LONDON/NEW YORK, Dec 7 (Reuters) – Bitcoin rocketed to a lifetime high well above $16,000 on Thursday after climbing some 67 percent over one week, intensifying the debate about whether the cryptocurrency is in a bubble about to burst.

“Even though Xunlei has repeatedly said that OneCoin has nothing to do with ICOs and that it doesn’t conduct trading on a trading platform, in reality (if) OneCoin can be transferred between user accounts it is unavoidable that a third-party platform provides OneCoin trading services,” he said.

“(On) the regulation of this area in China, I have concluded that there is no clarity about what is and is not permitted,” said another choi bitcoin [skyfon-varna.eu] expert David Yermack, a professor at the New York University Stern School of Business.

Secureworks researchers have found evidence dating back to 2013 of North Korean interest in bitcoin, when multiple user names originating from computers using extremely rare North Korean internet addresses were found researching bitcoin.

Wild gyrations of 10-30 percent in a single day is quite common in bitcoin, which was last up 1.5 percent at $16,900. Investors have increasingly grown optimistic that the $20,000-mark is now within reach.

But critics say that the price run-up is a bubble that has been driven mostly by speculation, leaving bitcoin vulnerable to a sharp reversal. JPMorgan Chase Additional reporting by Daniel Bases; Editing by Abhinav Ramnarayan and Meredith Mazzilli)

The Lazarus cybercrime group is mounting an ongoing scheme to steal the online credentials of bitcoin industry insiders, a report published by researchers at U.S. cyber security firm Secureworks’s Counter Threat Unit (CTU) said on Friday.

The public sale of the tokens on December 8 comes amid explosive growth of ICOs to raise money in cryptocurrencies. An ICO allows the issuer to raise funds without having to fulfil often rigorous regulatory requirements that would have to be met by venture capitalists or companies in mainstream markets.

Russians looking forward to incorporating cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin into their lives awoke to less-than-stellar news Tuesday morning, as Russia now intends to block cryptocurrency exchanges and the websites that offer them.

“Bitcoin is to me very much like gold,” Grant Spencer, acting governor of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, told a local television program. “It’s mined, it has a fixed quantity and the price is very volatile.”

“It is clearly aimed at mainland players, who make up 90 percent of gaming volumes, giving them a digital way to circumvent the country’s forex controls,” he said. (Reporting by Farah Master; Additional reporting by Thomas Wilson in Tokyo; Editing by Martin Howell)

Yet another ban

Russia’s decision comes after China and South Korea imposed similar bans

on cryptocurrencies and initial coin offerings, though China’s is said to be temporary

. For Russia, specifically, it comes as a bit of a surprise. It was only last month that the country struck a deal to create Ethereum Russia

, and soon after, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov stated plans were in the works to legalize cryptocurrencies

.

“When thought of purely as a payment instrument, it seems more likely to be attractive to those who want to make transactions in the black or illegal economy, rather than everyday transactions,” Lowe said in the speech titled “An eAUD?”

Prices for the volatile cryptocurrency surged past $10,000 late last month and have continued to race upward toward $20,000. A single bitcoin traded above $17,500 on Friday, up more than 7 percent on the day and more than 18 times in the year to date.

, Central Bank First Deputy Governor Sergei Shvetsov called cryptocurrencies “dubious” during a conference in Moscow. He went on to add that digital currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum are something people shouldn’t be able to easily access.

Xunlei shares mushroomed six-fold in value after the company introduced its “Wanke coin mining” cryptocurrency project on Oct. 12, making it one of the raft of small listed firms to boom this year as bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies surged in value.

“The value of bitcoin is very volatile, the number of payments that can currently be handled is very low, there are governance problems, the transaction cost involved in making a payment with bitcoin is very high and the estimates of the electricity used in the process of mining the coins are staggering.”

One senior Beijing-based legal expert on China’s clampdown on cryptocurrencies and Initial Coin Offerings (ICO), Renmin Law School Vice-Dean Yang Dong, said the company’s digital coins were still likely to wind up being traded on secondary markets.

, the deputy governor further backed up the decision, saying financial instruments based on digital currencies are nearly impossible to support; additional regulations would need to be put into place to prevent the Russian domestic market from dealing in cryptocurrencies.