated Witness (Segwit) activation.

Segregated Witness is a fix for transaction malleability and is also thought to alleviate existing capacity constraints by increasing the network’s transaction throughput.

Meanwhile, the development of SegWit in cryptocurrencies such as Litecoin (LTC), Syscoin and DigiByte has also led to a rise in their prices. Currently, as the possibility of SegWit activation becomes increasingly likely, many commentators are expecting Bitcoin to break the $1,277 record.

Litecoin’s price quadrupled after founder Charlie Lee announced his support for SegWit activation. Bitfury CEO George Kikvadze believes Bitcoin’s price will also rise sharply after SegWit activation.

At the same time, BU support is gradually decreasing. Due to a memory leak, the number of BU nodes dropped from 730 to 259 yesterday.

According to a Coin Dance survey, 88% of Bitcoin companies "clearly support" or "are ready to support" Segregated Witness, and only 6% "clearly" oppose it; 23% support the BU emergency consensus plan, while 30% oppose it.