SAN FRANCISCO — On Monday evening, a few days after a large cryptocurrency exchange listed its shares on the stock market, several hundred women gathered in a virtual conference room to talk about Bitcoin. Claire Wasserman, a co-founder of Ladies Get Paid, the company that co-hosted the event, marveled at the turnout, noting it showed “how committed you all are to getting wealthy.” She described a sweeping change in the way we live, work and transact — all driven by crypto. “I don’t want you to miss out on the future,” she said.

Attendees lit up the comments section to talk digital currency. One woman said she started investing after posing as a man in online forums for pickup artists.

“It was very YUCK,” she wrote, “but I learned a lot.”

Another said she’d been funneling her shopping budget into crypto during the pandemic, doubling her money since November.

A panel of talking heads encouraged the women to buy and hold Bitcoin as an investment — even just $5 or $25. They offered advice on security, privacy, taxes and digital wallets. And they pitched crypto start-ups as places to find promising career opportunities that could, frankly, use more women.

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We’re All Crypto People Now

The price of bitcoin has reached US$50,000 (£36,095) – another all-time high. It’s hard to believe that 10,000 bitcoin would only buy a couple of pizzas ten years ago. It’s even stranger to think that bitcoins are completely virtual. You can’t hold one, except on a hard drive, and there’s no underlying asset to them. A bitcoin is simply a digital representation of the computer power needed to make one, what’s called its “proof-of-work”.

This isn’t actually a new idea though. Rai stones were one of the first forms of money used on the Micronesian islands of Yap. To get hold of a Rai, you had to row a canoe for 500km or so to Palau and chisel away at some local limestone. Then you needed to take the 3m-wide lump of rock back to Yap without sinking in the Pacific. No one is quite sure when it started, but the practice is at least several centuries old. Yapese money had no inherent value. For everyone to respect the proof-of-work, the process was deliberately inefficient and incredibly resource-intensive, just like bitcoin.

Instead of relying on intrepid voyagers, bitcoin uses a global network of competing computers. Like safe crackers at a safe-cracking contest, these bitcoin mining machines guess the combination to a digital lock (a long string of digits) with the correct combination winning a few new bitcoins. The combination changes every ten minutes, and the contest continues.

This might all sound like a harmless game of digital bingo. But with more and more people enticed by the heady rewards, bitcoin mining on some days uses as much energy as Poland and generates 37 million tonnes of CO2 each year.

New institutional investors, like the carmaker, Tesla, are driving the asset’s price skywards while ignoring bitcoin’s climate-changing appetite. And to keep the bull market charging, supporters are working hard to argue for bitcoin’s green credentials.

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 Bitcoin isn’t getting greener: four environmental myths about cryptocurrency debunked

LONDON/GUANGZHOU, China — Bitcoin and other digital currencies plunged on Friday as a proposed capital gains tax hike from U.S. President Joe Biden led to a wave of selling.

Bitcoin was down 7.3% at $49,730, according to Coin Metrics data. It’s the first time bitcoin has traded below $50,000 since early March. Ether fell to $2,320, down 8%. XRP, the fifth-biggest cryptocurrency, plunged 16%.

Bitcoin rebounded late Friday to above $51,000.

This wiped out more than $200 billion of value from the entire cryptocurrency market, according to data from CoinMarketCap.

“The market has run up quite a bit overall, and it’s probably cooling off before the next leg up,” Vijay Ayyar, head of business development at cryptocurrency exchange Luno, told CNBC by email.

President Biden is expected to raise long-term capital gains tax for the wealthiest Americans to 43.4%, including a surtax. That would be higher than the top federal tax rate on wage income. The new tax rate would apply to returns on assets held in taxable accounts and sold after more than a year.

This triggered a sell-off in stock markets overnight, with all three major U.S. indexes ending Thursday’s session in the red. Analysts said fears over Biden’s capital gains tax proposal may be extending to crypto investors, who have had a great year with the price of bitcoin having climbed more than sixfold in the last 12 months.

