Bitcoin, the buzzword that's been filling up the financial and tech industries for the past 12 months. Although it may seem like it's a new thing, Bitcoin has actually been around since the anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto brought it into the world in 2009. It's only recently that its popularity has soared - undoubtedly by the fact that the price has increased dramatically over the past 12 months.
Here are some interesting facts about the "king of cryptocurrencies". Fact 1: One of the first Bitcoin purchases was for pizza! Two people on a Bitcoin internet forum made a deal to exchange a whopping 10,000 BTC for 2 Papa Johns pizzas. The value of those Bitcoins reached nearly an eye-watering $200,000,000 at Bitcoins highest price so far in December of 2017. Hopefully those pizzas were worth it! It is not know whether the receiver of the Bitcoin held onto them for all these years or sold them off. While some people would be feeling massively depressed over paying what could be $200mil for some pizza, it's said by others that without cases like this where Bitcoin was proven to work as a currency, it may not have become what it has in the first place. Fact 2: There will only ever be 21,000,000 Bitcoin created. Unlike traditional fiat currencies that can be printed at will, Bitcoin's supply is strictly capped at 21 million coins. The last Bitcoin will be mined in the year 2140. At present with the amount of people in the world, there is only enough Bitcoin for each person to have 0.0022 BTC each - and that's not even taking into account all of the thousands of Bitcoin that have been lost over the years - people throwing away hard drives with thousands of BTC or people formatting their computer that held their coins. There isn't even enough Bitcoin for each millionaire in the world to own a whole coin. No doubt their scarcity is one of the attractions of owning Bitcoin. Fact 3: In 2013, the FBI made a whopping $48,000,000 by auctioning of the seized Bitcoin from the infamous Silk Road dark marketplace. It is reported that a lot of those coins were sold to the Silicon Valley investor Tim Draper - the same person who predicts the price of a single coin will reach in excess of $250,000. Fact 4: You don't need to own a whole Bitcoin. Despite what some people think, you do not need to purchase whole coin to invest in Bitcoin. One of Bitcoin's advantages is that it is divisible down to 8 decimal points. So you could own 0.00000001 or 0.0001 of a Bitcoin if you wanted - meaning it would cost just a few dollars to get your first piece of Bitcoin. It is said by some that the decimal place may have to change in the future if it is to be used more commonly as a currency as people might not like dealing with such low fractions of a coin. Fact 5: Bitcoin is traceable. Much of the media uninformed people will have you think that Bitcoin is an untraceable currency that makes it attractive for money launderers and cybercriminals - this is simply not true as every transaction that Bitcoin has ever made is fully visible on the blockchain on sites like blockchain.info. There are of course other coins which are untraceable - called Privacy Coins, with Monero have the largest market cap share. Fact 6: You cannot revers a Bitcoin transaction. Unlike credit cards and other online payment services, you cannot reverse any Bitcoin that have been sent. The receiver would need to actually send the Bitcoin back to the sender if the sender wished to get it back. This makes it a great choice for online merchants to receive Bitcoin as it completely eliminates the risk of receiving fraudulent chargebacks. There you have it, 6 interesting Bitcoin facts that you can impress your friends and colleagues with! Interested in your hands on some coins now that you know a bit more? Check out this guide on how to buy Bitcoin in Australia on FindBitcoinATM. The quantity of Cryptocurrency events and conferences in NYC is definitely skyrocketing. Statements are showing that entry earnings alone are generating huge amounts of money for the organizers.
But not everybody in the space are impressed by all these conferences, which one of the niches most well knows figures, Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin expressing on Twitter a few weeks ago that he will almost certainly not be attending the Consensus conference this year because of the high cost of entry, together with apparently not being impressed with CoinDesk - he Tweeted "The conference costs $2-$3k to attend . I refuse to personally contribute to that level of rent seeking ," Buterin said . He added that CoinDesk "is recklessly complicit in enabling giveaway scams". The most famous conference, Consensus which is ran by the online publication CoinDesk, is anticipated to generate a crowd of higher than 4000 women and men. Tickets for this conference are up to $2000 alone, which means you can pretty quickly see that this conference on its own would earn around $8mil for the company. The number of conferences is seemingly unusual to many people, when you think that the cost of Bitcoin itself has seen an extremely volatile beginning of the year with it's price declining by over half . By December of 2017, BTC achieved a mammoth $19k+ and sharply dropped to around $6000 in the first couple of months. It could be that the quantity of conferences and attraction to Cryptocurrency and Bitcoin is an indicator that in spite of the erratic prices, they are without doubt not going anywhere soon. It was in fact after the 2017 CoinDesk Consensus that the price of BTC really skyrocketed - the value increased more than $2000 soon after the conference occurred . Numerous people are waiting to see if we are going to find similar value increases this year, will many crypto followers looking to see Bitcoin across that wonderful $10k range . Apart from the Consensus conference, you can find two or three dozen other functions happening around the city in that point in time - which lots of people are calling Blockchain Week. A number of similar conferences are asking for equally pricey entrance fees. Anyhow, huge numbers of people will certainly nevertheless attend and make the conferences successful. |