Investing.com - Bitcoin inched down on Monday, as floods in China and a European heat wave weighed on global mining capacity.
Bitcoin was trading at $6,715.80, falling 0.44% on the Bitfinex exchange, as of 9:09 AM ET (13:09 GMT). Bitcoin has struggled to gain ground in recent months, falling nearly 70% since its peak of almost $20,000 in December.
The hashrate or crypto mining capacity was lower as floods in Sichuan, China and a heatwave in Europe rendered mining farms useless. The floods have left hundreds of thousands of people homeless and has enveloped mining equipment.
China miners produce about 50% to 70% of the worlds bitcoin, despite the Chinese government banning access to cryptocurrency platforms and exchanges.
Cryptocurrencies overall were lower, with the coin market cap of total market capitalization down at $273 billion at the time of writing compared to $280 billion on Sunday.
Ethereum fell 0.86% to $481.06 on the Bitfinex exchange. Ripple, the third largest virtual currency, decreased 1.45% to $0.47740 while Litecoin was at $82.287, down 2.02%.
In other news, a French official doesn’t think virtual currencies should be regulated.
Jean-Pierre Landau, head of a government cryptocurrency task force to investigate French blockchain regulatory policy said regulators should be cautious of misidentifying the alternative currencies. Regulating digital coins could push innovators to avoid regulation, he added.
“The danger is three-pronged: that of freezing the rapid evolution of technology in legislation, that of failing to grasp the real nature of the object we intend to regulate and that of pushing innovation towards regulatory avoidance. On the contrary, regulation should be technologically neutral, and in order to become so, address the actors and not the products themselves,” he said.