CRYPTO Currencies are all the rage! Why? What is all the hoopla about? Well, if you– seven years ago– invested six cents in a BITCOIN it would be worth $17,040 this Tuesday evening December 19th, 2017. Bitcoin, the most popular crypto currency, has a current market valuation of $285,469,301,000 USD (as of 7:50 pm tonight– as of this writing). Some $18,908,700,000 USD in Bitcoins traded on the international markets in the last 24 hours. These are big numbers brought to light as BITCOIN futures are now traded by Chicago’s two largest derivatives exchanges– The CME and the CBOE– which are now directly competing to become the market of choice for Bitcoin futures trading; both have issued Bitcoin futures. The total crypto currency market is even larger and more staggering… $610,018,166,666 of Cryptocurrencies have changed hands in the last 24 hours in 7624 markets with BITCOIN 43+% of the global market.
Since the rise of cryptocurrencies is one of the most dramatic in history… and since we have a strong business community in Durango, we at Durango Downtown have decided to carry articles of interest regarding cryptocurrencies… this is the first in an ongoing series. This article features info on four of the most popular crypto currencies (out of 1369) … bitcoin, bitcoin cash, etherium, and litecoin– as well as info on two major exchanges for buying and selling: coinbase.com
Vitalik Buterin is a Russian-Canadian programmer and writer primarily known as a co-founder of Ethereum (pictured now at 23).
Ethereum has been one of the best-performing investments of 2017.
More than $30 billion has poured into it since March of this year.
As always, speculate wisely. Don’t risk more than you can afford to lose! Past performance is no guarantee of future gains!
Sam Rose, Durango Entrepreneur
Coinbase now lets you buy and sell Bitcoin Cash
Tech Crunch article by Fitz Tepper
Coinbase has just added full support for Bitcoin Cash (BCH) – meaning you can now send, receive, buy and sell the cryptocurrency. All users will also be credited an amount of Bitcoin Cash equal to their Bitcoin balance during the hard fork that occurred August 1st, 2017.
Bitcoin Cash trading will also be available on GDAX, Coinbase’s institutional-focused exchange.
Update: As of now both Coinbase and GDAX seem to be experiencing intermittent outages and Bitcoin Cash trading has been suspended, so it may take some time until traffic settles down and Bitcoin Cash is actually available for trading.
Immediately after the announcement Bitcoin’s price fell as much as 25% to a low of $14,000, but seems to have stabilized around $16,600 as of writing, which is still down about 10% from a few hours ago.
Bitcoin Cash is up around 50% in the last few hours, trading around $3,300.
As a refresher, Bitcoin Cash was created when Bitcoin “forked” in early August, by a group of developers who wanted to alter Bitcoin’s code so the blockchain could process more transactions at a faster speed, as well as require a much lower fee. When Bitcoin core developers disagreed, a group decided to copy and modify Bitcoin’s code to create Bitcoin cash.
Originally Coinbase said they wouldn’t support Bitcoin Cash – but quickly reversed course on August 3rd to say that customers would be able to withdraw it by January 1st, 2018. However they stopped of short of saying whether or not they’d provide full support and allow it to be bought and sold. So today’s full addition of the digital currency comes as a surprise for anyone who follows the cryptocurrency world.
In a blog post, Coinbase said they considered ” developer and community support, security, stability, market price and trading volume” when deciding to fully support the digital currency. Additionally, they gave some (brief) rational behind the decision:
“Coinbase operates by the principle that our customers should benefit to the greatest extent possible from forks or other networks events. This is essential in our mission to make Coinbase the most trusted, safe, and easy-to-use digital currency exchange. – Coinbase
Coinbase has made it clear they want to support many more digital currencies in the future, so in one sense it should be expected that the’ve added the third largest currency by market cap. But it’s a little more complicated considering there’s some drama behind Bitcoin Cash, mainly in the form of ongoing disagreements between the development teams about discrediting the other’s protocol.
Going forward, the company has a framework that will help guide it in deciding which digital currencies or assets to add next, and have said they expect to add more starting in 2018.
Note: The writer owns a small amount of cryptocurrency.
