Theres been a lot of talk about Wall Streets wild ride recently, and Bitcoin is another investment creating a lot of buzz. The cryptocurrency that was worth just a few dollars years ago is now soaring to prices in the tens of thousands of dollars, making many early buyers millionaires.

While many people have heard of Bitcoin, a lot of them may not really understand what it is. Its not a physical coin. When people say theyre buying Bitcoin, theyre actually buying a digital currency that can be exchanged over the internet without a bank.

For years, many people let their bitcoins sit in their virtual wallets. The cryptocurrency slowly grew in value and recently exploded, hitting new highs. One reason for the recent surge more investors are starting to buy Bitcoin as an asset, much like gold.

So the reason youre hearing about it a lot is because there is a lot of demand for it, said Taylor Tepper, investing and retirement analyst at Forbes Advisor. So as the prices rise, people become more and more interested. People start thinking, Am I missing out? Is this something I should do? Can I get rich quick?

But Bitcoin is not a get rich quick scheme. Its taken years for it to hit the current record highs. Some analysts predict the price of Bitcoin could see another surge, and even triple the highs its now seeing. However, Tepper warns that Bitcoin is extremely volatile and not something to build retirement on.

I think theres just a lot of mojo around it ... the price is going up, it has this potential to be this revolutionary technology, said Tepper. But when it comes time to actually plan out your future, it is something that should be viewed as a speculative bet as opposed to one that you can really rely on.

You dont need tens of thousands of dollars to buy Bitcoin. You can buy a fraction of a coin and watch it grow, even with just a few hundred dollars. No matter how much money you spend, Tepper warns, You should go into that with every pretense of this money could be worth nothing tomorrow. So that is money that you can afford to lose.

If you do want to buy Bitcoin to spend, a lot of major companies are beginning to accept cryptocurrency as payment. Microsoft, Paypal and even Overstock for example. And Bitcoin isnt the only cryptocurrency out there, its just the one leading the pack right now.

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Bitcoin Buzz! Is It Too Late to Get In? - NBC4 Washington

Cryptocurrency mining rigs at a crypto mining farm in Romania.

Akos Stiller | Bloomberg via Getty Images

LONDON Bitcoin's price isn't the only thing surging lately the amount of electricity it consumes is also on the rise.

The cryptocurrency has for years alarmed experts due to the sheer level of energy required by so-called miners, which release new coins into circulation.

Bitcoin has a carbon footprint comparable to that of New Zealand, producing 36.95 megatons of CO2 annually, according to Digiconomist's Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index, an online tool created by data scientist Alex de Vries. It consumes as much power as Chile around 77.78 TWh according to Digonomist's estimates.

The Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index, a separate tool from researchers at Cambridge University, shows a much larger figure of 110.53 TWh more than the entire annual energy consumption of the Netherlands.

"That's an unfathomable amount of electricity," said Charles Hoskinson, a cryptocurrency entrepreneur who co-founded Ethereum, the blockchain network underpinning ether, the world's second-most valuable digital coin.

Bitcoin's energy needs are "enormously large," Michel Rauchs, research affiliate at the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, told CNBC. It accounts for around 0.5% of total global electricity consumption, according to the Cambridge researchers' estimates.

"Although we agree the amounts are ludicrous right now, that is still half as much as inactive home appliances in the U.S. consumed," Rauchs said. The amount of energy wasted on idle home devices like phone chargers and microwaves in the U.S. could power the bitcoin network for two years.

Bitcoin isn't controlled by any single authority like a central bank but a disparate network of computers. So-called "miners" run purpose-built computers which compete to solve complex math puzzles in order to make a transaction go through.

The blockchain a digital ledger of all bitcoin transactions is designed this way to ensure that users aren't able to "double spend" funds, a flaw in which the same digital token could be spent more than once. Each block that is added onto the chain carries a hard, cryptographic reference to the previous block. Proponents of bitcoin say this makes it extremely secure.

But bitcoin miners do not run this operation for free. A key incentive of bitcoin's model, known as "proof of work," is the promise of being rewarded in some bitcoin if you manage to solve the complex hashing algorithm.

"The issue is, it can never get better by design," says Hoskinson, who now runs IOHK, a blockchain firm that developed another digital token called cardano.

"The more successful bitcoin gets, the higher the price goes; the higher the price goes, the more competition for bitcoin; and thus the more energy is expended to mine."

Cardano and some other digital coins rely on a "proof of stake" consensus mechanism, where participants buy tokens which allow them to join the network. Hoskinson says the cardano cryptocurrency network consumes only 6 GWh of power, a tiny fraction of bitcoin's energy consumption. Similar proof-of-stake tokens include polkadot and algorand, he added.

Rauchs said bitcoin is only likely to consume more and more electricity over time due to its proof of work mechanism.

"It doesn't really matter whether there are new, more efficient machines on the market," Rauchs said. "You will just use more and more machines but the total electricity consumption won't go down based off of that."

