ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT BITCOIN IN 2018

Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency and worldwide payment system. It is the first decentralized digital currency, as the system works without a central bank or single administrator. The network is peer-to-peer and transactions take place between users directly, without an intermediary. These transactions are verified by network nodes through the use of cryptography and recorded in a public distributed ledger called a blockchain. Bitcoin was invented by an unknown person or group of people under the name Satoshi Nakamoto and released as open-source software in 2009.

Bitcoins are created as a reward for a process known as mining. They can be exchanged for other currencies,products, and services. As of February 2015, over 100,000 merchants and vendors accepted bitcoin as payment. Research produced by the University of Cambridge estimates that in 2017, there are 2.9 to 5.8 million unique users using a cryptocurrency wallet, most of them using bitcoin.Its value is up more than 20 per cent over last month and more than 1,240 per cent over the last year, but recent goings-on have demonstrated just how quickly the situation can change.
Bitcoin's dominance of the cryptocurrency market is at its lowest level ever thanks to rising interest in alternative digital coins.

On Tuesday, its market cap was $231.8 billion, or around 36.1 percent of the total value of all cryptocurrencies. This is the lowest share of the market that bitcoin has had in its history.

Bitcoin's previous low was 37.6 percent in June. By contrast, at the start of 2017, its market share stood at over 80 percent.

Dominance refers to the percentage a single virtual currency has of the market capitalization or value of every cryptocurrency in the world. The total market capitalization of the entire cryptocurrency world stood at $640.4 billion on Tuesday, according to data from Coinmarketcap.com.

Bitcoin rallied by more than 1,300 percent in 2017. In December, it hit a record high of $19,783.21 before a sharp sell-off saw it plunge, closing the year at $13,889.99, according to CoinDesk's bitcoin price index, which tracks prices from digital currency exchanges Bitstamp, Coinbase, itBit and Bitfinex.

The decline of bitcoin's dominance, which on Dec. 1 stood at around 55 percent, is due to the pullback in price, but also rising interest in other cryptocurrencies such as ethereum, ripple and litecoin.

On Dec. 1, for example, ripple's value stood at around 3 percent of the entire market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies. On Tuesday, it was over 14 percent. Ripple's price rose over 36,000 percent in 2017 and it is now the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap.

Investors appear to be taking a breather from bitcoin for now and looking at alternative cryptocurrencies.

Bitcoin has divided the financial and business world. Last year, J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon famously called bitcoin a "fraud." And last week, The Gartman Letter editor and publisher Dennis Gartman told CNBC that bitcoin would trade under $5,000.

But many in the industry are also bullish on the cryptocurrency. Dave Chapman, managing director at cryptocurrency trading firm Octagon Strategy, sees the price of bitcoin exceeding $100,000 before the end of 2018.

The cryptocurrency’s value fell dramatically just ahead of Christmas, dropping by almost $2,000 in just an hour at one point, and almost slipping below the $11,000 mark.

Bitcoin is notoriously volatile, and its value is expected to continue to shift wildly.

Those fluctuations have caused problems with actually using bitcoin, with Steam recently announcing that it won’t be able to take it any more and multiple exchanges saying the huge amounts of trading is leading to problems with actually transferring them.

Naturally, its spectacular rise has coincided with increasing amounts of interest, with more and more people now looking to invest.