Bitcoin Is Alive And Well In 2016 And Maturing Into A Globally Traded Asset

Most of us know about Bitcoin now even though it’s been around less than a decade it has moved to our mainstream vocabulary. Bitcoin supporter and miners have done a great deal pushing press and keeping in the headlines. Bitcoin skyrocketed from less than $200 to more than $1,000 in late 2013, a spectrum of retailers have tried to capitalize on the buzz by accepting Bitcoin as payments. But from its anonymous creator “Satoshi Nakamoto” to its complex “mining” process to its connection to cybercrime, Bitcoin can be a lot to digest for those who are new to the concept.

Bitcoin is its own system of money, not advocated by any government but powered entirely by volunteer computers around the globe. It’s an experiment in high-tech money. And while it’s shaky and still unproven, it has shown the world a new way of making direct transactions — one without any banks in the middle.

Bitcoin has come a very long way since its inception, even if journalists continue to attack it up every so often. Some people believe it will be around for the next hundred years; others are surprised it hasn’t disappeared by now. In its short history, it’s seen the rise and fall of an illicit online drug market, multiple Black Friday-esque market crashes, a number of massive heists and pyramid schemes, and millions of dollars of investment schemes from businessmen.

2015 has seen the digital currency’s volatility stabilize and price jump, but it has also seen much of the hype dissipate. And there’s been a divergence between bitcoin and the technology that underpins it — blockchain. Blockchain, which uses complex cryptography to regulate and record transactions, is in the ascendancy, with millions of dollars flowing into the technology and banks lining up to experiment with it says Oscar Williams Grut in his article recently published.

According to Jeremy Millar a renowned expert on the Crypto-currency saws that the future of bitcoin is tied to its technology and the way it is traded in the markets. “A cryptocurrency market will have exchanges, it will have brokers, it will have speculators, it will have payment networks,” he says. “The features of blockchain as a market are institutional adoption, integration with existing business processes, IT planning and budgeting, evaluating technology replacement.”

As of last November, a record $1 billion has been invested in Bitcoin-related firms so far.

The price of bitcoin is not exactly tied to any market or any other asset and can be very difficult to predict or trade. In the wake of damning essay at the end of last week, the bitcoin price staged one of its sharpest declines of the year, and bottomed out around $350 flat – a level not seen since the beginning of December last year. More often than not these breaks require a fundamental catalyst – one impactful enough to shift sentiment to favor one direction or the other.

Some think the negative media barrage sabotaged bitcoin’s price which tumbled around 15% following this announcements.  But bitcoin’s price has since recovered some of the ground it lost. In light of bitcoin’s more recent price improvement while the stock market has delivered its worst early year performance the market has spoken and decided that as commodities and stocks collapse, “bitcoin is far from a ‘failure.’”