Still, one crypto entrepreneur said Biden could be doing his industry a favor.

“It would make even greater sense to play that oldest trick in the manage-your-finances-smart book: borrow against your assets to avoid capital gains taxes,” said Antoni Trenchev, co-founder of crypto lender Nexo.

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Over $200 billion wiped off cryptocurrency market in a day as bitcoin plunges below $50,000

Bitcoin continues to trade close to its all-time high reached this month. Its price is now around US $34,000 — up about 77% over the past month and 305% over the past year.

First launched in 2009 as a digital currency, Bitcoin was for a while used as digital money on the fringes of the economy.

It has since become mainstream. Today, it’s used almost exclusively as a kind of “digital gold”. That is to say, a scarce digital asset.

In response to the risk of economic collapse due to COVID, governments around the world have flooded global markets with money created by central banks, in order to boost spending and help save the economy.

But increasing the supply of money erodes its value and leads people to look for inflation-resistant assets to hold. In this climate, Bitcoin has become a hedge against looming inflation and poor returns on other types of assets.
What is Bitcoin?

Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency by market capitalisation, has a current circulating supply of 18,590,300 bitcoins and a maximum supply of 21,000,000.

This limit is hard-coded into the Bitcoin protocol and can’t be changed. It creates artificial scarcity, which ensures the digital money increases in value over time.

Whereas government-issued currencies such as the Australian dollar can have their supply increased at will by central banks, Bitcoin has a fixed supply that can’t be inflated by political decisions.

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 Why is Bitcoin’s price at an all-time high? And how is its value determined?

The price of the world’s second largest cryptocurrency, ether, hit a new all-time high of US$1,440 (£1,050) on January 19. This breached a previous high set three years ago and gave ether a total value (market capitalisation) of US$160 billion, although it has since fallen back to around US$140 billion.

Ether, which runs on a technology system known as the ethereum blockchain, is worth over ten times the price it was when it bottomed during the COVID market panic of March 2020. And the cryptocurrency is still only five years old. In part, this remarkable rise in the value is due to excess money flowing into all the leading cryptocurrencies, which are now seen as relatively safe store-of-value assets and a good speculative investment.

Ether/US$ price
But ether’s price rise has even outstripped that of the number one cryptocurrency, bitcoin, which “only” had a seven-fold increase since March. Ether has outperformed partly due to several improvements and new features being rolled out over the next few months. So what are ether and ethereum and why is this cryptocurrency now worth more than corporate giants such as Starbucks and AstraZeneca?
Ether and bitcoin

Blockchains are online ledgers that keep permanent tamper-proof records of information. These records are continually verified by a network of computer nodes similar to servers, which are not centrally controlled by anyone. Ether is just one of over 8,000 cryptocurrencies that use some form of this technology, which was invented by the anonymous “Satoshi Nakamoto” when he released bitcoin over a decade ago.

The ethereum blockchain was first outlined in 2013 by Vitalik Buterin, a 19-year old prodigy who was born in Russia but mostly grew up in Canada. After crowdfunding and development in 2014, the platform was launched in July 2015.

As with the bitcoin blockchain, each ethereum transaction is confirmed when the nodes on the network reach a consensus that it took place – these verifiers are rewarded in ether for their work, in a process known as mining.

But the bitcoin blockchain is confined to enabling digital, decentralised money – meaning money that is not issued from any central institution unlike, say, dollars. Ethereum’s blockchain is categorically different in that it can host both other digital tokens or coins, and decentralised applications.

Decentralised applications or “dapps” are open-source programs developed by communities of coders not attached to any company. Any changes to the software are voted on by the community using a consensus mechanism.

Perhaps the best known applications running on the ethereum blockchain are “smart contracts”, which are programs that automatically execute all or parts of an agreement when certain conditions are met. For instance, a smart contract could automatically reimburse a customer if, say, a flight was delayed more than a prescribed amount of time.

