Yes, 2018, the 10th anniversary of Bitcoin, was the best ever year for the original cryptocurrency. 

Speculators claim that this is a temporary crash but market analysts argue that it may be all over for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Should we continue to follow the hype or finally begin to exercise caution?

Bitcoin has witnessed a meteoric rise. With every blistering ascent to the next record breaking level of Bitcoin – having breached the incredible $20.000 mark - the hype becomes bigger, and even bigger, the predictions of doom.

In August of 2008, the domain bitcoin.org was registered, and only three months later, a mysterious entity posted the original bitcoin whitepaper. Authored by Satoshi Nakamoto, an entity claiming to be a 36-year old Japanese man, the whitepaper is only a nine page document outlining the core fundamentals of bitcoin, and was followed by the first open source bitcoin client in January of 2009. Satoshi himself mined the first block, called the genesis block, which had a reward of 50 bitcoins.

The process of mining bitcoins is similar to a lottery. Bitcoin miners are competing to produce hashes—alphanumeric strings of fixed length that are calculated from data of an arbitrary length. They are producing the hashes from a combination of three pieces of data: New blocks of Bitcoin transactions; the last block on the blockchain; and a random number. In this article, we will analyse hashing and the digital signature process to understand their use past Bitcoin transaction verification alone. 

Bitcoin, like Gold is mined. There are finite amounts of each and there are costs of mining both. Gold is used as a trade currency, investment currency and a reserve currency. Bitcoin is rarely traded for real goods, barely classifies as an investment and is far from a reserve currency, despite what companies such as Magister Advisors would have you think.

A year goes by so quickly. The one minute you’re at the beginning, wondering what the next 12 months will bring. Before you know it, you’re at a Christmas party. Ok…… perhaps it’s not that swift, but it sometimes feels like that. In the tech world, a year is a very long time, though. So much progress takes place in 12 months, and it’s only when you look back at a perspective written 12 months prior, do you realize how much the landscape has moved. 

Bitcoin is taking the world by storm. The digital currency most fervent supporters celebrate it as something akin to a monetary messiah. Money is changing as electronic and mobile communication devices have become a new interface for storing, spending, paying and keeping track of transactions. We are heading to a new era of digital non-state currencies.

Bitcoin has recently hit a new all time high, shattering the $5,000 barrier climbing up to over $5800 before settling back in the $5500s. Only two months ago, bitcoin went through a fairly big hard fork, in which a second currency was created: Bitcoin Cash. If you held bitcoin before August 1st, then you technically also hold an equal number of bitcoin cash coins. Bitcoin Cash is an alternative currency, though, and does not share the same value nor market capitalization that bitcoin does.

Right now is absolutely the prime time to talk about cryptocurrencies. In November 2017, the value of Bitcoin exploded, surging so quickly, that it was the catalyst to bring Bitcoin into the public lexicon. However, Bitcoin is just the most well known of the cryptocurrencies - there’s a whole world of them out there. Many people who have been investigating cryptocurrencies have come across something called Ethereum. What is Ethereum ?