Cryptocurreny
It would be true to say that Bitcoin has enjoyed a real explosion as far as popularity goes when we are talking about cryptocurrency. Headline producing Bitcoin news involves the bankruptcy of Mt. Gox in early 2014 and even bitcoin price more lately that of the South Korean market exchange Yapian Youbit, and others like the high profile employ of Bitcoin in drug deals via Silk Road that finished with the FBI shutdown of the market place in October 2013.
On 18 March 2013, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (or FinCEN), a bureau of the United States Department of the Treasury, issued a report regarding centralized and decentralized "virtual currencies" and their legal status within "money services business" (MSB) and Bank Secrecy Act regulations.
The People's Bank of China's frequently updated restrictions against Bitcoin finally pressure some Chinese banks to issue a deadline against several bitcoin exchanges, requiring them to close their accounts by April 15. Although some are spared the warnings, the uncertain regulatory environment holds some prominent loopholes that virtually all Chinese exchanges quickly adopt.
Coinbase, a San Francisco based company, is known as the leading cryptocurrency trading platform in the United States and with its continued success, landed at the No. 10 spot on the CNBC Disruptor list in 2018 after failing to make the list the previous two years.
The creation rate is automatically halved approximately every four years as more bitcoins are added into circulation, whilst this system is modeled after gold, mining difficulty is always increasing as hashrate increases and makes finding new bitcoins harder as the number of available bitcoins reaches the 21 million cap.
Demand is high both to buy the currency and to use it to purchase other commodities, such as gold and silver, and whilst some financial experts are warning about the lack of transparency involved in Bitcoin, many believe that it's a work in progress and that Bitcoin (BTC) is here to stay for the long haul.
Bitcoin miners are neither able to cheat by increasing their own reward nor process fraudulent transactions that could corrupt the Bitcoin network because all Bitcoin nodes would reject any block that contains invalid data as per the rules of the Bitcoin protocol.
This will be covered more deeply in a second; the most important thing to realize is that "getting rich" with BTC is not a case of giving people any better economic standing - it's simply the process of being able to buy the "coins" for a low price and sell them higher.
While mining is the surest and, in a way, simplest way to earn Bitcoin, there is too much hustle involved, and the cost of electricity and specialised computer hardware makes it inaccessible to most of us. To avoid all this, make it easy for yourself, directly input the amount you want from your bank and click "buy', then sit back and watch as your investment increases according to the price change.