Crypto News and Investment

Many people wonder how the price of Bitcoin is calculated, but it’s important to remember that it works no different than it would with other currencies or objects. Let’s first look at how the prices of most things are derived - we can use oranges as an example. What is the price of an orange? Well, it depends. As a starting point, one would derive the price of an orange based on two things: how much someone is trying to sell it for, and how much another person is trying to buy it for. If John wants to sell it for USD2.50 and Sarah is only prepared to pay USD2.00, there is no deal. But if they agree on a price that works for both, let’s say USD2.25, then the transaction will happen. If it’s winter there might be more people wanting to buy oranges, so the price will go up. Or if there is a drought the supply of oranges will become less, so more people are trying to buy less oranges, which can also drive the price up. Bitcoin and other currencies are a bit different from oranges ...

The price of Bitcoin surged by as much as 10% on the  Zimbabwean  exchange Golix in mid-November 2017 after the military successfully staged a coup d'état. The country is already known not to have a strong economy; Zimbabwe’s  peak month of inflation  was November 2008, when the rate of inflation hit an estimated at 79.6 billion percent. Based on data from the Golix  website , Bitcoin’s price  has skyrocketed  to up to $13,499 in the country, nearly double its rate in the international markets. As of November 15, Bitcoin was trading at $13,010 in the country’s capital Harare. Crisis in Zimbabwe and its effect(s) on Bitcoin The Zimbabwean army assaulted Harare on November 14 following a week of confrontation with the administration of President Robert  Mugabe . According to the army, the move was aimed at preventing an expected violent and deadly civil war in the country. Mugabe has been the country’s head since 1980. Due to the politic...

Bitcoin price  continues to delight investors Monday as the most popular virtual currency breaks and stays above $8,000. The latest milestone for Bitcoin, which came following news the  first Bitcoin-to-Litecoin  Lightning Network ‘atomic swap’ successfully debuted, caps its comeback after Bitcoin Cash volatility. BTC  currently has a market cap of almost $134 bln against a cross-crypto combined cap of just under $240 bln, both numbers representing new records. Bitcoin’s dominance has also recovered over the past few days to top 56 percent of the market after struggling to maintain supremacy as BCH caused  considerable fluctuations . BCH itself has come down off previous highs to languish around $1,200 - around 50 percent of its best prices. Staunch proponents of the Bitcoin fork as the ‘real Bitcoin’ are currently locked in a  forking battle  of their own as two strands of BCH emerged last week. The product of a “malicious fork,” Bitcoin...

There are a number of ways you can get Bitcoin: Just like traditional money, you can earn it by providing goods or services, and asking for people to pay you in Bitcoin rather than in traditional money. This is often a cheaper and easier alternative to other payment methods and one of the easiest ways to get your hands on some Bitcoin. Another way is how most people get their Bitcoin: buy it from a credible Bitcoin broker or exchange provider, like Luno. This is similar to how you would buy foreign currency at your bank or shares online. This is often the easiest way to get Bitcoin because you are virtually guaranteed that someone will be willing to sell their Bitcoin to you on such a platform. You can also get Bitcoin by mining for it, but this has become very difficult to do for the average person. Most mining is now done by huge companies with very expensive and highly specialised equipment, which a typical person or computer cannot compete with. So unless you have a lot ...

The bitcoin price has increased to over $6,550, after dipping below $5,600 on November 12. Analysts have attributed the recent increase in the price of bitcoin to CME Group’s confirmed launch of its bitcoin futures exchange by the second week of December. Over the past two months, several high profile investors including billionaire hedge fund legend Mike Novogratz emphasized that a rapidly growing number of institutional and retail investors are preparing to engage in bitcoin and invest in the market. Most of the large-scale hedge funds and institutional investors can only invest in assets and stores of value with high liquidity, because in most cases, they are required to allocate tens of millions of dollars in minimum. In the past 12 months, the liquidity of bitcoin as increased substantially along with its market valuation, attracting the interests of institutional investors. In the upcoming months, upon the launch of CME’s bitcoin futures exchange, infrastructure around...

The internet has changed the way people live and do business, and is arguably one of the biggest advancements in human history. What many people don’t realise is that the internet we know today might never have happened at all because there were a number of ‘rival’ ‘internets’ being built at that time. These were specific companies that wanted to connect all the computers in the world and share information, but do it on their own system, so that people had to pay to access their own ‘information superhighway’. The modern internet was different in that it was, by design, an open system that anyone could use as they please, and it wasn’t owned by anyone, so no gatekeepers. This lead to something called ‘permissionless innovation’ - people can try and test new things without needing access granted by some gatekeeper. This lead to an explosion of innovation and adoption of the ‘open’ internet, and is the reason the internet is so pervasive today. The design also means that most parts...

Over the centuries, gold has been considered as an object of value by many different groups of people all over the world. It’s important to note that gold in itself has no value - it’s just a piece of shiny metal. Its value comes from the (somewhat perplexing) fact that everyone just agreed that it has value, and therefore it becomes valuable. The reason they chose gold versus other objects is important - gold has certain characteristics that make it a better ‘store of value’ (as it is commonly known) than other objects: For one, it is rare, which means it has limited supply(there is only a certain amount of gold in the world - if it was too abundant everyone would have it and then it would have no value). It is malleable (it can be melted and made into smaller units i.e. coins, and importantly the per unit value doesn’t change when you break it into smaller pieces, unlike things like diamonds). It is stable and doesn’t degrade, it’s easy to recognise and very importantly, diffi...

How did we transfer money thousands of years ago, when we all still lived in little villages and knew and trusted each other? We simply exchanged things with each other, as we still do with cash today. But when money moved online things got a bit trickier, and the way the banks and credit card systems dealt with this was to create a ‘ledger system’ – basically records of account showing who owns what. For example, if John wants to transfer $100 to Sarah online, the bank moves the money from John to Sarah. John cannot do it himself because there is a risk he might cheat – he can copy and paste the digital money (it’s only numbers on a computer after all) and send the $100 to two different people; nobody would know. Instead, we trust the bank to send the money and make sure it’s only sent to one person. Now, the bank can also cheat, but we trust them that they don’t. If the transfer is between two accounts at the same bank, it’s easy to transfer, but if it’s between two differe...