Major online and offline retailers are starting to add the new currency as a payment method. But what exactly is bitcoin? According to a recent Bloomberg poll, only 42 percent of Americans correctly identified bitcoin as a virtual currency. Six percent thought it was an iPhone app. Satoshi worked on the project alone for 2 years before releasing the code to the public. He disappeared shortly after creating the cryptocurrency, but before leaving he posted the now infamous quote: Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency and a new and unique financial vehicle, unlike anything the world has ever seen. Despite the name, there is no physical coin to speak of, Bitcoin is a completely electronic form of money. For example, if I have an mp3 file or an ebook on my computer, I can freely copy that file a thousand times and send it to a thousand different people. For a digital currency, the possibility for unlimited copying would mean a quick hyperinflationary death. Bitcoin solves this by maintaining a peer to peer network and recording each transaction in a public ledger called the block chain. Say I send 1 bitcoin from my bitcoin address to my friend John. The bitcoin network records that transaction in the block chain and I no longer have possession of that bitcoin. There are many arguments on whether the new virtual currency will succeed or fail. We will not get into this nor discuss the politics behind the project. Our concern is strictly with the profit opportunities provided by this new payment phenomenon. In the next few pages on the new trading currency we will outline our thoughts from the perspective of a trader and a potential investor in this upcoming market. Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer virtual currency. This means that in order anyoption a transaction to occur, no middle men or central authority is needed. You can send any amount of bitcoins to anyone living anywhere in the world, completely eliminating the need for traditional third parties like banks or money transmitters. The cryptocurrency also allows the bypassing of capital and AML restrictions. In order to send or receive bitcoins, all you need to have is a bitcoin address and internet access. You only need to be online long enough for the transaction to process. Like we mentioned previously, in order to send or receive bitcoins you will need to have a bitcoin address. You can get a bitcoin address either by downloading the bitcoin client or by getting an online wallet. The two most popular btc clients are Bitcoin-qt and Multibit. The main difference between these two clients is in the size of the block chain that needs to be downloaded. If you decide to go with Bitcoin-qt, have at least 10 Gigabytes free space on your hard drive for the block chain. Multibit is a lightweight version of the bitcoin client. You can read more about it here. But where are the bitcoins actually stored? It is always recommend to backup this file. The bitcoins can also be stored in online wallets. There are specialized websites that offer bitcoin wallet services. However due to these sites being a frequent target for hackers, keeping bitcoins in online wallets is not recommended when you can easily store them offline on your computer. Wallets can be useful for storing small sums of bitcoins so that you can make quick online purchases. Some of the more popular wallet services are Blockchai n and CoinKite. Bitcoin has several advantages compared to traditional money transmitting services. We already mentioned two of these above, the elimination of the need for third parties and the bypassing of restrictions. Another major plus of the new cryptocurrency is the very low cost for sending and receiving bitcoins. While it is possible to send transactions completely free of charge, it is recommended to pay the small fee in order to speed up the sending process. The fee amount depends on the data size of the transaction. A typical transaction is bytes and carries a fee of BTC. Bitcoin offers benefits to merchants as well, as transactions that involve the digital currency are secure and irreversible. Without the risk of fraud or fraudulent chargebacks, merchants can offer their products at a discount thereby generating more sales or pocket the difference themselves. The picture above shows some of the recent large transactions recorded in the block chain. The long lines of letters and numbers you see in the pic are bitcoin addresses. A bitcoin address consists of alphanumeric characters, beginning with the number 1 or 3. Notice that there is no name that goes along with the bitcoin address. While all bitcoin addresses and transactions are public, the holders of those addresses remain hidden. The only thing that can be discerned by looking at the block chain is that address 1XXxxxXXXxxxxxxXX sent Bitcoins to address 3XXxxxXXXxxXXxxXX at a certain time. Who sent the coins, the reason for sending, and the users location is not revealed. However, keep in mind that as soon as you connect your bitcoin address to your real identity for example, by purchasing bitcoins online or in a face to face meetingthe pseudo anonymity provided by bitcoin is lost. There are ways to regain the lost anonymity but that is beyond the scope of this introductory article. But how can you actually get a hold of a bitcoin? The easiest hours to acquire bitcoins is to buy them at hours online exchange. There are three major bitcoin exchanges, each of them with their own unique properties and a different fee structure. The company is based in Slovenia, part of the EU. If you want to withdraw by SEPA, you have to convert your funds back to Euros. The fee structure favours big traders and market makers. The basic fee for new accounts starts at 0. Yes forex traders, you heard that right, the LOWEST fee structure is percent. Luckily, the spread between the bid and the ask price is very low, most of the time ranging between 1 and 2 dollars. You only pay the spread if you want to enter a trade right away anyoption a market order. Bitstamp has largely avoided the deposit and withdrawal