Bitcoin mining is intentionally designed to be resource-intensive and difficult so that the number of blocks found each day by miners remains steady. Individual blocks must contain a proof of work to be considered valid. This proof of work is verified by other Bitcoin nodes each time they receive a block. Bitcoin uses the hashcash proof-of-work function.
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It should also be noted that the timestamps on the subsequent blocks indicate that Nakamoto did not mine the first blocks in an attempt to keep them for himself and make profit this way. Yes, Nakamoto was awarded Bitcoins as he was the first and a sole miner for some time, but this continued only for about 10 days after the launch of the Bitcoin network. The only thing that Nakamoto used his Bitcoins for was a few test transactions. Starting from around mid-January of 2009, those Bitcoins were left unspent. Anyone can check the public log of Nakamoto’s Bitcoin address, which shows roughly 1 million Bitcoins. This amount of Bitcoins is roughly equal to about $2.8 billion USD. Needless to say, Nakamoto’s invention was a success.
A bigger concern is that, as the mining pools have got bigger, it no longer seems inconceivable that a bunch of miners might amass enough capacity to dominate the system and become capable of mounting a 51% attack. Last June one pool, GHash.IO, had the bitcoin community running scared by briefly touching that level, before some users switched to other pools.
So how exactly does the blockchain function? It’s actually a lot simpler than you think. Whenever a transaction is authorized and added to the ledger, it is replicated amongst all the nodes on the network. This means that every computer that is connected to a network which is using a blockchain has a copy of this ledger stored on their machine. Every time another transaction occurs, it is updated. Because these ledgers are simultaneously being kept on multiple machines, messing with or editing them is pretty much impossible. Furthermore, because it is being replicated and updated on all machines, there is no single point of failure, meaning if something happens to one ledger, there are thousands of others that can verify the data and omit the faulty one.
The DAO was the first attempt at fundraising for a new token on Ethereum. It promised to create a decentralized organization that would fund other blockchain projects, but it was unique in that governance decisions would be made by the token holders themselves. While the DAO was successful in terms of raising money – over $150 million – an unknown attacker was able to drain millions from the organization because of technical vulnerabilities. The Ethereum Foundation decided the best course of action was to move forward with a hard fork, allowing them to claw back the stolen funds.
Bitcoin was born with serious flaws. It was unregulated and provided anonymity, so it rapidly became a haven for drug dealers and anarchists. Its price fluctuated wildly, allowing for crazy speculation. And, with the majority of Bitcoin being owned by the small group that started promoting it, it has been compared to a Ponzi scheme. Exchanges built on top of it also had severe security vulnerabilities. And then there were the venture capitalists who got carried away. Several of them purchased considerable coinage and then began to hype it as a powerful disruption that could underpin all manner of financial innovation, from mobile banking to borderless, instant money transfers. They also poured millions of dollars into Bitcoin start-ups hoping to reap even greater fortunes.
One of the most common analogies that people use for Bitcoin is that it’s like mining gold. Just like the precious metal, there is only a limited amount (there will only ever be 21 million bitcoin) and the more that you take out, the more difficult and resource intensive it is to find. Apart from that, Bitcoin actually works quite differently and it’s actually quite genius once you can get your head around it. One of the major differences is that mining doesn’t necessarily create the bitcoin. Bitcoin is given to miners as a reward for validating the previous transactions. So how do they do it?
Over the last year, the value of the hyper-anonymous cryptocurrency Monero grew 2,760 percent, making it almost certainly the best-performing cryptocurrency of 2016. Today each Monero is worth around $12, compared with just 50 cents at the beginning of last year, and the collective value of all Monero has grown to close to $165 million. The source of that explosive growth seems to be Monero’s unique privacy properties that go well beyond the decentralization that makes Bitcoin so resistant to control by governments and banks. It’s instead designed to be far more private: fully anonymous, and virtually untraceable.
Jump up ^ Andolfatto, David (31 March 2014). “Bitcoin and Beyond: The Possibilities and Pitfalls of Virtual Currencies” (PDF). Dialogue with the Fed. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Archived (PDF) from the original on 9 April 2014. Retrieved 16 April 2014.
