Bitcoin prices are collapsing almost as quickly as they originally skyrocketed.
The average price of Bitcoin fell below $200 on Wednesday, continuing a months-long decline that has pushed prices back down to the lowest level since October 2013.
The recent drop comes on the heels of the news that Bitstamp, a bitcoin exchange, reported that its wallets were compromised and had to temporarily shut down services. Bitcoin prices fell below $300 last week and continued to skid.
Some Bitcoin mining services like CEX.io, which make money by unlocking new bitcoins, have been forced to suspend operations due to the declining prices presumably cutting into profit margins.
"Taking into consideration our users’ interests, the recent Bitcoin price drop, as well as the upscaling of the mining difficulty, CEX.IO Bitcoin Exchange would like to announce a temporary suspension of cloud mining services provided by the platform at the time of the next difficulty increase," the company wrote in a blog post this week.
Bitcoin briefly climbed above the $1,000 mark at the end of 2013, but prices fell off a cliff in February of the following year after Mt. Gox, at one point the largest Bitcoin exchange, shut down.
Even as the price of Bitcoin has declined throughout the past year, certain Bitcoin startups have raised tens of millions of dollars in funding from big name investors.
[Disclosure: I own one bitcoin.]
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