problems that plague many bitcoin exchanges. With a lack of regulation on the upcoming virtual currency and its checkered past, many financial institutions remain reluctant to get involved with processing bitcoin related transactions. You can deposit funds in USD, EUR, GBP and CHF. US clients are accepted Coinbase is probably the easiest and safest way to purchase bitcoins in the U. Unlike BitStamp, Coinbase is not an exchange. They act as a counter-party to all customer trades, you buy or sell your bitcoins directly to Coinbase. These limits are not applied on the individual level. Basically Coinbase has a set amount of bitcoins that it is willing to buy or sell every day. Sometimes the Coinbase site itself will run into a daily rolling limit on purchases or sales if there is an exceptional amount of activity in the bitcoin markets. We put up this temporary pause to make sure that we have enough funds to accommodate the transfer orders being created. This should be a rare exception rather than the general rule however. It might be best to check in at 6am or 7am Eastern Standard Time tomorrow. Sorry for any inconvenience this has caused you — we know this can be frustrating. The company offers its own MetaTrader platform. The instrument comes with a leverage of 3 to 1 and the ability to short bitcoin. Shorting is not an option at Bitstamp. The fees on MetaTrader are slightly higher, 0. But alas, nothing is as straightforward in bitcoin world. No one knows who the real owners behind btc-e are. Apparently the headquarters of hours company are in Bulgaria and the support staff is more familiar with Russian then with English, but the rest is a mystery. The company operates a complicated deposit and withdrawal process that relays the money through several banks and payment processors before depositing them to your account. If you plan to deposit on BTC-E, make sure to follow their deposit instructions to the letter. Because the deposits go through a web of banks, tracking down a lost deposit is near to impossible. According to user reviews, deposits and withdrawal by these methods are a lot faster and smoother compared to bank wires. BTC-E does accept US clients. However, starting from the middle of Decemberthe company stopped processing US dollar wires or any wires connected to a US bank. All transfers from US Citizens or US Bank will be refused by bank. Keep in mind that due to the possibility for chargebacks and fraud, bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies trade at a premium on ebay. Face to face meetups are another option to acquire bitcoins. Always exercise caution when doing trading offline exchange. Meet during the daytime and in places with a lot of people around. If possible, bring a friend. It all depends on your needs and requirements. Some exchanges are better for trading, others have superior banking relations with bankwire deposit and withdrawal options. Before we go any further, a caution is in order. Bitcoin prices are highly volatile. Prices rose from a low of on Hours 1st to a high of 1,090 by November 30th From here, the btc price crashed to a low anyoption on December 18th, only to go back up and retest the 1,000 level in January of this year. One bitcoin is currently worth on btc-e. The chart below trading this volatility. Unlike major forex currency pairs which barely move 1 percent per day, bitcoin prices can rise or fall over 30 percent in a single day. We already wrote about one of the more competitive options for shorting bitcoin and leveraged trading, BTC-E. The Bulgarian exchange offers the popular MetaTrader platform with 3 to 1 leverage, shorting capability and a low fee of percent per side. Two bitcoin CFDs are available, Bitcoin Mini and Bitcoin Weekly. The Bitcoin Weekly CFD has a 20 to 1 leverage and expires every Friday at GMT. You can find more about the bitcoin trading conditions here. Unlike forex which tradesbitcoin trades except on AvaTrade. AvaTrade does not accept US clients at this time. Unfortunately, the product is not very suitable for day trading as you can only enter and exit the market four times per day. Therefore, at this time we will not be accepting new clients or funds from existing US customers. The exchange currently accepts only bitcoin deposits, no fiat currency deposits are allowed. The pic above shows a bitcoin long position. As you can see on the picture, you can only set the stoploss as a distance from the current price in the pic this is set as 50 points. The default is 88 points below entry. Besides CFDs, the new cryptocurrency has trading helped spawn a new options market. Currently several companies are in the business of offering Bitcoin options. You can bet on rising or falling bitcoin prices. Currently the site takes bitcoin deposits only. Predictious does accept US clients Regulation and other actions by government entities has one of the biggest impacts on the price of bitcoin. The US and Chinese governments are the ones to watch. Somewhat favorable comments by US lawmakers in November and December of last year underpinned the bitcoin rally. Baidu, the biggest Chinese search engine started to offer payments in bitcoin. The chart below shows the remarkable November rally. The silence of the Chinese authorities was seen as a subtle acceptance signal by market participants. The Bank also demanded that businesses stop with the practice of pricing their products in Bitcoins. December 7th is marked with a yellow rectangle on the chart anyoption. But what a lot of people failed to grasp is why the price is going up. While speculation and betting on higher prices certainly played their part in the process, a major reason behind the gains is very simple, increased adoption of the cryptocurrency. According to BitPay, a Bitcoin Payment Service Provider, as of November there are over 14,000 merchants currently accepting bitcoins. Two years ago this number stood at few hundred. The number of transactions facilitated by Bitpay increased tenfold in and crossed the 50,000 mark in November. The payment processor said that 6,296 bitcoin transactions