Tulipmania gripped the Netherlands in the 1600s as the price of tulip bulbs skyrocketed. Bitcoin has been compared to tulipmania. When the tulip bubble collapsed, much of the Dutch economy was unaffected, which is likely the case if bitcoin ever collapses, according to Capital Economics. Tulipmania is a famous period in the 1600s when the Netherlands was enraptured by tulip bulbs, sending their prices sky high before collapsing in a spectacular fashion. Recently, people have been comparing bitcoin to that period in history because of the cryptocurrency’s meteoric rise, and…

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Bitcoin’s price has risen stratospherically, a fact that leaves many minor players in the market with massive gains and many bigger players millionaires. But is this a bubble? Are the gains real? And are the bitcoin whales in for a sad Christmas? First we must understand what drives bitcoin price and, in particular, this boom. The common understanding for current growth leads us back to institutional investors preparing for the forthcoming BTC futures exchanges. The primary theory about the astonishing rally being put forward by investors on social media is…

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ICOs have opened to the general public investments in blockchain ventures. In the third quarter of 2017 alone, ICOs raised more than $1.3 billion for crypto ventures — approximately five times more than funding raised through venture capital in the blockchain space. There were more than 200 ICOs in 2017, and conducting due diligence on all of them would be extremely time-consuming, even for a knowledgeable analyst, let alone an amateur investor. This is compounded by the fact that blockchain is still considered to be an early-stage technology, with new…

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Hackers emptied the entire contents of a digital wallet belonging to NiceHash, a cryptocurrency company. NiceHash didn’t say how much was stolen, but customers speculate that it could total around $63 million in bitcoin. Many of the funds belonged to the company’s customers, who use the site to exchange their computer processing power for cryptocurrency. The contents of a digital wallet belonging to cryptocurrency company NiceHash, which included potentially millions of dollars worth of customers’ bitcoin, was stolen in a major security breach early Wednesday. The hack affected NiceHash’s payment…

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Popular software wallets Parity for handling of Ethereum cryptocurrency stopped working on 6 November. Smart contract containing library that defined functioning of the wallets was accidentally killed and wallets‘ owners therefore lost ability to send their ETH tokens. More than 500.000 ETH, or 150 million USD, is now frozen on the defunct Parity wallets. Affected are all multi-signature Parity wallets created after 20 July 2017, when contract on Ethereum blockchain containing the library was updated in answer to previously discovered security bug through which tokens of more than 30 million…

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