A key measure of bitcoin's mining difficulty hit an all-time high last month. With bitcoin rising in price, revenue to miners is also increasing, incentivizing more participants to mine the cryptocurrency.

Nevertheless, bitcoin believers argue that disputes about its environmental impact are missing the point.

"Energy use in itself is not bad," Meltem Demirors, chief strategy officer of digital asset management firm CoinShares, told CNBC. "Sending and storing emails uses energy. Yet, we don't infer email to be bad because it consumes energy."

"What we have here is people trying to decide what is or is not a good use of energy, and bitcoin is incredibly transparent in its energy use while other industries are much more opaque."

Demirors questioned why the banking industry, for instance, wasn't under more scrutiny for its energy usage. She said bitcoin miners were "incentivized to use renewables" because it's getting cheaper to produce it.

But most bitcoin mining facilities are located in China, which is still heavily reliant on coal-based power. Though the Chinese province of Sichuan is known to attract miners due to its cheap electricity and rich hydropower resources, the level of power generation capacity fluctuates depending on the season.

Then there's the question of how bitcoin is used. Many investors today consider bitcoin to be a form of "digital gold" rather than an efficient payment system Digiconomist estimates that the energy footprint of one bitcoin transaction is equivalent to 100,000 payments on the Visa network.

The cryptocurrency more than quadrupled in value last year and is up another 27% so far this year, according to Coin Metrics, currently trading at about $37,189.

Andrew Hatton, head of IT at Greenpeace U.K., said the larger issue at hand is that "we're largely powering 21st-century technology with 19th-century energy sources."

"Bitcoin's spiralling energy usage is largely down to the huge amount of data-crunching needed to create and maintain this cyber-currency," Hatton told CNBC. "But their fast-growing hunger for electricity is just an early symptom of a much bigger problem to come."

"As online services become bigger and more complex, the demand for computing power is bound to go up over the next few years, and that will require more energy," he added. "The problem is that only about a fifth of the electricity used in the world's data centres comes from renewable sources, and that's not good enough."

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Bitcoin's wild ride renews worries about its massive carbon footprint - CNBC

The price of Bitcoin (BTC) broke above $40,000 on Feb. 6 for the first time in 23 days. But this time, the market sentiment is a lot calmer with a less overheated derivatives market.

The combination of a less crowded Bitcoin futures market, the selling pressure from whales peaking, and a fast recovery could help BTC stabilize above $40,000 this time.

On Jan. 29, a pseudonymous Bitcoin researcher and analyst known as Material Scientist said that mega whale order flow reached an all-time high.

This means that the selling pressure coming from whales dealing with $1 million to $10 million orders reached a record-high. The analyst said at the time:

If the price of Bitcoin establishes $40,000 as a new support area, it would establish a highly positive short-term price trend for BTC.

It would mean that BTC can now rally towards its all-time high without the massive selling pressure coming from major whales and high-net-worth investors.

In the near term, for Bitcoin to maintain its bullish structure, it would need to protect two key support levels: $40,000 and $37,834.

Meanwhile, according to the analysts at Whalemap, a data analytics platform that tracks whale data, there is a confluence of whale supports at $37,834 and $36,290.

If Bitcoin breaks down from $40,000, these two support areas would be critical to defend. Below these two levels would likely result in a short-term bearish trend. The analysts wrote:

In the foreseeable future, some traders anticipate Bitcoin to surge beyond $60,000 with the momentum from the ongoing rally.

Scott Melker, a cryptocurrency trader, said there will be pullbacks, but Bitcoin would likely reach $63,000 following the breakout. He said:

Bitcoin technically broke out of the bull flag when it surpassed $38,000 on Feb. 4. Considering that Bitcoin is looking stronger than the last time it broke $40,000 a month ago, there is sufficient momentum to carry it past $50,000this time around.

A potential catalyst in the near term could be Guggenheim potentially confirming its investment in Bitcoin after securing the rights to invest in the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust in February.

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Launching in 3, 2... Here's why Bitcoin breaking $40,000 is different than last time - Cointelegraph

Ether, the digital token of the Ethereum blockchain, is the second-largest cryptocurrency in the world by market value.

Jaap Arriens | NurPhoto via Getty Images

LONDON The cryptocurrency ether hit a fresh all-time high on Friday, surging past $1,700 for the first time.

Ether, which is the world's second-largest digital coin by market value, climbed 11.2% to a price of $1,743 at around 10:30 a.m. ET, according to data from CoinDesk.

It comes after bitcoin, the most valuable virtual currency, hit a record high close to $42,000 last month.

Bitcoin more than quadrupled in price over the course of 2020, and is up 29% since the start of 2021. Ether has risen about 129% year to date.

Ether has been steadily rising this week as investors await the highly anticipated launch of ether futures contracts from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange next week.

Trading in ether futures is set to start Monday. The CME launched bitcoin futures over three years ago, at the peak of that cryptocurrency's 2017 rally.

Some investors believe that futures and other crypto-focused derivatives products will give institutional investors more confidence to invest in the space.

