The BTC news has been coming in fast and furious lately. The first BTC futures contracts were introduced by the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) on December 10th, 2017. This was followed by a new BTC ETF proposal from Van Eck Securities Incorporated on December 18th, which is expected to be filed with the SEC later this week.
This past Thursday, CME Group also announced that it would introduce BTC futures trading before the year-end of 2017. These announcements are just the latest in an ongoing evolution of BTC investment opportunities – but what exactly does that mean?
We’ll explore these recent events and how they represent part of a larger trend towards more mainstream BTC adoption below!
What is BTC?
Bitcoin BTC is a digital currency, also known as a cryptocurrency. BTC was first introduced in 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto – the anonymous creator(s) of this technology and payment system. In 2009, BTC became an open-source software.
What does that mean? It means it’s free to use! Anyone can download its code for free from GitHub or other sources online and begin using BTC right away.
Where did BTC originate? The original concept came from a whitepaper published under the pseudonym “Satoshi Nakamoto,” but where did the idea itself come from? Some argue that there were precursors before BTC which laid some of the groundwork for how blockchain technology works today, such as Hashcash (1997), B Money (1998), and Bitgold (2008). BTC is really a continuation of these ideas, but it was the first to solve certain problems in this space.
What are BTC’s key benefits? BTC has multiple advantages over other payment systems which include: lower transaction fees, faster confirmation times, decentralized currency control, better security against fraud or theft, global accessibility/borderless transactions, transparency for all accounts on its public blockchain ledger… the list goes on!
BTC isn’t perfect though; there have been challenges along the way such as high volatility rates due to speculative trading behavior by investors versus actual adoption of BTC by average users. As more real-life uses cases continue to emerge, however – online shopping with companies like Overstock or Expedia, BTC ATMs in major cities, etc. – BTC’s image as an asset for trading/speculation is slowly being replaced by its reputation as a legitimate alternative currency.
In conclusion, BTC is still in its infancy and there’s a lot about BTC we can’t predict yet. BTC, for example, is currently limited to only seven transactions per second which will be problematic when BTC becomes more widely adopted as the number of blocks mined every ten minutes won’t be able to keep up with the number of users trying to transact on BTC news .
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