The 4 Reasons Why Bitcoin Is Stronger Than Ever In 2018
by Trading 101 lip 16, 2019
The 4 Reasons Why Bitcoin Is Stronger Than Ever In 2018
It’s no secret that Bitcoin prices have been down significantly compared to December 2017, when the cryptocurrency reached unforeseen levels of value. While some believe that Bitcoin has peaked and is now only a few months away from being as obscure as it was half a decade ago, all performance metrics point to the opposite being the case. In fact, it is arguable that Bitcoin is in fact stronger than ever and has a bright future ahead. Let’s look at what you need to know about Bitcoin trading 101 in 2018.
- 1) The Userbase Is Growing
Bitcoin has been on significant upward trend in total amount of transactions being posted every day. There are several other metrics to gauge activity by, but total transaction value is the most straightforward and important. The overall trend has been towards growth.
If you’ve been diligently doing your trading 101 research on Bitcoin you’ll have seen a decline in transactions recently. This can be accredited to batch transactions becoming more and more popular, which make individual transactions more impactful but lower overall transaction value.
One trend to be observed is the relation between price and transaction value. As the prices fluctuate up and down, so does the total transaction value – meaning that the volume will go up again when Bitcoin value starts increasing.
- 2) Nodes Are Everywhere
Nodes are essential to any blockchain network as they’re the ones confirming transactions are genuine based on the Bitcoin governance protocol. A user can opt to become a full node and use that to validate their own transactions too.
The more nodes exist in the network, the more decentralized the Bitcoin system becomes. The higher the level of decentralization, the higher the level of stability and safety in the network.
There are over 12,000 nodes spread across the globe now, with 2,700 being in the United States, 2,300 being in China and almost 2,000 coming out of Germany. An interesting thing to note is that China has become the second largest home to Bitcoin nodes despite its government recently cracking down on all types of cryptocurrency.
- 3) Bitcoin Is Growing In All Aspects
Due to the attention Bitcoin received from mainstream media and the finance industry, the network experienced a large surge of users and transaction volume. It reached extremely congested levels which caused a steep increase in exchanges charging exuberant transaction fees, slowing down the entire blockchain.
At the end of 2017, Bitcoin adopted SegWit as a way to upgrade its infrastructure to handle the additional load. SegWit allows for each block in the blockchain to contain less data, bringing faster transactions back and in return lowering transactional fees for the foreseeable future.
SegWit implementation has also kickstarted Bitcoin’s focus on developing more technologies to provide better services in the future. Those include: faster, cheaper and more private transactions in 2018.
- 4) The Bitcoin Blockchain Is More Powerful Than Ever Before
In cryptocurrencies, a network’s hash rate is used to determine how many tera hashes are being performed per second. That’s how many trillions of hashes being performed per second – in layman’s terms, how much computing power is on the Bitcoin network.
Bitcoin is hovering around 22 million tera hashes per second as of March 2018. Security experts have said that the required amount of computing power to successfully attack the blockchain that Bitcoin sits on, doesn’t currently exist.
This makes Bitcoin the most robust and secure cryptocurrency and blockchain in the world. It’s a level of computing power that no single nation or corporation could hope to ever beat using their own computers – Bitcoin is definitely around to stay.