Bollywood and Bitcoin sounds strange together, right? With all the Bitcoin hype these days and people going gaga over the rising price of the cryptocurrency, our tinseltown stars are no behind. Just a heads up for those who still are unaware about Bitcoin; it is a cryptocurrency invented in 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto using Block […]
The difficulty is the measure of how difficult it is to find a new block compared to the easiest it can ever be. The rate is recalculated every 2,016 blocks to a value such that the previous 2,016 blocks would have been generated in exactly one fortnight (two weeks) had everyone been mining at this difficulty. This is expected yield, on average, one block every ten minutes.
Despite RBI’s reluctance to recognize the cyptocurrency, the interest in Bitcoins in India has not waned. After Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s demonetisation move, Ahmedabad-based bitcoin trading start-up Zebpay witnessed a 25 per cent surge in revenue.
Litecoin, launched in the year 2011, was among the initial cryptocurrencies following bitcoin and was often referred to as ‘silver to Bitcoin’s gold.’ It was created by Charlie Lee, a MIT graduate and former Google engineer. Litecoin is based on an open source global payment network that is not controlled by any central authority and uses “scrypt” as a proof of work, which can be decoded with the help of CPUs of consumer grade. Although Litecoin is like Bitcoin in many ways, it has a faster block generation rate and hence offers a faster transaction confirmation. Other than developers, there are a growing number of merchants who accept Litecoin.
Awareness of my forgotten PIN had become something like tinnitus—always in the background, hard to ignore, annoying. What was wrong with my brain? Would I have remembered the PIN if I was in my 20s or 30s? I was feeling sorry for myself when I saw an email from Satoshi Labs, manufacturer of the Trezor, arrive in my inbox.
r/Altcoin r/Best_of_Crypto r/BitcoinMarkets r/Blockchain r/BitcoinMining r/Bitcoin_Unlimited r/BitcoinXT r/CryptoMarkets r/CryptoRecruiting r/CryptoTrade r/DoItForTheCoin r/EthTrader r/Jobs4Crypto r/Liberland r/LitecoinMarkets r/LitecoinMining r/OpenBazaar r/XMRtrader r/GPUmining
Some Argentinians have bought bitcoins to protect their savings against high inflation or the possibility that governments could confiscate savings accounts.[88] During the 2012–2013 Cypriot financial crisis, bitcoin purchases in Cyprus rose due to fears that savings accounts would be confiscated or taxed.[125]
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so the advice I will give is that any cryptocurrency that is not just there to serve as a coins or a trading asset but provides more services is bound to survive and you can invest in it in the long term. Such cryptocurrencies are springing up everywhere.
KROPS launched in January of 2017 in the Philippines. In that first month, 9 transactions were made for a total of $1,200 USD. By March, the app had 3,000 users registered, $16.7M in transactions as of December, and a total of 100M USD in product inventory. October 2017 saw 4.2M transact—in just one month. Today, the users have doubled and the total product has tripled. That’s an upward trajectory and unprecedented rise.
Golem. This technology will allow you to rent out unused computing power. They believe they are creating one of the next internet norms, and I believe it. If you expect the world to be run by computers in the next 5 years, then this coin should be part of your portfolio.
Nakamoto, who claimed to be a thirty-six-year-old Japanese man, said he had spent more than a year writing the software, driven in part by anger over the recent financial crisis. He wanted to create a currency that was impervious to unpredictable monetary policies as well as to the predations of bankers and politicians. Nakamoto’s invention was controlled entirely by software, which would release a total of twenty-one million bitcoins, almost all of them over the next twenty years. Every ten minutes or so, coins would be distributed through a process that resembled a lottery. Miners—people seeking the coins—would play the lottery again and again; the fastest computer would win the most money.
Security and control – Bitcoin users are in full control of their transactions; it is impossible for merchants to force unwanted or unnoticed charges as can happen with other payment methods. Bitcoin payments can be made without personal information tied to the transaction. This offers strong protection against identity theft. Bitcoin users can also protect their money with backup and encryption.
Mr. Palmer, a laid-back Australian who works as a product manager in the Bay Area and describes himself as “socialist leaning,” was disturbed by the commercialization of his joke currency. He had never collected Dogecoin for himself, and had resisted efforts to cash in on the currency’s success, even turning down a $500,000 investment offer from an Australian venture capital firm.
Bitcoin mining has been designed to become more optimized over time with specialized hardware consuming less energy, and the operating costs of mining should continue to be proportional to demand. When Bitcoin mining becomes too competitive and less profitable, some miners choose to stop their activities. Furthermore, all energy expended mining is eventually transformed into heat, and the most profitable miners will be those who have put this heat to good use. An optimally efficient mining network is one that isn’t actually consuming any extra energy. While this is an ideal, the economics of mining are such that miners individually strive toward it.
