While people were shopping for black friday deals over the weekend, the value of the most popular cryptocurrency made significant jumps. While shoppers were busy buying up low-priced goodies, investors were dumping money into the currency of the future.
The popularity of cryptocurrency and the trust people have in it is growing by the day, and as a result, the value of these coins keeps rising to new heights. In the spring, Bitcoin and Ethereum started to rise in value at rapid rates. In fact, Ethereum’s value increase spurred a rapid influx of new miners who snatched up the world’s supply of graphics cards and affected prices for a couple of months. You can’t mine Bitcoin with graphics cards anymore, so it did not affect the GPU market. Nonetheless, Bitcoin’s value rose in rapid succession throughout the year. In the last 365 days, Bitcoin’s value increased an almost unfathomable 1,224%.
At the beginning of 2017, Bitcoin was trading for roughly $700 per unit. By the beginning of May, the price had doubled, and by the end of the month, it nearly doubled again. The price of Bitcoin continued to rise at a steady pace through the summer, and on September 1, it nearly topped the $5,000 barrier. Now, just 12 weeks after Bitcoin almost hit $5,000 and four weeks after it topped $7,000, the cryptocurrency is on the precipice of surpassing $10,000 per coin.
For the week leading up to Thanksgiving, Bitcoin’s value remained flat, trading around $8,200. But overnight leading into Black Friday, the price started to climb rapidly, and by Sunday morning, it was over $9,000. This morning the price peaked at $9,782.
Not Just Bitcoin
Bitcoin isn’t the only cryptocurrency on the rise again. Ethereum’s value recently started to increase as well. In June, Ethereum’s price peaked at $378, only to crash back down to $163 by mid-July. At the end of August, Ethereum rose again to $389 and then dipped below $300. Leading up to Thanksgiving, Ethereum surpassed the $400 barrier and settled around $480.
Litecoin also hit a new milestone in the last week when it squeezed past the $80 mark and peaked at $94.
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Kevin Carbotte is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware who primarily covers VR and AR hardware. He has been writing for us for more than four years.
And a currency that could crash one day, with investors losing millions potentially overnight. Plenty of upside, but no guarantees that it continues to go up.
So... What you're telling me is people trust crypto currency more than government currency? The value of Bitcoin compared to USD is 1 : 9774.99 as of 11/27/17.
Right now is a terrible time to invest in bitcoin, it always crashes back down after a spike up like what just happened. You'd have to be an absolute fool to buy at its current price of nearly $10k .
20423278 said:
is there any profitable pc builds that you would recommend for mining any of these coins going forward?
is there any profitable pc builds that you would recommend for mining any of these coins going forward?
Both bitcoin and litecoin mining have been taken over by ASICs. You're not going to make money mining them with a GPU in a PC. Ethereum is still profitable in the sense you will earn more than electricity costs. However, no one can say how long it would take you to recoup the investment of the PC hardware for mining. Maybe eith value stays the same and after maybe a year you break even. Maybe the value continues to go up and you make a decent profit. Maybe it goes down (or difficulty goes up) and you never make your money back.
If you think eth is going to keep going up and want to try to make some money off it, you can also just purchase some eth and sit on it for a while.
If you want to earn money in an "investment" then do some research and buy real estate in an expanding or soon-to-be expanding area. It's not rocket science figuring out where the growth trends are out there. That's about the only guaranteed multiple digit return on investment if properly researched.
