Billions of dollars have fled the cryptocurrency market as an historic bitcoin bull run appears to be over. Fresh from an all-time high price of $83,000 per bitcoin in mid-April, the cryptocurrency held its price in the mid $70,000s for much of May before a dramatic 30% fall in the past week. As of Thursday… Read more »
Over the weekend, Tesla chief executive Elon Musk suggested his company could sell off its Bitcoin holdings, sending the cryptocurrency plummeting. It followed Musk’s announcement earlier this month that his company would no longer accept Bitcoin in payment for its electric cars, due to the fossil fuels needed to create the digital currency. Bitcoin is… Read more »
It has been a big year for cryptocurrency. Bitcoin is worth six times what it was 12 months ago, and the joke currency Dogecoin has seen a hundredfold increase in price. A boom in “non-fungible tokens”, or NFTs – tradable tokens based on the same technology as cryptocurrency – is transforming the art market. With… Read more »
January 2015 was an interesting time for bitcoin and Westpac’s fintech venture capital fund, Reinventure. Simon Cant and Danny Gilligan, co-founded the VC with Westpac the year before. Bitcoin kicked off the year at around US$300, before crashing to $170 within a fortnight. The cryptocurrency would climb to $465 before the year was out and… Read more »
Joke cryptocurrency Dogecoin (pronounced dodgy-coin by some sceptics), which has spawned a metaverse of additional puns during a 400% rise in value over the past week has finally come off the boil after hitting its 420 punchline in trade overnight. Social media users dubbed April 20 as #DogeDay, riffing on the drug subculture reference to… Read more »
Meme joke cryptocurrency Dogecoin more than doubled in price in the last 24 hours, briefly hitting a high of US28c today, and currently sits around 80% up for the day Elon Musk’s favourite Twitter shout out has climbed nearly 300% for the week, putting it into the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market capitalisation for the… Read more »
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have gone on a tear this afternoon, surging to record highs ahead of the direct listing of US crypto exchange Coinbase on the Nasdaq tonight. The listing is also good news for Westpac and its investment fund, Reinventure, which dropped $50 million investment in Coinbase back in 2015 and could be… Read more »
A man lost 17.1 bitcoin – worth $1.3 million today – in an Apple app store scam that serves as a warning to people wanting to track their cryptocurrency on smart phones. Over the course of a few years, Phillipe Christodoulou banked up the bitcoin, watching as its value started to climb last year, according the Washington Post.… Read more »
Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, recently announced his company had bought US$1.5 billion (almost A$2 billion) of Bitcoin. The announcement led to a flurry of enthusiasm and a quick surge in price for the controversial cryptocurrency. This price bump has been good news for Musk in the short term. At one point, Tesla’s… Read more »
One of the most difficult problems in finance right now is figuring out the fundamental economic value of cryptocurrencies. And the past week has complicated this further. For many cryptocurrency investors, the value of Bitcoin is based on the fact it is artificially scarce. A hard cap on “minting” new coins means there will only… Read more »
Iranian police confiscated more 45,000 bitcoin mining machines, chewing up around 95 megawatts per hour (MWh) of electricity, because the miners were using cheaper, subsidised power illegally, according to local media agency Tasnim News. To put that in perspective, that’s around half the capacity of South Australia’s Tesla “big battery” plant (aka Hornsdale). Iranian authorities… Read more »
If you’re feeling a bit sad about your fortunes at the moment, spare a thought for San Francisco-based computer programmer Stefan Thomas, who, around a decade ago, made this video and took 7,002 Bitcoins as payment for the job. The New York Times has the sad tale of German-born Thomas – a former CTO at blockchain… Read more »
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. (Editor’s note: Since this piece was first published, Bitcoin’s price has doubled in a month to US$40,000.) First launched in 2009 as… Read more »
Bitcoin is back. Three years after the bubble that inflated its value from US$5,000 to US$20,000 in less than three months burst in spectacular fashion, plunging more than 80%, the cryptocurrency is again on the verge of a record high. In recent days it has been trading above US$19,000, up from US$10,000 in October and… Read more »
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