Bitcoin is closing in on its all-time high
The price of the red-hot currency was up more than 4% on Monday above $4,800 a coin, less than $200 shy of its all-time high of $4,983, according to data from Markets Insider.
Bitcoin hit nearly $5,000 at the beginning of September, but quickly saw its price decline amid news of a crackdown in China on the cryptocurrency and regulatory uncertainty around initial coin offerings, a cryptocurrency-based fundraising method. After bottoming out near $2,900 per coin on September 15, it has since rallied.
That's despite mounting criticism from some of Wall Street's most powerful players.
It all started on September 12 when JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon called bitcoin "a fraud" and said it was "worse than tulips bulbs" in the 1600s.
In a recent interview with Bloomberg News, Larry Fink, the head of BlackRock, the world's largest investor with $5.7 trillion under management, said he thinks the explosive growth of bitcoin points to nefarious behavior.
"It just identifies how much money laundering there is being done in the world," Fink said. "How much people are trying to move currencies from one place to another."
Kenneth Rogoff, the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, weighed in on bitcoin Monday, saying "in the long run, the technology will thrive, but that the price of bitcoin will collapse."