In addition to lining the pockets of miners, mining serves a second and vital purpose: It is the only way to release new cryptocurrency into circulation. In other words, miners are basically “minting” currency. For example, as of the time of writing this piece, there were about 17 million Bitcoin in circulation. Aside from the coins minted via the genesis block (the very first block created by Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto himself), every single one of those Bitcoin came into being because of miners. In the absence of miners, Bitcoin would still exist and be usable, but there would never be any additional Bitcoin. There will come a time when Bitcoin mining ends; per the Bitcoin Protocol, the number of Bitcoin will be capped at 21 million. (Related reading: What Happens to Bitcoin After All 21 Million are Mined?)
The enigmatic Mr Nakamoto designed the system to keep everybody honest. For instance, successful miners have to wait for a further 99 blocks of transactions to be processed before they get their rewards—so there is a constantly refreshed pool of participants with an interest in ensuring that everyone else keeps to the rules.
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Real Life Use. Does the coin offer a real life use? Some coins are used as a store of value (like Bitcoin, Dash, ZCash, Etc.) while others are used for entirely different purposes, such as Lucid Exchange with decentralized derivatives trading. Make sure to invest in coins that have a future use, and aren’t simply another replica of some of the existing coins. We’ll cover some of these examples below.
The brainchild of Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn, Zcash is a further iteration of the zerocoin project. It is fundamentally the same as Bitcoin but it provides an extra layer of security and anonymity. But as per the development team, it’s not because they want to endorse illegal activity.
Most cryptocurrencies are designed to gradually decrease production of currency, placing an ultimate cap on the total amount of currency that will ever be in circulation, mimicking precious metals.[1][16] Compared with ordinary currencies held by financial institutions or kept as cash on hand, cryptocurrencies can be more difficult for seizure by law enforcement.[1] This difficulty is derived from leveraging cryptographic technologies.
Paint mixing is a good way to think about the one-way nature of hash functions, but it doesn’t capture their unpredictability. If you substitute light pink paint for regular pink paint in the example above, the result is still going to be pretty much the same purple, just a little lighter. But with hashes, a slight variation in the input results in a completely different output:
Cryptocurrencies are not immune to the threat of hacking. In Bitcoin’s short history, the company has been subject to over 40 thefts, including a few that exceeded $1 million in value. Still, many observers look at cryptocurrencies as hope that a currency can exist that preserves value, facilitates exchange, is more transportable than hard metals, and is outside the influence of central banks and governments.
The use of bitcoin by criminals has attracted the attention of financial regulators, legislative bodies, law enforcement, and the media.[181] In the United States, the FBI prepared an intelligence assessment,[182] the SEC issued a pointed warning about investment schemes using virtual currencies,[181] and the U.S. Senate held a hearing on virtual currencies in November 2013.[81]
Bitcoin mining is competitive and the goal is that you want to solve or “find” a block before anyone else’s miner does. Then you will get the block reward and transaction fees from the block. During the last several years we have seen an incredible amount of hashrate coming online which made it harder to have enough hashrate personally (individually) to solve a block, thus getting the payout reward. To compensate for this pool mining was developed.
In the early days of Bitcoin, anyone could find a new block using their computer’s CPU. As more and more people started mining, the difficulty of finding new blocks increased greatly to the point where the only cost-effective method of mining today is using specialized hardware. You can visit BitcoinMining.com for more information.
The New York Post has published a news article based on a report by researchers at Germany’s RWTH Aachen University.[185] The researchers said “Our analysis shows that certain content, e.g., illegal pornography, can render the mere possession of a blockchain illegal”.[186]
The system of rewarding successful miners with bitcoin has proved an effective way to get the currency into circulation. Operators of conventional payment systems live on transaction fees, but that business model would not have worked for bitcoin in its early days, because of a lack of users. However, as bitcoin becomes more popular, the idea is that miners will be able to start charging significant transaction fees, and that these will become their main source of income. It will need to: the system cuts the reward for solving puzzles every four years or so.
The population is booming, and by the year 2050, our world is going to require a 70% increase of food production just to maintain our current functionality and distribution throughout the world. That’s startling.
