Bitcoin trades slump as cryptocurrency’s rise stalls

The currency has been useful as a rival to traditional payments processors, as transfers made in Bitcoin can be near instantaneous and performed at very low cost compared with conventional services.

Preston Byrne, a fellow of the Adam Smith Institute and a commercial lawyer specialising in securitisation and cryptocurrency in the City of London, says that speculative investment in the currency has pushed up its price.

The Bitcoin protocol employs a built-in transaction fee of 0.1pc per transaction. Many users also choose to pay additional rewards so as to receive their orders more quickly. And as the currency has appreciated, so have the fees.

Mr Byrne suggests that while lower than late last year, historically elevated prices and equivalently high fees have been enough to put off many new buyers. As such, daily transaction volumes have slumped, falling to levels typical for 2012 - when Bitcoin was relatively unknown.

That has meant that many of the currency's immediate benefits such as lower transaction costs have been "significantly reduced", says Mr Byrne.

Higher nominal values have driven many users to trade exclusively within private exchanges, which do not show up publicly, as bitcoins are not moved about.

Account balances at these exchanges are merely updated, allowing users to avoid being stung by transaction fees.

Mr Byrne says that Bitcoins trading volume to date has consistently represented a very small number of the total tokens outstanding some estimates place it at less than 1pc of bitcoins in existence.

A study published last December - "A Fistful of Bitcoins: Characterizing Payments Among Men with No Names" - estimated that 64 to 75pc of the dominant cryptocurrency has never been spent.

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Bitcoin trades slump as cryptocurrency's rise stalls