Bitcoin recovered from its Thanksgiving scare, now all eyes are on $20,000

"Psychology, sell pressure keeps bitcoin below $20,000," says CoinDesk. The world's leading cryptocurrency has fully recovered from its 14% beatdown on Thanksgiving, bouncing back from a bottom of $16,684 to an all-time high of $19,900 last week, and setting in a $19,100 at the time of writing. Fueling the bullish sentiment right now is the fast adoption of bitcoin by institutional funds like Guggenheim Funds Trust, with $233 billion in assets, signaling their intention to invest up to $500 million in the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) in 2021. One of BlockRock's Chief Investment Officers, Rick Rieder, said in a CNBC interview this week that "cryptocurrencies are here to stay" and that "bitcoin is more functional than gold." In late July, prices for the gold soared to all-time highs amid concerns over the economic fallout from the pandemic, but institutional funds like Deutsche Bank have since turned bearish on gold — and bullish on bitcoin — as the dollar continues to collapse. The U.S. Dollar Index (DXY) has fallen from its highs of $102.82 in March to a low of $90.64 at the time of writing, a slide of nearly 12% this year. Check out Cointelegraph for tips on how you can monitor trading volume, long-to-short ratios, and other key metrics in the options markets as bitcoin attempts to break the $20,000 mental barrier. Bitcoin opened the year 2017 trading at $960, then spiked to a high of $19,380 by December, then crashed (by anyone's standard) to a low of $7,771 by February 2018. Despite the decline, Bitcoin still ended 2017 at $14,112, up 1,370%. Over 98% of all Bitcoin investors have been profitable, according to Bitcoin.com. The original Bitcoin White Paper was published on Halloween, October 31, 2008, by the mysterious software developer, Satoshi Nakamoto.