[ Before venturing into ICO’s, it’s important to have a sound understanding of the blockchain, how cryptocurrencies function and the right steps to take when entering the crypto market. Investopedia Academy’s Cryptocurrency for Beginners course provides an educational roadmap that leads to your successful entry into the world of crypto. Check it out today! ]
Security of the network. Are there enough network nodes? Is there a system in place to ensure that the blockchain network will always have enough people to remain decentralized? If you can’t answer yes to these questions, then don’t invest in the coin.
The beautiful part about trading Bitcoin is that there are limited rules and regulations set regarding cryptocurrencies around the world. This means that you aren’t limited by your government with your transactions. However, some countries have very strict rules when it comes to trading cryptocurrencies, such as Russia. If you reside in one of these countries make sure that you are operating within you legal parameters.
Physical wallets store offline the credentials necessary to spend bitcoins.[63] One notable example was a novelty coin with these credentials printed on the reverse side.[73] Paper wallets are simply paper printouts.
An ASIC designed to mine bitcoins can only mine bitcoins and will only ever mine bitcoins. The inflexibility of an ASIC is offset by the fact that it offers a 100x increase in hashing power while reducing power consumption compared to all the previous technologies.
The short answer is maybe. Legally, ICOs have existed in an extremely gray area because arguments can be made both for and against the fact that they’re just new, unregulated financial assets. The SEC’s recent decision, however, has since managed to clear up some of that gray area. In some cases, the token is simply a utility token, meaning it gives the owner access to a specific protocol or network; thus it may not be classified as a financial security. On the other hand, if the token is an equity token, meaning that it’s only purpose is to appreciate in value, then it looks a lot more like a security.
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Almost all groups launching ICOs reiterate some version of this idea to potential buyers, in part as a kind of incantation to ward off financial regulators. The thinking is that, if they are selling part of a platform, rather than stakes in any company, they’re not subject to oversight by bodies like the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. But in practice, ICOs are constantly traded across a variety of online marketplaces as buyers breathlessly track their fluctuating prices. In this light, they look an awful lot like speculative investments.
This cryptocurrency platform is world’s largest distributed computing system. Ethereum is also the most used platform for creating ICO projects, with around 50% market share. This gives you an idea of Ethereum’s popularity.
The system allows transactions to be performed in which ownership of the cryptographic units is changed. A transaction statement can only be issued by an entity proving the current ownership of these units.
This appears to be the first time since McAfee has made his bullish bet that the Bitcoin price has dipped below the steady growth trend-line, and it indicates that McAfee is on track to lose his bet — and face the grisly consequences.
I knew it would be a mistake to waste a precious guess in my agitated condition. My mind had become polluted with scrambled permutations of PINs. I went into the kitchen to chop vegetables for a curry we were making for dinner. But I couldn’t think of much else besides the PIN. As I cut potatoes into cubes, I mentally shuffled around numbers like they were Scrabble tiles on a rack. After a while, a number popped into my head: 55144545. That was it! I walked from the kitchen to the office. The Trezor still had a few hundred seconds left on the countdown timer. I did email until it was ready for my attempt. I tapped in 55144545.
NEO is not mineable just like XRP. Instead, the platform has another cryptocurrency called GAS, which is mineable in a way. And the way you mine GAS is by holding NEO. Currently, this feature is only available at a popular exchange called Binance.
A Canadian businessman agreed to sell four gold castings of South African leader Nelson Mandela’s hands. For $10 million in bitcoin, a cryptocurrency firm launching an initial coin offering (ICO) has agreed to the purchase, promising a world tour of the art pieces in an effort to educate more people about Madiba’s legacy. Also read: China’s Huawei Rumored to Partner with Cold Storage Smartphone Maker Mandela…
I barely slept that night. The little shuteye I managed to get was filled with nightmares involving combinations of the numbers 1, 4, and 5. It wasn’t so much the $8,000 that bothered me—it was the shame I felt for being stupid enough to lose the paper and forget the PIN. I also hated the idea that the bitcoins could increase in value and I wouldn’t have access to them. If I wasn’t able to recall the PIN, the Trezor would taunt me for the rest of my life.
Thanks, Steven, very helpful. Not too sure about the DragonMint machine (lots of negative press out there) but Slush does sound reputable. Think my partner and I will jump in and mine Bitcoin and LiteCoin with one machine each.