occurred on Black Friday last year, up from only 99 transactions the year prior. You can now buy a private flight into space with your bitcoins. Major adult websites are also starting to accept the new currency as a means for payment. All of these developments point to one thing. The Bitcoin marketplace is expanding at an astounding rate of growth. The businesses and individuals that embrace this new phenomenon will have a leg up over their competition going forward. The third biggest fundamental driver of bitcoin prices is the increased or decreased usage in activities outlawed by governments. Government crackdown on these activities tends to suppress the price of bitcoin. Around different varieties of drugs were offered on the site. The FBI shut down Silk Road on 2 October The alleged chief operator of the site, Ross William Ulbricht also known as Dread Pirate Roberts was charged with alleged murder for hire and narcotics trafficking violation. The agency confiscated over 26,000 bitcoins from different accounts on Silk Road, worth approximately million US Dollars back then. Twenty days later, the FBI reported that they had seized 144,000 BTC thought to belong to Ulbricht. Bitcoin prices plummeted from to a low of on the news. Prices were back to two days later. The prospect of an US law enforcement agency holding a large chunk of bitcoins spooked markets. But as can be seen on the chart, the spike lower was again used by investors to gabble up coins at a bargain. It is interesting to note that a major bitcoin rally started right after the Silk Road shutdown, somewhat dispelling critics arguments that the virtual currency was mainly used as a tool for facilitating drug trafficking. Traders with experience in other commodity markets are probably asking themselves why the supply topic is placed last in an article that goes over the drivers of bitcoin prices. This is because the supply is constant and known beforehand and SHOULD therefore be already priced in. Situations like finding a huge oil field that significantly depresses oil prices is not possible with bitcoin. The rate of block creation is 6 per hour with each block worth 25 bitcoins around 25k USD. On the other hand if miners generate less coins then the difficulty will go down making it easier to generate new coins. You can read more about the supply of bitcoins here. With the mark of drug trafficking of the record, the new cryptocurrency was also starting to attract the attention of Wall Street. The analysts expect bitcoin to rise by 10 to times its current value as anyoption new technology partly replaces traditional payment processors and money transmitters. Visa and MasterCard are estimated to take a 2 to 3 percent cut of every card transaction. By using bitcoin instead, merchants stand to improve their bottom line by at least 2 percent. In addition, because bitcoin transactions are irreversible, there is no possibility for chargebacks and fraud. This reduces the costs of operation by another several percentage hours. The market is currently dominated by large players like Western Union and MoneyGram, WU for example can earn upwards of 10 percent per transaction on international remittances. If no fiat currency trading involved, sending and receiving bitcoins is almost free and costs btc regardless of the amount. This is around 9 cents at current btc prices. There are plenty of resources online where you can learn more about bitcoin and its unique properties. Here are some of the major websites that can help you speed up the learning process. Plenty of articles on any bitcoin related topic that range from securing your wallet, dealing with scams, mining bitcoins, to a list of online and offline businesses that accept the new currency. Use this resource to ask questions about more advanced topics. Bitcoincharts is the most popular website for following the current bitcoin price. The site provides a rundown of all major btc exchanges by volume. You can also arrange the markets to only display the Euro or the Japanese Yen versus bitcoin on the different exchanges. Like the name says, the website also offers charts with several popular technical indicators. The choice of timeframes ranges from 1 minute all the way to the Weekly TF. Plus, you get to see the current market depth at the different exchanges. They still offer the option to display prices in BTC instead. DC Magnates focuses on news about different digital currencies including bitcoin. It was launched by the same team from Forex Magnates, a popular forex industry news website that many of our forex readers are probably familiar with. The wiki page showcases different categories of businesses. You can find anything from major retailers like Overstock and Target to forex brokers accepting bitcoin deposits and bitcoin specific stock and options markets. This wiki page provides a selection of places where you can gamble away your bitcoins. Includes card games, dice rolls, poker sites and online casinos. You are advised to conduct your own independent research before making a decision. This website is an information site only. Accordingly, ForexNews makes no warranties or guarantees in respect of the content. The publications herein do not take into account the investment objectives, financial situation or particular needs of any particular person. You should obtain individual financial advice based on your own particular circumstances before making an investment decision on the basis of information on this website Today is Fri, December 2, GMT Bond Market FX Words ForexNews.
These included 29% of the population (or 4.7 million) who regularly participated more than twice a week. and 36% (or 5.8 million) who participated up to twice a week.
Among men who are part of a couple, 75% report that they always have an orgasm.
These included 29% of the population (or 4.7 million) who regularly participated more than twice a week. and 36% (or 5.8 million) who participated up to twice a week.
We often find that parents are upset when they have been court-ordered to take a divorce class or parenting classes.