"Bringing more financial instruments will bring more participants into the market," said SachinPatodia, a partner at Avon Ventures, a venture capital fund affiliated with the parent company of Fidelity. "That probably is positive for the ether price."

But Patodia said a big driver of the price of ether and other smaller digital currencies was the momentum for bitcoin in recent months.

"We've seen this pattern over many crypto cycles that we've gone through, where bitcoin leads the way in price movement and then you see what we call the alt-coins get carried along," he said.

Ethereum, ether's network, was created after bitcoin in 2013. The main difference it has with bitcoin's blockchain is the ability to support applications.

"This move by the CME may spark further buying of ether by new entrants to the market because it provides a way forsophisticatedinvestors to hedge their risk againstpositions that they may be holding on the underlyingasset," Simon Peters, a cryptoasset analyst at online investment platform eToro, told CNBC.

"However, it is worth noting that, like bitcoin, CME ether futures will be cash settled so as not to involve any physicaldelivery, so we shouldn't necessarily expect a major impact on spot prices."

Crypto investors said another factor potentially boosting ether was the start of a major upgrade to the Ethereum blockchain, called Ethereum 2.0. Believers in ether hope the upgrade will make Ethereum faster and more secure.

The total market value of all cryptocurrencies combined hit $1 trillion last month, as bitcoin's price surged to records. Bitcoin bulls say it's gotten a boost from institutional demand, as well as the perception that it is a store of value similar to gold.

Bitcoin was up 4.7% in the last 24 hours, trading at a price $38,151. XRP, the third-largest digital token, climbed 10.7% to 44 cents.

But skeptics like economist Nouriel Roubinisay bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have no intrinsic value. A recent Deutsche Bank survey found investorsview bitcoin as the most extreme bubblein financial markets.

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Ether, the world's second-largest cryptocurrency, hits a record high above $1,700 - CNBC

BitMEX incorporated in the Seychelles, a move that allowed the start-up to move fast and minimize its tax exposure while Western governments struggled to even understandmuch less create a way to governthe newfangled financial instruments and market that BitMEX was building. In a 2015 investor presentation, Hayes made the point that Bitcoin derivatives are completely unregulated worldwide. Regulators are still trying to tackle the exchanging of fiat and Bitcoin.

That might have been magical thinking. There were no rules in the beginning, and [governments] werent interested in articulating the rules, Chu remembered. You would go to [them] and ask for guidance and get nothing. Is this illegal? No answer. It was only after the fact, he said, that cryptic strictures emerged to police cryptousually in response to some infraction that had not been previously articulated by regulators. But where Chu saw chaos, Hayes saw opportunity.

For nearly a year after its launch, BitMEXs business was flat. Some days we had no trades, Hayes remembered. No one bought or sold. The fees from trading on the platform barely covered the server bill, which Reed paid with his credit card. While Hayes and Delo stayed in Hong Kong, Reed got married and moved back to the States, settling in Milwaukee, where he operated out of coworking space. The time zone difference, however, worked in their favor: Reed and Delo, in signature start-up fashion, took turns being on call, addressing customer support issues 24/7.

The companys fortunes changed when, in late 2015, it started offering customers 100xfive times as much leverage as its closest competitor. Political volatility the following year, with Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, increased cryptos trading volume. Come 2017, BitMEX had to bring on 30 employees to cope with the explosion in trading. The firm moved into new office space, which it would soon outgrow.

By 2018, BitMEX had become a high-stakes bazaar, moving billions every day. During one of our meetings, Hayes commented, We are the biggest trading platform in the world, by volume. Thats anyone who trades a crypto product. BitMEX, he said, was one of the most liquid exchange[s] in the world, regardless of asset class. By that measure it was in the same league as the NASDAQ as well as the New York, London, and Tokyo stock exchanges. Within four short years Hayess scrappy casino had become, in gambling terms, the house. (Since the indictment was unsealed in October, BitMEX has taken a huge hit; its market share and trading volume have dropped precipitously.)

In May 2018, on the opening day of Consensusthe crypto worlds equivalent of the Consumer Electronics ShowHayes pulled up to the Hilton in midtown Manhattan in an orange Lamborghini and tweeted: Did you see my ride today at #Consensus2018 ?

A close friend insisted he was simply lampooning the thousands of attendees gathered inside the hotelinvestors who talked a big game about cashing in on crypto, but who had really only succeeded in burning through millions in venture capital on harebrained schemes and ICOs (initial coin offerings). Still, looking back, the Lambo gambit might well have been the moment, more than any other, when Hayes painted a bulls-eye on his back.

