Bitcoin’s market capitalization exceeded $150 billion the other day. At the same time, the international expert community keeps on pondering upon the near-term prospects of Bitcoin and other digital currencies.
The world’s most popular and expensive cryptocurrency managed to go above the $154 billion threshold. For the sake of comparison, this is twice as much as the cost of Rosneft, Russia’s most expensive company. If Bitcoins were stocks, they could be compared to the stocks of such giants as Adobe and Neflix.
At the same time, more and more governments, banks, corporations and retail investors are getting increasingly interested in various digital currencies including Bitcoin, of course. For millions of retail investors out there, this is a relatively quick and easy way to make money. At least, this is what it looks like on the surface. In reality, everything is way more complicated than it seems.
In early 2017, Bitcoin cost under $1000. Today, it costs over $4000. This is a very volatile market, a roller coaster. Digital currencies are still unstable and have been subject to continuous ups and downs. That’s why those are not investments for everyone. That’s why you have to really know what to do.
Back in the early days, the first investors made tons of money by investing in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. This inspired millions of others who wanted to get rich quick. As a result, trading and mining cryptocurrencies gradually became one of the main trends of 2017.
People buy computer hardware for mining like never before. Some of them even get neck-deep into debt to get everything required to start mining digital currencies. Still there are many skeptics who think that it’s really difficult to get rich fast by mining or trading digital currencies these days.
At the same time, some experts are convinced that the so-called block-chain technology is the door to a whole new world and prosperity. Their opponents think that the world has been obsessed with mining all of those cryptocurrencies, which are essentially a new kind of financial pyramids of global scale, they say. They say that digital currencies are unpredictable, and that’s one of the key risks for all the players out there. They say that the exchange rate of any cryptocurrency is defined purely by the supply and demand. The mining costs boil down to electricity expenses. However, neither Bitcoin nor other digital currencies are backed by anything but people’s trust.
