The grandfather of all cryptocurrencies extended its brutal price slide last Wednesday, adding to its recent loses amid another wave of negative news.
A single bitcoin was trading for $8,701.19, down nearly 5% overnight, and has dragged all other major digital currencies along for the bearish ride.
The losses felt in the crypto world thus far this year intensified after Google announced that it had updated its financial services policy. In it, the company states that ads will no longer be allowed for "cryptocurrencies and related content."
Google went on to state that the "related content" includes initial coin offerings (ICOs), cryptocurrency exchanges, cryptocurrency trading advice, and digital wallets.
The latest marketing move was triggered by the rapid rise in Bitcoin's popularity and also how that has inspired countless scams to pop up all over its online platforms.
Facebook, you may recall, announced its own crypto ad ban this past January for the very same reasons.
Google's ad restrictions are set to come into effect this June.
Google's director of sustainable ads, Scott Spencer, refused to comment on how much revenue the company could be turning away with this ban. But he did state the following in the announcement:
"Improving the ads experience across the web, whether that's removing harmful ads or intrusive ads, will continue to be a top priority for us."
The number of ads that tried to harvest personal information, distribute malware, and otherwise violate Google's policies doubled from 2016 to 2017.
The company said it took down more than 3.2 billion ads violating its policies in 2017, up from the 1.7 billion ads that it removed in 2016, and is dedicated to weeding out all deceptive content from its platforms.
Google's parent company, Alphabet, makes roughly 84% of its total revenue from advertising. So, convincing advertisers and consumers that its ecosystem is safe and effective is critical.
This financial advertising crackdown comes amid continued pressure on the search titan, which also owns YouTube, over the way that it runs its advertising platforms.
The company has been criticized by the press and politicians for allowing everything on its platform from radicalism to profiting from addicts through lax policing of its content and advertising.
Over the past year, all forms of digital currencies exploded onto the scene because of the astronomical surge in Bitcoin at the end of 2017.
This coincided with a boom in ICOs. With many of these ICOs, startups would issue their own cryptocurrencies in exchange for money to build their businesses.
But the entire space is highly unregulated, so it's attracted a lot of scammers looking to prey on the uninformed and also make quick money.
Last year, Business Insider reported on how commonplace sham ICOs had become. And the numbers were staggering.
The new policy will even exclude companies with legitimate cryptocurrency offerings from serving ads through any of Google's ad products, which places advertising on its own sites and third-party websites.
"We don't have a crystal ball to know where the future is going to go with cryptocurrencies, but we've seen enough consumer harm or potential for consumer harm that it's an area that we want to approach with extreme caution," Spencer said.
There's still a lot of work to be done, though.
Following Bitcoin's downward trend after the ad banishment, Ethereum was down 4.9% to $657.32, Bitcoin Cash was down 5.5% to $1,009.59, Litecoin fell 5.7% to $166.01, and Ripple fell 4.5% to $0.75, according to CoinDesk.
So, sorry digital currency investors — it appears that the overall crypto-regulatory rot continues...
That's all for now.
Until next time
John Peterson
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