Bitcoin frenzy continues unabated; futures surge past $17,000 on first day of trading in US

noolivaralakshmi (37)in #bitcoin • 8 years ago

Sydney: The front-month bitcoin futures contract on the Chicago-based CBOE Futures Exchange surged past $17,000 on Monday, the first day of trading.

The January contract opened at $15,460 in New York on Sunday evening, before leaping to a high of $17,170 during Asian hours. They were last quoted at $17,120, a more than $1,000 premium to the price on Gemini Exchange.

The futures are cash-settled contracts based on the auction price of bitcoin in US dollars on the Gemini Exchange, which is owned and operated by virtual currency entrepreneurs Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss.

Here are some facts that you might not know about the largest and best-known cryptocurrency.
How many are there

Bitcoin’s supply is limited to 21 million - a number that is expected to be reached around the year 2140. So far, around 16.7 million bitcoins have been released into the system, with 12.5 new ones released roughly every 10 minutes via a process called “mining”, in which a global network of computers competes to solve complex algorithms in reward for the new bitcoins.

These mining computers require a vast amount of energy to run. As the price increases, more miners enter the market, driving up the energy consumption further. A recent estimate by tech news site Motherboard put the energy cost of a single bitcoin transaction at 215 kilowatt-hours, assuming that there are around 300,000 bitcoin transactions per day. That’s almost enough energy as the average American household consumes in a whole week.

If you want to buy bitcoin, you do not need to buy a whole one. Bitcoin’s smallest unit is a Satoshi, named after the elusive creator of the cryptocurrency, Satoshi Nakamoto. One Satoshi is one hundred-millionth of a bitcoin, making it worth around $0.0002 at current exchange rates.