Bitcoin broke above $40,000 on Wednesday and headed for another attempt at breaking from its months-long range as short-sellers bailed out and traders drew confidence from recent positive comments about the cryptocurrency by high-profile investors.
Bitcoin was last up 1.7 per cent at $40,149 while rival cryptocurrency ether rose 1 per cent to $2,328.
Bitcoin is within a whisker of rising through its 100-day moving average.
is a decentralised digital currency, without a central bank or single administrator, that can be sent from user to user on the peer-to-peer bitcoin network without the need for intermediaries.
Transactions are verified by network nodes through cryptography and recorded in a public distributed ledger called a blockchain.
The cryptocurrency was invented in 2008 by an unknown person or group of people using the name Satoshi Nakamoto.
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The currency came into use in 2009 when its implementation was released as open-source software.
Bitcoins are created as a reward for a process known as mining.
They can be exchanged for other currencies, products, and services, but the real-world value of the coins is extremely volatile.
Research produced by the University of Cambridge estimated that in 2017, there were 2.9 to 5.8 million unique users using a cryptocurrency wallet, most of them using bitcoin.
Users choose to participate in the digital currency for a number of reasons: ideologies such as commitment to anarchism, decentralisation, and libertarianism, convenience, using the currency as an investment, and pseudonymity of transactions.
Increased use has led to a desire among governments for regulation in order to tax, facilitate legal use in trade, and for other reasons (such as investigations for money laundering and price manipulation).
