Bitcoin and Ether prices hit all-time high

Something is going on in the cryptocurrency world, but it’s hard to figure out why prices are jumping. Both bitcoin and Ether prices are currently trading at an all-time high.

According to Coindesk’s price index, you could buy one bitcoin for $1,343 earlier today. It roughly represents a 6 percent increase in 7 days, and a 34 percent increase in a month.

And when it comes to the price of an ether, things are even more impressive. One ether is currently worth $64.04, up around 24 percent in just a week.

Ether prices are a bit correlated to bitcoin prices as many people trade bitcoins against Ethers. But it doesn’t explain why it was such a good week for Ether’s price.

Bitcoin still faces a scalability issues. It seems like bitcoin stakeholders can’t agree on a solution to make some improvements on the core bitcoin protocol to speed up transactions and lower transaction fees. As a result, it has never been so expensive and slow to send and receive bitcoins.

But there’s one thing I noticed. Prices tend to go up when there’s bad news around the world. If Donald Trump tweets about North Korea, chances are it will have positive effect on cryptocurrencies.

Conversely, I noticed a micro-crash minutes after the results of the first round of the French election — prices went up again minutes later. Marine Le Pen arrived second, which was a good sign for traditional currencies like USD and EUR.

It’s still hard to predict those market changes as many depend on macro-economic rules in China. But as many worry about the current political outlook, cryptocurrencies could counterintuitively look like a safe investment.