Skip to main content

Bitcoin just passed $4,000




What a day for Bitcoin.

24 hours ago the cryptocurrency was trading below $3,700. About an hour ago it surged passed $4,000 and has no signs of stopping. It’s now trading around $4,135.00. For reference, a week ago Bitcoin hit an all-time high as it passed $3,000 for the first time.

Check out the chart below to see what the price has done in the last 24 hours.



So the million dollar bitcoin question is…why now?

Without wasting too much of your Saturday night with detailed analysis, here are a few possible reasons you can tell your friends during brunch tomorrow.

Two weeks ago Bitcoin went through a hard fork, and came out essentially unscathed. Sure, a bitcoin-clone called Bitcoin Cash was created, but it’s gotten a lot less attention than most people expected. A few days later Bitcoin locked in SegWit, a code modification that fixes malleability issues and frees up space in blocks, allowing for more transactions to be stored in each one.

These two code-related developments have helped boost conference in Bitcoin’s future.


Another reason – the ICO frenzy. The amount recently raised via initial coin offerings have now (at least temporally) topped amount raised via early stage venture capital. Just last week Filecoin raised $180 million in a few hours. Most investors have to convert fiat currency to bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies to participate in ICOs, which could be driving up the price (and providing some investors with their first taste of bitcoin).

Another reason – Wall Street’s new obsession is bitcoin. You can’t watch CNBC for five minutes without seeing a trader or analyst give their opinion – which is usually something insanely bullish like “it’s going to be the best performing investment of the year”. For better or for worse, statements like these are getting non-technically inclined investors interested in bitcoin, some of which are definitely buying coins for the first time.

So what happens next? No one knows. Bitcoin could crash 50% to $2,000 tomorrow or spike to $5,000 – and I don’t think anyone who truly knows crypto would be surprised at either option. E

veryone has a different opinion – some say the bubble is oversized and should have popped months ago – others think that bitcoin is currently just a fraction of what it could eventually trade at.

Whichever camp you fall in, here’s one friendly reminder: don’t invest more than you can afford to lose – because if you ask anyone who’s spent more than a few months in the cryptocurrency world they’ll tell you it’s a roller coaster.

More@ https://www.technapping.com

Source: Techcrunch

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

WTF is bitcoin cash and is it worth anything?

Early yesterday morning bitcoin’s blockchain forked — meaning a separate cryptocurrency was created called bitcoin cash . The way a fork works is instead of creating a totally new cryptocurrency (and blockchain) starting at block 0, a fork just creates a duplicate version that shares the same history. So all past transactions on bitcoin cash’s new blockchain are identical to bitcoin core’s blockchain, with future transactions and balances being totally independent from each other. For practical matters, all this really means is that everyone who owned bitcoin before the fork now has an identical amount of bitcoin cash that is recorded in bitcoin cash’s forked blockchain. But it’s not exactly this easy. If you control your own private keys, or hold your bitcoin in an exchange that said it would credit users’ balances with bitcoin cash, you’re fine and can access your newfound cryptocurrency right now. If you held your bitcoin with a provider like Coinbase, which said before the fork t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Walmart expands its grocery delivery business, powered by Uber

Walmart is expanding a test of its grocery delivery service, powered by Uber, the company announced this week. The retailer is now offering grocery delivery in two new markets — Dallas and Orlando — which join Tampa and Phoenix as locations where consumers can shop online for grocery items, then opt to have them come to their home for an additional $9.95 fee. Grocery delivery has been something Walmart has experimented with for years, starting with tests in Denver and San Jose of grocery delivery using its own service and trucks. The tests involving Uber are newer, however. In June, 2016, Walmart began a trial in Phoenix, which expanded to Tampa this March. In those locations, Walmart offers grocery delivery at five local stores per market. This week’s Dallas test is larger, with 8 stores participating. In Orlando, there are four stores involved. The grocery delivery service is available via the same online grocery shopping website where customers can place their pick-up orders — a s...
Post a Comment
Read more

OpenAI bot remains undefeated against world’s greatest Dota 2 players

Last night, OpenAI’s Dota 2 bot beat the world’s most celebrated professional players in one-on-one battles, showing just how advanced these machine learning systems are getting. The bot beat Danil “Dendi” Ishutin rather easily at The International, one of the biggest eSports events in the world, and remains undefeated against the world’s top Dota 2 players. Elon Musk’s OpenAI trained the bot by simply copying the AI and letting the two play each other for weeks on end. “We’ve coached it to learn just from playing against itself,” said OpenAI researcher Jakub Pachoki . “So we didn’t hard-code in any strategy, we didn’t have it learn from human experts, just from the very beginning, it just keeps playing against a copy of itself. It starts from complete randomness and then it makes very small improvements, and eventually it’s just pro level.” To be clear, a 1v1 battle in Dota 2 is far less complex than an actual professional battle, which includes two teams of five players completing...
Post a Comment
Read more