What happened: Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies had a run-up in value like nothing we've ever seen. It makes the dotcom bubble of the 90s look quaint. The most notable so far is blocked. One is a blockchain startup that has raised $700 million and plans to continue to raise over $1 billion. The company has a beta product of about 50 people in a distributed team formed over the last 18 months. Unlike traditional startups, block. One didn't sell equity shares in the company. They sold an EOS cryptocurrency in an initial coin offering (ICO). By one estimate, there were 1,500 ICOs in 2017. The total value of cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin, is worth over 30 times the value in January 2017.
And in exchange for a miner's computing and electrical power, they have rewarded a new Bitcoin that is now in circulation. Every 10 minutes, a miner solves a "block" of encrypted data, and by doing so, more Bitcoin is introduced into circulation each time. Initially, each block creates 50 new Bitcoin. But after every 210,000 blocks are solved (approximately four years), the amount of Bitcoin created for every block will be halved. In January 2009, the first block was mined, and since then?—?it has undergone two halving events. Currently, 12.5 Bitcoins are created per block (until the next halving in 2020).
Trading bitcoin is becoming increasingly popular every day and nowadays is much easier to buy bitcoin than before. There are many online trading platforms, but are they all so good? Many have high fees, some were hacked or have bad security, and even the platform interface can be challenging to understand, especially for beginners.
I knew blockchain would be a revolutionary change, and I wanted to be a part of it, although I still needed to learn how. I took the Coursera course Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies, which is still one of the best resources available for learning the technical foundations of blockchain. After learning and absorbing for about four months, I connected to ShapeShift and was brought on board to create the MVP of Prism. After a year-and-a-half of learning all the ins and outs of the EVM, building Prism, building a team, and launching my speaking career, I co-founded Maiden. Maiden was the result of the obvious gap between the vision of blockchain as a decentralized platform and the reality of a highly centralized culture even more narrow than existing tech and finance spaces. Women, trans people, queer people, and people of color were nowhere to be seen, all while blockchain converts touted the benefits of decentralization.
The Bitcoin price rally has been blowing people's minds over the past week. Each time everyone thought it couldn't get higher, but it eventually did. Hype and panic around the rally and the overload of the Bitcoin services platforms have been accompanying the trading process. Thus, yesterday, on December 7th, the Bitcoin price reached $19,000 on GDAX. Even though the prices on this exchange have recently been unprecedentedly higher than on the other exchanges, this seems to be a record. Thereby, many people seemed to move their capital from altcoins to Bitcoin to catch up with the rally.