The Media's Cringeworthy Coverage of Bitcoin's Latest Price Surge

If one would have thought that recent milestones - bitcoin's 10th anniversary, the arrival of crypto projects from the likes of JP Morgan and Facebook - would have encouraged the media to get smarter, this week's news shows attitudes at major publishers haven't changed much.

This is especially true during times of heavy market activity like that of bitcoin's April 2 breakout, which saw its price rise 17 percent over a 30-minute.

"To be clear, bitcoin is absolutely worthless by any real measure. It's fake money that's about as practical to use in the real world as Monopoly bills. Bitcoin is backed by nothing and requires tremendous amounts of energy to mine using computers."

For one, bitcoin definitely can act as a medium of exchange.

Finally, while the cost of mining bitcoin remains high thanks to its large energy consumption, this does not mean it cannot run off renewable energy.

It seems mainstream media tends to forget that the cost of mining bitcoin's physical competitor, gold, is perhaps even more guilty of harming the earth's environment as its miners regularly tear apart massive landscapes and leave behind loads of toxic waste.

Using an hourly view of bitcoin's price we can see just how much volume was recorded during a single trading period by looking at the volume bars and order books and then noting their readings.

At 4:00 UTC on April 2, Coinbase recorded a total of 6,889 units in a single hour and Bitstamp handled close to 3,798 units while Kraken had the least at 4,121 bitcoin units traded in the same hour.

Throughout 2018, CNBC and its subsequent panel show Fast Money made some outrageous comments regarding the direction of bitcoin's price and advice to investors.

Comments such as "Don't fear the dip, bitcoin will more than double in 2018" and "What will hit 25k first, bitcoin or the DOW," it's no wonder they have claimed such a bad reputation for calling a correct directional bias and sticking to it.