The cryptocoin system known as Ethereum crashed in the middle of the day yesterday due to a single mega-massive trade. While the ticker showed a relatively significant drop in price throughout the day, it was at 12:30PM (on the 21st of June) that a single order kicked the entirety of the Ethereum universe in the pants. Not on all exchanges - not all at once - but the shockwaves were swift and merciless.
Over the past 24 hours, the cryptocurrency known as PotCoin, or $POT, has risen over 81-percent. That's nuts - and it doesn't just happen because a lot of investors suddenly happened upon the little-known coin. The reason PotCoin is suddenly cashing in in a big way has very little to do with its first sponsorship of an American peace-brokering mission with a foreign entity. PotCoin just sent Dennis Rodman to North Korea.
Investors in Ethereum have seen massive rises in price over the past month - but that's all going to end soon. I'm not certain, of course - nobody can know absolutely what's going to happen in any market, cryptocoin or otherwise. But what I'm seeing and what I'm hearing is that a coin that went from around $240 to nearly $400 in a month isn't going to stick there for long. Not because of investors getting jumpy, necessarily, but because of the reasons for the rise.
This morning it became apparent that the cryptocoin called DigiByte ($DGB) was set to skyrocket in price. In the past 24 hours, the price of the coin went up a cool 43%, and beat its own previous top price (from May 21st) - once, and hasn't looked back since. But why - why has DigiByte suddenly turned into the third most traded coin on the market overnight? We've got a few answers.
While Friday is generally a profit taking sort of day for stock markets around the world, Bitcoin seems to be moving in the opposite direction. This adds up, of course, since here in the warmer months of 2017, many traders in the cryptocurrency make use of Bitcoin as their trading currency, choosing to value their quick-trade coins in the slightly more reliable value of the most famous of them all. Bitcoin rose a wild 9.8% in early morning trading to around $2,550 a coin.
A single Bitcoin is currently worth more than an ounce of gold, marking a new milestone for the cryptocurrency. The move follows a steady rise in Bitcoin value, a trend that itself ended the cryptocurrency's long-running streak of low value throughout 2015 and part of 2016. At the moment, an ounce of gold is worth just under $1,238 and a single Bitcoin is worth just a tad over $1,238.
Bitcoin’s value is slowing climbing, and has exceeded the $1,000/ea valuation for the first time in about three years. The so-called cryptocurrency saw its value peak — and then crash — in 2014, and though the price has been relatively stable since, the yearly trend shows its value climbing. The currency is largely used for online purchases in which anonymity is important, though it is increasingly being accepted by mainstream retailers, too.
The first time we talked about a man called Craig Wright and his alleged ties to the cryptocurrency Bitcoin was in December 2015 when word surfaced that Australian police had raided a home that he and his wife had rented. Apparently, Wright and his wife had already moved and the raid reportedly had something to do with missed tax payments, not Bitcoin. Fast forward, several months and Wright has now publically identified himself as the creator of Bitcoin known as Satoshi Nakamoto.
If you're a fan of cryptocurrencies and also partake in buying PC games from Steam, you're now in luck. Valve's game marketplace platform now accepts Bitcoin as a form of payment, meaning you have another option for spending all your extra money on the next Steam sale. Valve sought out Bitpay, a leading Bitcoin payment processing service, with a goal of making the Steam marketplace easier to shop in several emerging markets.
Brave, the new web browser app for iOS, made a splash a few months ago when it was announced with a feature that would allow users to block ads in exchange for payment. The purpose is to allow privacy-minded individuals to browse the web without ads or trackers, but still help benefit publishers and the sites they visit. Now Brave has detailed the second half of the feature: the ability for users to get paid if they permit the browser to show them safe replacement ads.
Microsoft says that message on its website about not supporting Bitcoin is a mistake, and that nothing has changed. The support, which was added back in late December and allows customers to buy content using the digital currency, hasn't changed, and the message saying it wasn't supported has been corrected. How such a message accidentally got posted on the website isn't clear.
Even you still believe in Bitcoin, you might be one of the remaining few. Even some of its biggest backers have thrown in the towel. Following this latest trend, Microsoft is also closing the door on it. Unlike the somewhat big announcement it made more than a year ago, Microsoft has rather silently adjusted its pages to let you know that you can no longer do business in the Windows 10 and Windows 10 Mobile stores using Bitcoin. A small but still significant blow to the beleaguered cryptocurrency.
