The market of cryptocurrency is not having the time of its life now. Many people, who made investments in November-December of 2017 because of hype, have suffered severe losses, and nobody knows when the situation changes for the better. Thus, a large number of people are interested in the global perspective of

Bitcoin

and other coins, whether is it worth investing in digital currency and what to wait for in the nearest future. In this article we will try to analyze the situation and share our thoughts on this matter with you.

Contents:

(please, click the topic to scroll down to it)

1. What is happening to the market?

Earning on investments in coins with a large capitalization in 2018 is, unfortunately, not really possible. The market lost about 75-80% of its capitalization in 6 months. In such a situation, only traders who speculate for fall (do shorting) or ICO-investors can earn on cryptocurrencies.

Now let’s take a look at the situation from a different angle and evaluate the growth rate of the cryptocurrency market over a longer period of time. As many experts say: "Investments need time, just like good wine." And if you look at the 12-month graph of the

cryptocurrency market capitalization

, you can clearly see that the growth is about 280% per annum, and this is at the lowest point of correction.

According to https://coinmarketcap.com

Two years ago we could see an increase of investments by about 2200%. You can go deeper into the history of cryptocurrency, but these figures make it obvious that the market is still liquid and growing if you look at it in the long term.

According to https://coinmarketcap.com

2. Advantages and disadvantages of the leading cryptocurrencies

Each coin is a separate company, with its employees (a team of developers), an idea, a technological base, etc. Each cryptocurrency has its own strengths and weaknesses. But if we are talking about the largest projects, we should single out two unconditional leaders: Bitcoin and

Ethereum

.

The most popular and the oldest cryptocurrency is Bitcoin, which has the most reliable and large

blockchain

. This coin can claim the title of digital gold, since it has some common characteristics with this precious metal (increase in the complexity of extraction, limited emission over time). The main disadvantages of the system are slow transactions (block generation takes about 10 minutes) and low bandwidth.

Ethereum has a much more advanced technological base than a cryptocurrency flagship. It is a huge platform, where you can run third-party decentralized applications. The main feature of the project is the technology of smart contracts, which can remove any intermediaries from the chain of interaction between the parties. Among the problems that Ethereum has, we can name inflation of the coin. The development team plans to switch to a new PoS algorithm in the future, which will help to reduce the inflation rate by about 20 times. However, nobody knows when it is going to happen.

3. Should you invest in cryptocurrency now?

There is no clear answer to this question, as no one knows what will happen to the industry in the future. However, if you analyze the news background more carefully, you can notice the global infusion of money into infrastructure development by the major market players (Goldman Sachs and other investment funds, as well as whole governments of individual countries, for example, India). It would seem that Bitcoin has fallen, the bubble has burst, but no, rich people are investing billions of dollars in new exchanges, farming farms, etc. Considering all this, we can conclude that the world's major figures are betting on the cryptocurrency market and nothing bad will happen to the industry in the global sense at least in 3-5 more years.

4. Conclusion

The cryptocurrency market is not having the time of its life now, but if you look at it at a slightly different angle, it becomes clear that this is just another phase that will not last forever. What will happen to Bitcoin in the future is not 100% known to anyone, but the big players come to this field and, thus, we can conclude that we can be waiting for new historical highs in the coming years.

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