Strong rises in bitcoin could drive the digital currency to an exorbitant $ 250.000, up from around $ 4.600 today, over the next ten years. This would send bitcoin's market capitalization to 5.000 trillion over the same time frame. To predict this type of scenario is Aaron Lasher, co-founder of Breawallet, according to whom, however, the risk of a bubble is around the corner: "I have owned bitcoin for a long time and I am happy with the recent price movements (it has hit the record of $ 4.911,80, with a market cap of $ 72,42 billion, and up more than 300% from the beginning of the year), but I am aware that the bull market will likely be followed by a fairly drastic bearish phase ", he told MarketWatch. According to Lasher, “there is absolutely a digital currency bubble”, but “that's not necessarily a bad thing”. Even according to Robert Shiller, Yale economics professor and Nobel laureate for his work, "the best example of a bubble today is bitcoin." According to the economist, as he explained in an interview with Quartz, the aura of mystery surrounding the digital currency contributes to its success: “The inventor has never been identified and his brilliant idea of crypto and blockchain fuels the belief that it is so powerful that it cannot even be stopped by governments ”, he said, also speaking of the poor regulation of bitcoin.
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Bitcoin is an electronic money created in 2009 by an anonymous inventor, known under the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto, who developed an idea that he himself presented on the Internet at the end of 2018. By convention, the term Bitcoin, with a capital letter, refers to technology and the network, while the lower case bitcoin refers to the currency itself.
Unlike most traditional currencies, Bitcoin does not use a central body: it uses a database distributed among the network nodes that keep track of transactions, but uses cryptography to manage functional aspects, such as the generation of new money. and the attribution of ownership of bitcoins.
The Bitcoin network allows the anonymous possession and transfer of coins; the data necessary to use one's bitcoins can be saved on one or more personal computers in the form of a digital “wallet”, or kept with third parties that perform functions similar to a bank. In any case, bitcoins can be transferred over the internet to anyone with a "bitcoin address". The peer-to-peer structure of the Bitcoin network and the lack of a central body make it impossible for any authority, governmental or otherwise, to block transfers, seize bitcoins without the possession of the relevant keys or devaluation due to the entry of new currency.
Bitcoin is one of the first implementations of a concept defined as a cryptocurrency, first described in 1998 by Wei Dai on a mailing list.