True, the firms partners had differing approaches to their images and their booming business. Hayes, who didnt mind ruffling feathers, reveled in the role of financial renegade. Sam Reed kept an extremely low profile, a secret billionaire (on paper) walking the streets of Milwaukee. Ben Delo, however, seemed to hunger for mainstream acceptance. When BitMEX was declared the worlds largest cryptocurrency exchange in 2018, a string of British newspapers dubbed him the U.K.s youngest self-made billionaire. That October he donated 5 million to Oxfords Worcester College and a few months later signed the Giving Pledge, designed by Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett as an open invitation for billionaires...to publicly commit to giving the majority of their wealth to philanthropy. In a letter explaining his decision, he wrote, As a schoolboy in Britain aged 16, I was asked to list my ambitions for the future. I answered concisely: Computer programmer. Internet entrepreneur. Millionaire. I have been incredibly fortunate to exceed those goals, and Im grateful to be in a position to sign this pledge.

Two years ago BitMEX leased the 45th floor of Cheung Kong Center, the most expensive real estate in Hong Kong and home to Goldman Sachs, Barclays, Bloomberg, and Bank of America. Hayes, Delo, and Reed were literally moving in on the establishment. But ever eager to make a statement, BitMEX kitted out its office with an accessory none of those stodgy legacy companies had: a large aquarium inhabited, appropriately enough, by live sharks.

By the summer of 2019, the amount of money moving through BitMEX was staggering. On June 27, the company announced it had set a new daily record, trading $16 billion. Two days later Hayes tweeted: One Trillion Dollars traded in a year; the stats dont lie. BitMEX aint nothing to fucking [sic] with. @Nouriel Ill see you on Wednesday.

The man he was tweeting at was Nouriel Roubini, a respected NYU economics professorand BitMEXs fiercest critic. Dubbed Dr. Doom, Roubini sat on President Clintons Council of Economic Advisers and served at the Treasury Department, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank. In other words, he was about as establishment as Hayes was contrarian. On July 3, the pair faced off onstage at the Asia Blockchain Summit in what was publicized as the Tangle in Taipei, taking their seats as the theme from Rocky blared overhead.

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The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin Billionaire Arthur Hayes - Vanity Fair

The bitcoin price has surged about 300 percent over the last 12 months thanks to mainstream adoption and institutional interest. It has rallied massively to surpassing all-time highs of $41,000. At the time of this writing, the price is hovering around $35,000 and it will be interesting to watch traders reactions and price behavior for the rest of 2021.

Bitcoins bull cycle will likely continue, especially in the second half of 2021. One of the causes of price increase will be widespread adoption. Currently, relatively few people accept and use Bitcoin in everyday life. However, we could see mainstream acceptance in the coming months. For instance, PayPal has allowed its users to buy and sell bitcoin using PayPal accounts. Also, Square invested $50 million in bitcoin. Ongoing mainstream adoption like this could boost bitcoins price significantly.

The liquidity in bitcoin has been a telltale sign that more institutional bodies are at play. Similarly, throughout 2021 the institutional interest is expected to drive the prices of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

In another sign of the mainstream growth of cryptocurrencies expected in 2021, major cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase is expected to become a publicly-listed company this year. The exchanges institutional assets increased from $6 billion to a whopping $20 billion between April and November of 2020.

Caused by the U.S. dollars cyclical bear market and global liquidity, bitcoin will benefit significantly from people hedging against inflation. Many retail traders will also jump in due to the fear of missing out (FOMO), pushing the price further. Traders who will not want to invest directly in bitcoin will trade contracts for difference (CFDs) on bitcoin via forex brokers and trading platforms.

As mentioned above, in October 2020, PayPal announced that it would support buying and selling cryptocurrency. Also, other Institutions and Wall Street giants have shown interest in cryptocurrency. For instance, JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Citibank are predicting a bullish bitcoin market. According to a leaked report from Citibank, the analysts refer to bitcoin as 21st century gold predicting that it could hit $318,000 by the end of 2021. Likewise, Will Woo, a former partner at Adaptive Capital, has referred to $200,000 as a conservative price.

A note to institutional clients from Tom Fitzpatrick, the global head of CITIFX, leaked on Twitter. The note showed a chart of three bitcoin bulls in the last decade. He suggested that the bitcoin rally could hit a peak of $318,000 in December 2021. However, other analysts such as BTIG and Bloomberg have been more conservative, predicting the price will reach $50,000.

Fiscal policy and monetary policies aiming to devalue currency will work in favor of the bitcoin price. Much of the demand will come from investors who fear that the money printing will devalue conventional money. With fiat money growing out of control, bitcoin is seen as a fixed asset, just like gold.

Besides a weak monetary policy, the dollar could also be affected massively by the COVID-19 vaccine rollout. For these reasons, the demand for bitcoin might increase significantly.

While cryptocurrency proponents are exuberant, there is a possibility that bitcoin prices wont rise beyond the all-time high set in 2020. In fact, the price may fall back and remain below this mark for some time, as was the case during the 2017 rally. Some believe that the only time bitcoin is likely to reach another significant high is in 2024, following the next mining subsidy halving.

Bitcoins popularity as digital gold is spreading fast. However, unlike gold, bitcoin is experiencing its first global crisis, caused by COVID-19, as it was born in 2009 following the 2008 financial recession. The 2020 bear run in the market saw investors sell equities for cash. Even gold, which is considered by many to be a safer investment than bitcoin, dipped in March. Bitcoin crashed hard in mid-March too, but the bitcoin case was different. The cryptocurrency bounced from the bottom a month later in a bull run that continued until the end of the year.

