Motley Fool Australia » Investing » Bitcoin just hit an all-time high: Is it too late to invest?

The incredible run of the Bitcoin price continued this morning when the cryptocurrency climbed to an all-time high of US$6,306.58 according to CoinDesk.

This latest gain brought its year-to-date return to a staggering 500%.

While it has since given back some of these gains, at the time of writing Bitcoin is fetching US$6,115.23.

What happened?

Last week Bitcoin split once again to create Bitcoin Gold. Although Bitcoin Gold hasn’t fared very well since the split, much like its previous split with Bitcoin Cash, the Bitcoin price has not let that hold it back and has raced higher.

Bitcoin Gold had a disappointing start to life as a cryptocurrency. A distributed denial of service attack on its servers led to its website going down immediately after launch.

Since then the price of Bitcoin Gold has sunk from as high as US$528 last week to US$131.44 today.

But things have been looking far better for the original Bitcoin thanks partly to a spot of positive press from billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel.

Last week at the Future Investment Initiative in Saudi Arabia, Thiel said that people were underestimating the cryptocurrency and stated his belief that its primary use is as a separate store of value like gold.

Should you invest?

Like Thiel, I’m cautiously optimistic on Bitcoin. While I do think that a little exposure to Bitcoin could arguably diversify a portfolio, I would only want it to be a very small part of my portfolio.

But considering the price of Bitcoin, investors would need a sizeable portfolio to make that possible. This may well be out of the reach of the average investor.

So instead of looking at Bitcoin, I would suggest investors consider some of Australia’s top tech shares such as Aconex Ltd (ASX: ACX) and Altium Limited (ASX: ALU).