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

According to Coindesks 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 doesnt explain why it was such a good week for Ethers price.

Bitcoin still faces a scalability issues. It seems like bitcoin stakeholders cant 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 theres one thing I noticed. Prices tend to go up when theres 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.

Its 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.

See the article here:
Bitcoin and Ether prices hit all-time high - TechCrunch