Regulators have been scrutinizing digital currencies for years. Some people, albeit only a few, are using cryptocurrencies to engage in illegal trades and with the surging value of cryptocurrencies, governments around the world will be looking closely at the market. For instance, a lawsuit by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) against altcoin project Ripple saw XRP prices fall by almost half.

Regulatory agencies could suddenly erect a hurdle to tame unscrupulous activities surrounding bitcoin, but this regulation couldnt affect bitcoins bullish run significantly.

Transactions involving different fiat currencies can take days and involve heavy fees and a global digital currency could significantly streamline this process in 2021. While bitcoin adoption is growing, the cryptocurrency could face competition to solve this problem from big tech. A good example is Facebooks digital currency and, while Facebook diem is quite different from Bitcoin, it may draw some attention away from bitcoin in 2021.

Likewise, central banks are also competing against bitcoin. As reported by Banks for International Settlements, 80 percent of central banks are on the verge of developing some form of digital currency. For instance, China is working toward the adoption of a digital yuan. In many critical ways, these central bank digital currencies will be vastly different than bitcoin.

In general, the adaptation of bitcoin in commerce is a perfect cause for price increases in 2021. While bitcoins price and adoption is expected to proliferate, we cant rule out the opposite and volatility is certainly possible.

This is a guest post by Michael. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

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Bitcoin Investment In 2021: What Should We Expect? - Bitcoin Magazine

It was a Saturday morning and Adam was feeling bold.

He'd made thousands of dollars on a single trade the night before, and was feeling lucky. But Adam wasn't trading on the NASDAQ, pumping GameStop stocks or investing in a startup. He was about to sink $2,500 into a cryptocurrency called DeTrade.

It seemed safe. Adam had investigated the coin's development team on LinkedIn, and watched a video of its CEO laying out a roadmap for the coin's future. A newswire piece published on Yahoo touted DeTrade's technology as advanced enough to disrupt cryptocurrency.

Thanks to Bitcoin hitting an all-time high valuation of $40,000, almost tripling its value in two months, cryptocurrency is very much back in the zeitgeist. But while for many people Bitcoin is synonymous with cryptocurrency, it's not what crypto traders like Adam are interested in. Beneath Bitcoin and Ethereum, the second-best-known currency, is a strange underworld of different cryptocurrencies.

Called altcoins or, sometimes, "shitcoins," these are essentially penny-stock cryptocurrencies. And they're crazy. Bitcoin tripled its value recently, but many altcoins explode 30, 40 or 50 times over within days. Arguably the most famous is Dogecoin, which recently shot up thanks to a potent combination of Reddit and Elon Musk, but there are thousands of altcoins, forming an Indiana Jones-esque Cave of Crypto Wonders. The spoils can be life-changing, but there are traps around each corner. Fortunes can be made and lost in seconds. Cons and fraudsters are everywhere, with traders vulnerable to scams at each step of the process.

Case in point: Adam's foray into DeTrade. The touted technology behind it wasn't real. Nothing about the project was. DeTrade, for all intents and purposes, didn't exist. The LinkedIn profiles were fake, and the video of its CEO was a deepfake created with AI. It was a scam. Those behind it, operating in the unregulated world of crypto, vanished. Adam lost his $2,500, but he got off easy. In total, those behind the scam took in around $2 million.

Just a regular day playing with altcoins, says Adam.

Adam got into cryptocurrency in September. When we spoke, it felt like he'd crammed years of trading into two months. He put in $4,000 and lost it in days. Then he turned $3,000 into $90,000. After withdrawing a third of that and then losing just over another third, he now had around $20,000 in crypto.

Adam had seen some tempestuous trading in recent weeks. One person managed to flip $2,000 into over $40,000 on two different occasions, but lost it all to scams both times. Another put $150 in a coin and doubled his money in 15 minutes. Decent result, but his $150 would've turned into $28,000 if he'd waited only one more day.

But despite the community's enthusiasm, there's a small problem. Right now cryptocurrencies don't really do anything.

Bitcoin nearly tripled in price, from $15,000 to over $40,000, in two months. If you invested $1,000 in early November, you could have taken out $2,600 two months later.

Investing in a stock means ascertaining its value -- based on factors like competition, risks and, above all, profit generation -- and then putting money into ones that are undervalued. If other investors follow you, the stock rises, giving you an opportunity to take profit.

Speculation is naturally part of this: The Dot-com Bubble was all about pouring money into "pre-profit" companies in the hopes they'd make money someday. Cryptocurrency, however, takes speculation into the stratosphere. For the most part, cryptocurrency is pure speculation. People are investing in technology that produces nothing, and has no practical application. As I write this, a coin called Meme is selling for $517. That's a little over four times the price of an Apple share. Doge, a coin marketed after the internet slang for "dog,"doubled in value earlier this month after a pornstar tweeted about it. After the price settled, it then rocketed once more when Reddit wanted to make it the GameStop of cryptocurrency.

