Bitcoin price dives below $12,000, down 40% from last week's highs

Well, it can't just go up all the time. 

After an incredible rally in the first part of December, which saw Bitcoin's price nearly double from $10,240 to $19,994, the popular cryptocurrency is losing value, fast. 

The price dropped by a quarter in the last 24 hours alone, and Bitcoin is currently trading at $12,874, according to CoinMarketCap.

UPDATE: Dec. 22, 2017, 3:23 p.m. CET Bitcoin price continued its free fall throughout the morning, with the price momentarily going to around $11,000 on some exchanges. The second largest cryptocurrency by market cap, Ethereum, plunged below $550 at one point. 

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As it usually happens in the world of cryptocurrencies, most other coins are following suit: Ethereum is down 27.4 percent, Bitcoin Cash is down 36.3 percent, Ripple is down 6.2 percent and Litecoin is down 29 percent in the last 24 hours. 

Image: coinmarketcap.com

There's no obvious explanation for the price drop. There's been a fair amount of news on Bitcoin lately, including Russia's announcement of new cryptocurrency regulation, but none of it extremely negative. One possible trigger could be the rise in price of Bitcoin Cash, which recently got listed on Coinbase, and is touted by several prominent people in the crypto community as a better Bitcoin alternative. But whatever the trigger, the current fall is likely a much needed correction of an overheated market. 

The correction wiped approximately $179 bililon from the total market cap of all cryptocurrencies, which is now $471 billion.

If all this sounds dramatic, remember that the price of Bitcoin is still up roughly 30 percent since Dec. 1, and 1,300 percent since the beginning of the year. Cryptocurrencies are extremely volatile, and sudden price drops of this magnitude have happened before, and they're likely to happen again. 

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