Many of the dapp communities are also operating what is known as decentralised autonomous organisations or DAOs. These are essentially alternatives to companies and seen by many as the building blocks of the next phase of the internet or “web 3.0”. A good example is the burgeoning trading exchange Sushiswap.

Ethereum has evolved and developed since its launch six years ago. In 2016, a set of smart contracts known as “The DAO” raised a record US$150 million in a crowdsale but was quickly exploited by a hacker who siphoned off one- third of the funds. However, since then, the ethereum ecosystem has matured considerably. While hacks and scams remain common, the overall level of professionalism appears to have improved dramatically.
Why the price explosion

Financial interest in ether tends to follow in the wake of bitcoin rallies because it is the second-largest cryptocurrency and, as such, quickly draws the attention of the novice investor. All the same, there are other factors behind its recent rally.

The first is the pace of innovation on the platform. Most activity in the cryptocurrency space happens on ethereum. In 2020, we saw the emergence of decentralised finance (DeFi). DeFi is analogous to the mainstream financial world, but with the middleman banks cut out.

Users can borrow, trade, lend and invest through autonomous smart contracts via protocols like Compound, Aave and Yearn Finance. It sounds like science fiction, but this is no hypothetical market – approximately US$24 billion is locked into various DeFi projects right now. Importantly, DeFi allows users to generate income on their cryptocurrency holdings, especially their ether tokens.

The second factor behind the ether surge is the launch of ethereum 2.0. This upgrade addresses major concerns impacting the current version of ethereum. In particular, it will reduce transaction fees – especially useful in DeFi trading, where each transaction can end up costing the equivalent of tens of US dollars.

Ethereum 2.0 will also eliminate the environmentally wasteful mining currently required to make the ethereum blockchain function (the same is true of many other cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin). Within the year, ethereum should be able to drop the need for vast industrial mining warehouses that consume huge amounts of energy.

Instead, transactions will be validated using a different system known as “proof-of-stake”. The sense that ethereum addresses problems like these quickly rather than letting them sit could prove a major differential from the sometimes sluggish and conservative pace of the bitcoin development culture.

A final factor is the launch of ethereum futures trading on February 8. This means that traders will be able to speculate on what ether will be worth at a given date in the future for the first time – a hallmark of any mature financial asset. Some analysts have said the recent bitcoin rally has been fuelled by traditional investment firms, and the launch of ethereum futures is often touted as opening the doors for the same price action.

However, as every seasoned cryptocurrency user knows, both currencies are extremely volatile and are as liable to crash by extremes as rise by them. Bitcoin’s price fell 85% in the year after the last bull market in 2017, while ether was down by 95% at one stage from its previous high of US$1,428.

Whatever the valuation, the future of ethereum as a platform looks bright. Its challenge is ultimately external: projects such as Cardano and Polkadot, created by individuals who helped launch ethereum itself, are attempting to steal ethereum’s crown.

But as bitcoin has shown, first-mover advantage matters in cryptocurrency, and despite bitcoin’s relative lack of features it is unlikely to be moved from its dominant position for some time. The same is most likely true for the foreseeable future with ethereum.

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 Ethereum: what is it and why has the price gone parabolic?

A cryptocurrency is a digital or virtual currency that is secured by cryptography, which makes it nearly impossible to counterfeit or double-spend. Many cryptocurrencies are decentralized networks based on blockchain technology—a distributed ledger enforced by a disparate network of computers. A defining feature of cryptocurrencies is that they are generally not issued by any central authority, rendering them theoretically immune to government interference or manipulation. 
 Understanding Cryptocurrencies

Cryptocurrencies are systems that allow for secure payments online which are denominated in terms of virtual "tokens," which are represented by ledger entries internal to the system. "Crypto" refers to the various encryption algorithms and cryptographic techniques that safeguard these entries, such as elliptical curve encryption, public-private key pairs, and hashing functions.
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The first blockchain-based cryptocurrency was Bitcoin, which still remains the most popular and most valuable. Today, there are thousands of alternate cryptocurrencies with various functions and specifications. Some of these are clones or forks 

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