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Bitcoin, the world's best known and largest cryptocurrency, reached $ 19,000 in December 2017. Despite the initial peak of appraisal and interest from users and institutions around the world, bitcoins remained a volatile cryptocurrency for all 2018. At the moment, bitcoin is trading at around $ 3,900.
The collapse of bitcoin evaluation has been going on for several weeks. From here, things are unlikely to improve for cryptocurrency. According to industry experts, bitcoins are earmarked for the lowest rating of the last one year, although the decline may be short-term.
"There's still a lot of people in this game," he told Bloomberg Innes, head of trading for the Asia Pacific at Oanda, a forex company. If Bitcoin "collapses, if we start to see a run towards $ 3000, this thing will be a monster." People will run to the exits. "
The bitcoin trajectory so far has been very close to what the industry experts have predicted. The boss of JP Morgan, Jamie Dimon, last year, famously called bitcoins a "fraud" and that was more useful for criminals than traditional use. READ ALSO: the dip in the volume of Bitcoin raises questions about its popularity
The unpredictable nature of bitcoins has already taken over some companies. One of the biggest incidents was the mobile computing giant Nvidia. The company published a disappointing earnings report in November after being the main beneficiary of crypto-mania at the end of last year.
The mobile computing company has invaded the market with mining encryption chips with increasing requests for bitcoins. The demand for cryptographic chips vanished soon after the bitcoin rating began to fluctuate.
"Our short-term results reflect the excess inventory of channels after the cryptocurrency boom, which will be corrected," said Jensen Huang, Nvidia's founder and CEO.
READ ALSO: 10 things to know about Bitcoin virtual currency
One of the biggest barriers to bitcoin and cryptocurrency has been that governments around the world have not been bullish on virtual currency. For example, India, one of the largest economies in the world, does not consider cryptocurrencies as legal tender.
"The government does not consider cryptocurrency currencies as legal tender or currency and (will) take all measures to eliminate the use of cryptographic resources …", Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said # 2018-19 Union in Lok Sabha at the start of this year.
Cryptocurrencies have suffered a severe crackdown on Internet giants such as Facebook, Google and Twitter, among others. Facebook and Google, in particular, have been more restrictive in their crackdown in an attempt to prevent cryptocurrencies related to their platforms. Months later, both companies were silenced over cryptocurrency ads.
Cryptocurrency mining malware increased by 86% in the second quarter of 2018, according to a new McAfee Labs report
(REUTERS)
Safety issues
Security has emerged as one of the biggest problems for cryptocurrencies, including bitcoins. From fraud, from hacking to illegal mining, cryptocurrencies still have to solve critical security problems.
According to McAfee Labs Threats Report – September 2018, cryptocurrency malware increased by 86% in the second quarter of 2018.
"Although less common than ransomware, cryptographic malware quickly became a factor in the threat landscape, and after growing by about 400,000 in the fourth quarter of 2017, new cryptographic malware samples increased 629% to more than 2, 9 million samples in the first quarter of 2018. This trend continued in the second quarter with a total increase of 86% of samples with over 2.5 million new samples, McAfee Labs even identified what appear to be old malware like the ransomware recently retooled with mining functionality, "said the report.
The report states that cybercriminals have also found new perspectives, including illegal coin mining and profit-driven theft.
(McAfee)
"A few years ago, we did not think about Internet routers, video recording devices and other Internet of Things devices as encryption platforms because their CPU speeds were too low to support that productivity," said Christiaan Beek, Lead Scientist and Senior Principal Engineer with McAfee Advanced Threat Research.
"Today, the huge volume of such online devices and their propensity for weak passwords are a very interesting platform for this business.If I was a cybercriminal with a botnet of 100,000 IoT devices, it would cost me almost nothing from the point financial perspective to produce enough cryptocurrency to create a new and profitable revenue stream. "
Yes to Blockchain
Blockchain was the biggest beneficiary of the growing interest in cryptocurrency. Decentralized technology, which facilitates cryptocurrencies, has evolved into a more reliable platform for a variety of purposes, ranging from supply management to health care.
Blockchain-based phones have also become a reality this year. Sirin Labs has launched the world's first blockchain-based phone, Finney. HTC has also launched a blockchain-based phone.
Back in India, NITI Aayog worked with Oracle, Apollo Hospitals and Strides Pharma Sciences to pilot a true supply chain of drugs using the decentralized ledger and blockchain IoT software.
"AI, ML, blockchain and data science are no longer fashionable phrases, these technologies have evolved from pilot projects to become mainstream.Today, for example, artificial intelligence is used in remote clinics and Google Pixel smartphones have changed the way people take pictures on mobile devices thanks to automatic learning, so moving forward, these technologies will be at the center of every organization's business strategy, according to the guide for the spending of semi-annual global cognitive artificial intelligence systems IDC's spending on cognitive and artificial intelligence resources will increase to $ 52.2 billion in 2021, "said Vishal Agrawal, Managing Director, India and SAARC, Avaya.
Globally, many technology giants are rapidly joining the blockchain bandwagon. This year we saw Facebook create a separate blockchain division. It is said that the social networking giant is working on its cryptocurrency that would work with WhatsApp. Amazon recently introduced Amazon Quantum Ledger Database and Amazon Managed Blockchain for record management.
Although cryptocurrencies are failing to take off, it is expected that the blockchain will expand into broader areas of supply chain, finance and peer-to-peer payments in various industries including insurance, healthcare, infrastructure and more.
First publication: 29 Dec 2018 16:36 IST