This disconnect between price and purpose has made many experts understandably skeptical.

David Gerard is one such skeptic. He became interested in Bitcoin in 2013, when it first hit $1,000, and has since written two books on cryptocurrency. His most recent focuses on Libra, Facebook's ill-fated attempt at digital currency.

"The driving force of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency is nothing to do with technology," he told me during a Skype call. "It's all about the chance that people might get rich for free. All of this is about the psychology of get-rich-quick schemes."

In his years working as an IT systems administrator, Gerard's job has been to examine new technology and discern what's useful and what's not. Cryptocurrency, he told me, is not.

"Bitcoin burns a whole country's worth of electricity for the most inefficient payment network in human history," he said.

After launching at around $8 in August, the obscure Meme coin briefly reached a valuation of over $1,750 in September. If, with fantastic luck, you invested $1,000 at $8 and sold at $1,750, you'd be up $217,000. This is the allure of "shitcoins."

That's no exaggeration. Cryptocurrencies are mined using powerful computers, and many enterprising types put together farms of computers used solely for the purpose of mining Bitcoin. As a result, Bitcoin is responsible for more energy consumption than Switzerland.

Gerard says the only thing you can do with Bitcoin is buy it and sell it. He's even harsher on altcoins.

"They're absolutely useless objects. Even by the standards of Bitcoin, altcoins are useless," he said.

This is precisely what makes them so fascinating. Seemingly, all they can do is get internet punters to bet on their success. But this enables average people to become rich. That Meme coin I mentioned before? It was listed at $2.72 and a month later hit an all-time-high price of over $2,000.

Imagine becoming a millionaire from a joke internet coin.

Crypto Spider has made millions with altcoins. Crypto Spider isn't his real name. Like most people in the cryptocurrency community, he goes by a pseudonym.

He's gained renown in some Telegram groups over the past few months thanks to a "2K to 1M" challenge, where he endeavored to see how quickly, and with how few trades, he could turn the first number into the second. In cryptocurrency, you can follow someone's portfolio if you have their wallet number, so the community was able to watch this challenge play out in real time.

Within two months, that $2,000 had grown to over $2 million. Much of that money was made off one trade: He chucked $50,000 into a project which, in the space of around a week, magnified 35 times in value, netting him $1.75 million. After passing $2 million, he cashed out.

"You won't ever see that type of explosive growth if you don't trade in altcoins," he told me, though he also said "95% of these coins are going to be nonexistent in the future."

Like Adam, Crypto Spider has no background in finance or trading. He lists college courses in game theory, basic algorithmics and some economics as useful to his crypto exploits -- but in essence he's a self-taught amateur. He declined to tell me his specific age, only that he was "20ish" when he first got into cryptocurrency in 2017.

He admits he was attracted by the "pretty numbers," by seeing coins magnify in value 30, 40 and 50 times within a short period. He was enthusiastic enough to start a university club around cryptocurrencies, and how they'd be used in the future.

Crypto Spider says cryptocurrency will play a "major part in the future of finance," and speaks with the passion of a believer. He breathlessly transitions from how cryptocurrency is a part of the internet's evolution to the possible use cases of blockchain, the technology behind Bitcoin, in the next 10 years. But despite his enthusiasm, I couldn't help but notice how chunks of what he said echoed Gerard.

Cryptocurrencies are mined using powerful computers. More emissions are produced by global Bitcoin miners than by the entire country of Switzerland.

For one thing, he looks back at all the projects he was excited about in 2017 and realizes most were almost entirely vaporware, technology that's advertised but never delivered.

Gerard calls the cryptocurrency community a pool of scammers. Spider notes that people often invest in altcoins they know don't have a function, because there's enough hype around the project to make money. "It's a bubble," he said, "we're literally swapping money from each other. I somehow was able to game all the other people."

Spider says his performance is 60% luck. He first approached cryptocurrnecy trading with the mentality of, "I'm young, I'm dumb, I can lose all my money and it'll be OK."

Again, it reminded me of something Gerard said: "If you're rich enough that your money is your own problem, fine. If you know zero is a number your investment could go to, fine."

"But a lot of people are being ripped off, and that's really bad."

People really are getting ripped off. Difficult to regulate and subsisting largely on hype, cryptocurrencies are particularly prone to scams.

Take OneCoin, a company that, through a presale for a cryptocurrency that didn't exist, stole $4 billion from people around the world before its founder disappeared. Then there's BitConnect, a coin that reached a $2.6 billion valuation by promising a 1% return on investment every day. It was eventually designated a Ponzi scheme by various authorities around the globe, causing it to lose 96% of its value before getting shut down months later.

Those are two of the biggest instances of crypto-fraud. But millions of dollars are scammed from cryptocurrency markets every day in less dramatic ways. Coins are suddenly discontinued, with owners taking all the money with them in what the community calls "rug pulls." Some have investment contracts, ignored like terms-of-service agreements, that prohibit you from taking your money out of a project. Other times, entire cryptocurrency exchanges -- which sell coins like a stock exchange sells stocks -- vanish.