Dash (originally known as Darkcoin) is a more secretive version of Bitcoin. Dash offers more anonymity as it works on a decentralized mastercode network that makes transactions almost untraceably. Launched in January 2014, Dash experienced an increasing fan following in a short span of time. This cryptocurrency was created and developed by Evan Duffield and can be mined using a CPU or GPU. In March 2015, ‘Darkcoin’ was rebranded to Dash, which stands for Digital Cash and operates under the ticker – DASH. The rebranding didn’t change any of its technological features such as Darksend, InstantX. (Related reading, see: Top Alternative Investments for Retirement)
The primary purpose of mining is to set the history of transactions in a way that is computationally impractical to modify by any one entity. By downloading and verifying the blockchain, bitcoin nodes are able to reach consensus about the ordering of events in bitcoin.
On March 25, 2014, the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS) ruled that bitcoin will be treated as property for tax purposes. This means bitcoin will be subject to capital gains tax.[47] In a paper published by researchers from Oxford and Warwick, it was shown that bitcoin has some characteristics more like the precious metals market than traditional currencies, hence in agreement with the IRS decision even if based on different reasons.[48]
Several projects used a crowdsale model to try and fund their development work in 2013. Ripple pre-mined 1 billion XRP tokens and sold them to willing investors in exchange for fiat currencies or bitcoin. Ethereum raised a little over $18 million in early 2014 – the largest ICO ever completed at that time.
Russia ordered 60 U.S. diplomats to leave the country by April 5, and said the American consulate in St. Petersburg must close by March 31. This action—the expulsion of 60 diplomats and the closing of a consulate—is a precise parallel to a move announced this week by the Trump administration, which was responding to Moscow’s alleged role in the attempted assassination by nerve agent of Sergei Skripal, a former Russian spy, and his daughter, Yulia, in the U.K.
Bitcoin mining is competitive and the goal is that you want to solve or “find” a block before anyone else’s miner does. Then you will get the block reward and transaction fees from the block. During the last several years we have seen an incredible amount of hashrate coming online which made it harder to have enough hashrate personally (individually) to solve a block, thus getting the payout reward. To compensate for this pool mining was developed.
One of the most sought after reasons why so many traders are turning to Bitcoin is the fact that it’s a completely new median and is in most cases independent of the FOREX and other exchange systems. Furthermore, this currency also moves on a global scale, so it is somewhat isolated from localized risk. Events that impact the fluctuation of Bitcoin prices are usually easily traced and often predictable as long as common sense and some knowledge of economics are used. Those of who are first starting to trade Bitcoin won’t have to sift through enormous amounts of data to carefully analyze price movements of Bitcoin, in most cases you can see clear relationship between events related to Bitcoin and its value.
“Because the software and hardware utilized in Bitcoin mining uses brute force to repeatedly and endlessly perform SHA-256 functions, the process of Bitcoin mining can be very power-intensive and utilize large amounts of hardware space. The embodiments described herein optimize Bitcoin mining operations by reducing the space utilized and power consumed by Bitcoin mining hardware.”
With the above criteria in mind, I came up with a list of coins I believe will come out on top. It also allows you to diversify your portfolio, having coins that offer completely different benefits. Make sure you keep your coins in a safe wallet on a usb key, such as these ones.
Some nodes are mining nodes (usually referred to as “miners”). These group outstanding transactions into blocks and add them to the blockchain. How do they do this? By solving a complex mathematical puzzle that is part of the bitcoin program, and including the answer in the block. The puzzle that needs solving is to find a number that, when combined with the data in the block and passed through a hash function, produces a result that is within a certain range. This is much harder than it sounds.
The whole block then gets sent out to every other miner in the network, each of whom can then run the hash function with the winner’s nonce, and verify that it works. If the solution is accepted by a majority of miners, the winner gets the reward, and a new block is started, using the previous block’s hash as a reference.
I think there are certain industries that have a lot of synergy with, and can benefit immediately from blockchain technology, namely – Finance & Logistics. Currently banking infrastructure is highly inefficient, and blockchain tech at its core provides digital trust, and eliminates counterparty-risk. The moment you can do that and you can increase liquidity and easily move money around the globe, the more money and time you can save. Same with logistics, there are real benefits that businesses can derive value from right now. Such as the traceability and guarantee of authenticity of goods in the supply chain, combating counterfeit goods, etc.
