Bitcoin price drops below $ 10,000 as President Trump slams crypto

Bitcoin fell sharply Monday, following criticism of President Donald Trump on cryptocurrencies.

According to CoinDesk data, the most valuable virtual currency in the world has fallen from about 10% to 10,175 USD. He briefly plunged below the $ 10,000 mark, falling to $ 9,872.

The reason for the downward movement was not immediately clear. But it happens after President Trump said last week that he was "not a fan of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency, which is not money, and whose the value is very volatile and based on tunes ".

"Unregulated cryptographic badets can facilitate illicit behavior, including drug trafficking and other illegal activities," added Trump.

Trump also criticized Facebook's plan to create a cryptocurrency, called Libra, which will be tied to a basket of currencies and badets backed by the government in order to maintain a stable value. Facebook should apply for a banking license if it wants to become a bank, Trump said.

Some in the encryption space ignored Trump's comments. Brian Armstrong, CEO of coinbase digital currency, said it was "a feat", putting crypto in the spotlight while Tom Lee of Fundstrat Global Advisors , called it "positive because crypto-currencies and bitcoin are really in the foreground".

Nevertheless, bitcoin is still up more than 160% since the beginning of the year, despite the recent decline. Analysts had attributed the bulk of the rise in digital currency to the new involvement of large companies such as Facebook.

Elsewhere on the market, Ether and XRP – the second and third largest cryptocurrencies in the world, were also in negative territory. Ether slipped nearly 17% to $ 221 while the XRP dropped 5% to about 31 cents.

In other cryptographic information, Chinese police confiscated about 4,000 computers belonging to bitcoin miners accused of stealing electricity worth nearly $ 3 million last week. . The extraction of bitcoins is known to be an energy intensive operation. A recent study indicates that it consumes as much energy as Switzerland.