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Bitcoin and Ethereum Prices Are Surging Again (cnbc.com)
An anonymous reader quotes CNBC:
Bitcoin is getting a Black Friday boost. The digital currency climbed above $8,700 to a record high Saturday following increased investor interest around the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday and Black Friday shopping. Bitcoin rose more than 6 percent to a record high of $8,725.13, according to CoinDesk, trading around $8,674 midday on Saturday. [Bitcoin passed $8,000 for the first time just six days earlier]. Another digital currency, ethereum, also hit an all-time high of $485.18, according to CoinMarketCap [rising more than 50% from $300 as recently as mid-November]...
The largest bitcoin exchange in the U.S., Coinbase, added about 100,000 accounts between Wednesday and Friday -- just around Thursday's Thanksgiving holiday -- to a total of 13.1 million. That's according to public data available on Coinbase's website and historical records compiled by Alistair Milne, co-founder and chief investment officer of Altana Digital Currency Fund. Coinbase had about 4.9 million users last November, Milne's data showed... The world's largest futures exchange, CME, is planning to list bitcoin futures in the second week of December...another step in establishing bitcoin as a legitimate asset class.
UPDATE (9/26/17): Sunday the price of Bitcoin surged past $9,000 -- just one week after surging past $8,000.
The largest bitcoin exchange in the U.S., Coinbase, added about 100,000 accounts between Wednesday and Friday -- just around Thursday's Thanksgiving holiday -- to a total of 13.1 million. That's according to public data available on Coinbase's website and historical records compiled by Alistair Milne, co-founder and chief investment officer of Altana Digital Currency Fund. Coinbase had about 4.9 million users last November, Milne's data showed... The world's largest futures exchange, CME, is planning to list bitcoin futures in the second week of December...another step in establishing bitcoin as a legitimate asset class.
UPDATE (9/26/17): Sunday the price of Bitcoin surged past $9,000 -- just one week after surging past $8,000.
The current average fee is $57 USD per transaction. That doesn't even guarentee you will be in the next block. It used to be pennies for a transaction. The current reward for mining a block is 25 bitcoin (225000)plus the transaction fees which add another $100,000. The miners are making a killing but the currency is useless. Worse it's in the miners best interest to keep things this way. The miners control the bitcoin protocol and they like making $100,000 per block in transaction fees. Efforts to increase the block size or decrease the difficulty so blocks are mined more frequently are not going to go anywhere. The price is going to crash but the miners won't care. They sell as soon as they mine and they can either switch to a different SHA 256 based coin or throw out their mining rigs (the rigs were always intended to be obsolete in 6 months anyway)