"I think I've been scammed over 100 times," Crypto Spider said, adding that he lost $250,000 through fraud in December. "Who knows who creates these projects. A lot of people are taking on pseudonyms, because they're almost all money grabs."

But the deepfake used to scam $2 million adds a new vector. Coming into wider use in recent years, deepfakes are mostly used for pornographic purposes, but as the DeTrade scam shows, deepfakes can also be used in financial scams.

OneCoin founder Ruja Ignatova at an event for the "revolutionary" cryptocurrency. Ignatova disappeared around the time OneCoin was discovered to be a fraud: The cryptocurrency the company sold didn't actually exist. It's reported to have scammed over $4 billion from people around the world. Ignatova has yet to be found.

Gerard says he's never seen a deepfake used as part of a scam before. Crypto Spider says he's seen it just once.

"We didn't have that problem in 2017, where people would use deepfakes and rug pull like this," he said. "The internet is evolving, but the scammers are also evolving."

Deepfake technology "is being democratized, and that may not be a good thing," said Julie Inman-Grant. Now commissioner of the Australian government's eSafety Commission, Inman-Grant formerly led public policy teams at Microsoft, Adobe and Twitter.

"This kind of takes the art out of social engineering," she explained, referring to the techniques usually used by scammers to get you to click a fraudulent link or hand over credit card details. "If they're delivering a video of someone you respect and you really have no way of telling by the naked eye or ear if it's fake or not, the potential for misuse could be devastating."

Ironically, it's blockchain, the behind-the-scenes technology, that could be the solution to the burgeoning deepfake problem. In cryptocurrency, the blockchain is an unalterable ledger that tracks every transaction. Once it's on the ledger, it can't be altered. That same technology can be used to track anything -- like the creation and distribution of a video, from studio to iPhone screen. There are already startups working toward this, like Truepic.

When I asked about blockchain's ability to neutralize deepfakes, Inman-Grant wasn't entirely optimistic.

"It's definitely an arms race, but it's not an arms race we're winning right now."

When Bitcoin hit $40,000 in December, it was confirmation to enthusiasts that cryptocurrency is the future. For skeptics, a higher peak just means a more precipitous fall.

"I think they'll become increasingly regulated and less and less interesting," Gerard said of cryptocurrency. That means less of the "pretty numbers" Crypto Spider was attracted to, but hopefully fewer scams.

For Adam, DeTrade actually had a happy ending. One aggrieved victim of the scam analyzed the metadata of the deepfake, which he used to track down the perpetrators. After some naming and shaming across Telegram, the money was returned.

That unexpected $2,500 return was a big deal, equivalent to a few weeks pay. Good timing too: By the time Adam got it, a bad trade saw his crypto portfolio diminish from $10,000 to $2,000.

Just another day trading altcoins, Adam told me.

Correction, 1:30 p.m. PT:Removed incorrect statement that Netflix had yet to turn a profit.

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Forget Bitcoin: Inside the insane world of altcoin cryptocurrency trading - CNET

It was mind-blowing for many when the value of bitcoin tokens rose past $20,000 in mid-December 2020, but the cryptocurrency more than doubled from that price roughly three weeks later. The volatile price cooled from those $40K highs in the days that followed, but tokens are even now trading around $38,000. Plenty of people consider it a great investment, but there are plenty of detractors too (thus the volatility).

If bitcoin has caught your investing eye, consider this: Bitcoin's rise sounds incredible, but there are stocks out there -- Fiverr International (NYSE:FVRR) for instance -- that could be an even better investment. Let's take a look at why.

Fiverr International is a marketplace for freelance jobs. The company has been growing since its incorporation in 2010, but its services became much more vital to workers and those in need of project help during the pandemic with the rise of remote work.

Image source: Getty Images.

In the third quarter ended Sept. 30, revenue increased 88% over the prior year. Active buyers -- those who have used the company's services recently -- increased 37% to 3 million, and there were over 300,000 new buyers. High-value buyers, who spend more than $500 annually through the service, increased as well, to 57% of total revenue.

Does it sound good yet? It gets better. Freelance job websites have been around for a long time, but online freelance is still a fraction of the overall freelance market. Fiverr estimates an $815 billion U.S. freelance market and a $115 billion addressable market. Even if that's overshooting, there's massive opportunity in freelance as the pandemic and overall shift to digital are changing how businesses operate. Fiverr's 2019 annual sales come in at $107 million, and that will be much higher in 2020 when Fiverr releases full-year sales results on Feb. 18. But it's still a small number, and investors can expect it to keep growing.

To get a great chunk of that market, Fiverr has expanded to seven countries and is broadening its suite of services in its model of service as a product. It's also upgrading its technology and investing in customer acquisition.

Costs are also decreasing as the all-digital company is easier to scale, and as sales keep increasing, there's a path toward profitability.

Image source: Getty Images.

