- Bitcoin dropped by nine per cent to $8,155 (£5,733) on Friday morning
- The cryptocurrency is so far down more than 30 percent this week
- Bitcoin is headed for its worst weekly performance since April 2013
Bitcoin fell nine per cent on Friday, leaving the best-known cryptocurrency down more than 30 per cent this week and headed for its worst weekly performance since April 2013.
Bitcoin had dropped to $8,155 (£5,733) at 09.15am GMT on the Luxembourg-based bitstamp exchange.
Other large cryptocurrencies have lost more than 20 percent of their value in the last 24 hours of trading, according to Coinmarketcap.com.
Low value: Bitcoin dropped to $8,155 (£5,733) on Friday morning, a nine per cent fall in value
It slid more than 26 percent last month, in its worst monthly performance since January 2015, and is down more than 55 per cent from a December peak of almost $20,000
A growing regulatory backlash against digital coins has sent investors scrambling to sell this week.
Last year’s explosive rise in the value of digital coins and the flood of new retail investors drawn to the market have rattled global regulators nervous about a sector used largely for speculation.
Officials have said cryptocurrencies are used by criminals to launder money.
Going lower: Bitcoin is down more than 30 percent this week and headed for its worst weekly performance since April 2013
Facebook said in a post on its website this week that it was banning all advertising that ‘promote financial products and services that are frequently associated with misleading or deceptive promotional practices, such as binary options, initial coin offerings and cryptocurrency’.
It was not clear whether the ban would affect all cryptocurrency adverts on the social media site.
International regulators are set to debate how to address the risks posed by the market at the next G20 meeting in March.
Bank of England governor Mark Carney said this week that the G20 needed to consider how easily digital coins should be converted into other central-bank issued currencies, as well as the role of anonymity, as ‘a lot of the underlying use of these currencies has been illicit activity’.