Bitcoin is being coded by the best developers in the world (apart from a few exceptions such as Vitalik Buterin, Charlie Lee etc). If one of the smartest groups of people in the world believe in this concept, why shouldn’t you?
My daughter and I arrived at the Howard Johnson on a hot Friday afternoon and were met in the lobby by Jefferson Kim, the hotel’s cherubic twenty-eight-year-old general manager. “You’re the first person who’s ever paid in bitcoin,” he said, shaking my hand enthusiastically.
All these approaches run into trouble of one form or another. There is certainly a high cost of production in the cryptographic “proof of work” required to create, or mine, bitcoins. But their value has little relation to this cost. By the end of 2017, a single Bitcoin was worth almost $20,000, and the cryptocurrency market as a whole had a value of $830 billion. Just a few weeks later, the market had collapsed to $280 billion.
Starting March 5th, 2018, the German National Tourist Board, headquartered in Frankfurt, is accepting payment in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin for services, as a response to their interest in utilizing the blockchain technology supporting cryptocurrencies in the German and international markets.
These two features have now been replicated in dozens of new systems inspired by Bitcoin. One of those systems is Ethereum, proposed in a white paper by Vitalik Buterin when he was just 19. Ethereum does have its currencies, but at its heart Ethereum was designed less to facilitate electronic payments than to allow people to run applications on top of the Ethereum blockchain. There are currently hundreds of Ethereum apps in development, ranging from prediction markets to Facebook clones to crowdfunding services. Almost all of them are in pre-alpha stage, not ready for consumer adoption. Despite the embryonic state of the applications, the Ether currency has seen its own miniature version of the Bitcoin bubble, most likely making Buterin an immense fortune.
^ Jump up to: a b “Statement of Jennifer Shasky Calvery, Director Financial Crimes Enforcement Network United States Department of the Treasury Before the United States Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Subcommittee on National Security and International Trade and Finance Subcommittee on Economic Policy” (PDF). fincen.gov. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. 19 November 2013. Archived (PDF) from the original on 9 October 2016. Retrieved 1 June 2014.
Find those side hustles and get out of that 9-5 that has taken your soul. Be thankful for the opportunity that #cryptocurrency brings to us as early adopters to gain financial freedom. We might not see another one like it in our lifetime pic.twitter.com/diQVRt2sEm
Spagni says he expects Monero will no doubt be used in other potentially unsavory ways, too, like ransomware, and as currency for the gambling and porn industries. But he argues it will also be used for more innocent forms of financial privacy, like keeping your net worth secret while making routine purchases, or buying contraband like outlawed books in oppressive regimes. He also argues the uses of Monero are out of his and his fellow developers’ control. “I’m in no position to judge what people should or shouldn’t do, and no one else should be either from a code perspective,” he says.
Some early adopters have large numbers of bitcoins because they took risks and invested time and resources in an unproven technology that was hardly used by anyone and that was much harder to secure properly. Many early adopters spent large numbers of bitcoins quite a few times before they became valuable or bought only small amounts and didn’t make huge gains. There is no guarantee that the price of a bitcoin will increase or drop. This is very similar to investing in an early startup that can either gain value through its usefulness and popularity, or just never break through. Bitcoin is still in its infancy, and it has been designed with a very long-term view; it is hard to imagine how it could be less biased towards early adopters, and today’s users may or may not be the early adopters of tomorrow.
Producing a proof of work can be a random process with low probability, so that a lot of trial and error is required on average before a valid proof of work is generated. Bitcoin uses the Hashcash proof of work.
I think the best cryptocurrency to invest in right now is Ripple (XRP). Ripple is starting to be accepted by banks globally because it shaves costs and time off per transaction. This means that other banks will catch on, and it will spread like wildfire. As it does this, the price will go up. Another reason I think Ripple is due to go up is because it is yet to be included on Coinbase, the worlds most popular place to trade Bitcoin. Coinbase currently supports Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, and Ethereum. Because Coinbase makes money per purchase, they’re going to want to incorporate popular cryptocurrencies to make more money. Ripple is certainly a popular currency, so I think Coinbase is going to support Ripple soon. When this happens, Ripple will much easier to trade and the price will go up. The last reason I want to include is that the low price is drawing in money. Everybody curses themselves out because they “almost invested in Bitcoin when it was $1.50,” and seeing this price is drawing in people who think that Ripple could experience what Bitcoin experienced.