Nothing is necessarily wrong with bitcoin as an investment, and a lot of people have made heaps of money from bitcoin trading. But stocks, as opposed to cryptocurrency, generally have some inherent value in the companies' sales, products, and management that back them up. Long-term investors buy shares in companies they believe in, and while the market can be manipulated (shorting) and investors can bid up failing companies as with GameStop, share price typically follows how well a company is performing.

Bitcoin doesn't have any clear, solid financials to back it up as a great investment. Some investors see it as the currency of the future, and others are interested in its potential for even higher gains. But that comes with a lot of risk, at the expense of more stable investment.

Bitcoin made headlines with its rapid ascent in 2020, but altogether it gained a little less than 300% in value in the past year. If that sounds like a lot, Fiverr, which has a strong track record, excellent management, and enormous potential for growth, did even better. Its stock price gained nearly 750% in 2020, more than double bitcoin's surge, and is up 16% so far in 2021. And there's so much more coming.

Fiverr shares trade at a high valuation of 47 times sales, so it doesn't look like a bargain. But while some future growth is baked into the current price, investors can still expect to see more massive gains as the company grows.

Then again, there's no guarantee of future gains. But considering everything Fiverr International has going for it, and everything that bitcoin doesn't, I'd place my bets on Fiverr.

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Forget Bitcoin, This Stock Is a Better Buy - The Motley Fool

Digital assets, in one form or another, are making their way into big business.

The headline-grabbing version of this is straight-up BTC on the balance sheet, a renegade charge being led by MicroStrategy (MSYTR) CEO Michael Saylor, who is known for warning corporates that capital in fiat is being debased.

Saylors MicroStrategy event this week included a playbook, going into the nuts and bolts of things like qualified custodians, hot and cold wallets and so on. Square (SQ) provided a similar guide in October.

Its worth stepping back and remembering what unlikely bedfellows mainstream corporate treasury management and bitcoin really are and how unthinkable this would have been a couple of years back.

That said, MicroStrategy is not alone when it comes to fielding these sorts of discussions. At the end of last month, an event hosted by the Association of Corporate Treasurers (ACT) featured London-based crypto custodian Copper in discussion with IKEAs treasury group.

Its a conversation corporate treasurers should be having, said Naresh Aggarwal, associate director at the ACT, even if the reality of getting into this new asset class remains some way off for many.

Through experience and from our qualifications, most treasurers are familiar with applying security, liquidity and yield when it comes to investing. In that order, Aggarwal told CoinDesk in an interview. Ultimately, if a board decides it wants to ride the coat-tails of a market that is potentially continuing to go up, thats a choice that should be based on the risk appetite of the company informed, of course, by their treasurer.

Aggarwal agreed the discussion around whether crypto is a hedge against inflation is an interesting one, but pointed out that countries like the U.K. are not running into an inflationary environment.

Most G20 countries are not experiencing high levels of inflation and in the U.K., I think inflation recently ticked up to 0.8%, Aggarwal said. I cant see us returning to the days of inflation rates of 8% or 9% any time soon. If youre in Venezuela, for example, then thats a very different situation.

While corporate treasurers wait and see what happens to Saylors capital reserves, many players understand the inevitability of digital and crypto-enhanced forms of payment and tokenized asset plays. Last years regulatory recommendations from the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) only served to confirm this.

MicroStrategy's bitcoin reserves have grown

Making its first immaculately timed outing this week, Ledgermatic, a startup helmed by former PwC, IBM and BTC.com executives, is offering a range of tools to future-proof corporate treasury management in light of the coming digital-asset economy.

Ledgermatic CEO Luke Sully says the likes of Michael Saylor and Jack Dorsey must be recognized as the first corporate evangelists for this use case.

This will be an interesting test case for the BTC on the balance sheet, Sully said in an interview. It would appear that theirs are a long-term approach and not for short-term gains. I expect CFOs and treasury teams will be watching and scratching their heads, thinking of the other questions this raises and exactly how to manage this particular asset and get the benefit while reducing exposure to its price volatility.

Corporates have to account for crypto differently than investment funds do, Sully pointed out, adding that most CFOs and finance teams just dont have the tools available to them to manage and integrate digital-asset workflows.

There are some procedures we have gamed out for anyone thinking of adding crypto to their balance sheet, he said.

Its also worth remembering that Square is a payments company that is naturally involved in fintech, while software is native to MicroStrategy. Even some insurance companies that are said to be looking at crypto, may well have been through a process of tire-kicking with custody providers that are looking for cover.

Speaking at the Copper/ACT webinar, Michael Aandahl, IKEA Groups head of digital treasury, said the early birds moving towards digital assets are often already close to this area in terms of their core business.

You can imagine, as you get further away from your core business, you would ask more questions like, Should we really be doing this? Aandahl said. Well, I think the point here is some companies are starting to do this because they see it as an enabler for their core business.

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Corporate Treasuries Are Figuring Out Bitcoin on the Balance Sheet - CoinDesk - Coindesk