Cryptocurrency market
Cryptocurrencies have been compared to Ponzi schemes, pyramid schemes and economic bubbles, such as housing market bubbles. Howard Marks of Oaktree Capital Management stated in 2017 that digital currencies were «nothing but an unfounded fad (or perhaps even a pyramid scheme), based on a willingness to ascribe value to something that has little or none beyond what people will pay for it», and compared them to the tulip mania (1637), South Sea Bubble (1720), and dot-com bubble (1999), which all experienced profound price booms and busts blue moon apartments.
“Imagine a book where you write down everything you spend money on each day,” says Buchi Okoro, CEO and co-founder of African cryptocurrency exchange Quidax. “Each page is similar to a block, and the entire book, a group of pages, is a blockchain.”
An October 2021 paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that bitcoin suffers from systemic risk as the top 10,000 addresses control about one-third of all bitcoin in circulation. It is even worse for miners, with 0.01% controlling 50% of the capacity. According to researcher Flipside Crypto, less than 2% of anonymous accounts control 95% of all available bitcoin supply. This is considered risky as a great deal of the market is in the hands of a few entities.
Cryptocurrency bitcoin price
However, Bitcoin is a relatively young asset, and its volatility often counts against it as a store of value. For risk-averse investors, the massive volatility that Bitcoin has historically exhibited can be a severe drawback.
Bitcoin is the easiest cryptocurrency to purchase. Ever since the pizza delivery guy who effectively bought 10,000 BTC for the price of two pizzas, Bitcoin has been an effective peer-to-peer currency – and it can still be purchased in a peer-to-peer fashion.
This is not strictly true, however, being that Bitcoins are stored on the blockchain and wallet addresses only identify them. But, to all intents and purposes, having a wallet and keeping its private key safe is similar to being in possession of and not losing a physical wallet containing cash.
However, Bitcoin is a relatively young asset, and its volatility often counts against it as a store of value. For risk-averse investors, the massive volatility that Bitcoin has historically exhibited can be a severe drawback.
Bitcoin is the easiest cryptocurrency to purchase. Ever since the pizza delivery guy who effectively bought 10,000 BTC for the price of two pizzas, Bitcoin has been an effective peer-to-peer currency – and it can still be purchased in a peer-to-peer fashion.
Cryptocurrency market
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One of the biggest winners is Axie Infinity — a Pokémon-inspired game where players collect Axies (NFTs of digital pets), breed and battle them against other players to earn Smooth Love Potion (SLP) — the in-game reward token. This game was extremely popular in developing countries like The Philippines, due to the level of income they could earn. Players in the Philippines can check the price of SLP to PHP today directly on CoinMarketCap.
However, Bitcoin is far from the only player in the game, and there are numerous altcoins that have reached multi-billion dollar valuations. The second largest cryptocurrency is Ethereum, which supports smart contracts and allows users to make highly complex decentralized applications. In fact, Ethereum has grown so large that the word «altcoin» is rarely used to describe it now.