The passing year was definitely a year of cryptocurrencies. The spring bull of altcoins exceeded all expectations, as did the new Bitcoin ATH. Which coin turned out to be the best investment of the year? What events affected the market? We invite you to read our summary of the year with expert comments.
The fact that this was the cryptocurrency year is best demonstrated by the green in our ranking. All of the most popular coins gain in value. The highest rate of return was given by PIVX – 152 796%, the second place belongs to the NEO with the result of 52 814% and the third to the winner of the December ranking – Ripple – with the result of 35 466%. These are really staggering numbers and it would seem that such returns are impossible. And yet, it was enough to buy one of these coins on January 1 2017 and wait until today…
Winner of the previous annual ranking is this time on position 24, but with a similar rate of return for the second year in a row. Will it also be a good investment in 2018? NEM, which had second place year ago, this time is just outside the podium with a rate of return several times higher. Bitcoin, on the other hand, allowed to increased the savings by 1370%. (Not all cryptocurrencies were available a year ago, but we include them because of your choice in monthly rankings).
The beginning of the year was very nervous and investors’ moods were completely different from those currently. Bitcoin experienced 6 major price drops, and the first fell at the beginning of the year and was associated with the „Chinese banking” and exchange control by the PBoC, or People’s Bank of China. Today nobody remembers about China, the ICO was forbidden, exchanges fled abroad, it turned out that the turnover was artificially high, and the miners themselves are starting to think about evacuation. In 2017, China’s hegemony ended.
However, nature abhorse a vacuum – just like business. Most of these cryptocurrency businesses and users are moving to nearby Japan or South Korea. On April 1, 2017, Bitcoin was recognized as a fully-fledged currency in Japan – you can pay tax, buy a house or a car, and run a business using cryptocurrency as a settlement method. It was Japan and Korea that quickly dominated the market and began to dictate the price. It even happened that the daily turnover of Japanese yen accounted for nearly 3/5 of Bitcoin’s global turnover, although it has now fallen in favor of the dollar.
The first half of the year is also a time of crazy increases in altcoins, which are increasingly beginning to grow as potential Bitcoin competitors. Only a year ago, hardly anyone treated projects such as Dash, Monero, Zcash, Neo or NEM as actually independent projects. Most people treated them as an opportunity to multiply bitcoins. Meanwhile, these projects have seen significant price increases and are promising for the future. Naturally, the dispute over whether Bitcoin will be overtaken by either of these (or other) coins has been going on for a long time. Bitcoin still remains the largest and most recognizable cryptocurrency that goes to the so-called mainstream, that is people from outside the industry.
And it is Bitcoin which gave the most emotions this year. At the beginning of the year, investors were not convinced that the price would hit $ 1000, and later there were frequent votes that falls at $ 3000 or $ 5000 is the bursting of the bubble. Those who predicted the magical level of $ 10,000 were not taken too seriously (even less seriously was taken forecasts like, for example John McAfee for $ 0.5 million in three years), and even ridiculed. And yet Bitcoin has reached the price almost twice as high: the current ATH on the Bitfinex market is $ 19,981.
This year also brought a certain „fashion” to forks. It all started, of course, from the loud bitcoin fork from August 1, when Bitcoin Cash was created without any block limit. The main chain branched in two, and users received the same amount of BCH they had at Bitcoin’s address from the forks. It was a hot period full of heated discussions. Soon other forks appeared, like Byzantium on ETH or Bitcoin Gold. There have also been many other forks, but it is these listed ones that remain at the forefront of capitalization. Yes, there has been a lot of fashion for ICO, so the carrying out of forks also began to be a form of token distribution between users.
There was also a lot of fuss around the stock exchanges. A positive event was the repayment of all people who lost Bitcoins in the results of the burglary. The closing of BTC-e, one of the largest exchanges, was much louder. Recently, the storm also caused a situation in Bulgaria, where in one night the banks terminated contracts for all cryptocurrency exchanges in the country, thus cutting off a very large number of users from cryptocurrency
Most important events in 2017:
• China: PBoC controls stock exchanges, turnover decline, ICO and stock exchange activities re banned, users’ flight to nearby countries
• First division of the Bitcoin network in history – Bitcoin Cash is created, and later Bitcoin Gold
• Bitcoin is a full-fledged currency in Japan
• The price of $ 10,000 for Bitcoin exceeded for the first time in history – the new ATH $ 19,981
• Market capitalization of cryptocurrencies exceeds $ 0.5 trillion for the first time
• Altcoins are growing – Bitcoin dominates at a record low (36%)
• Rejection of ETF Funds for Bitcoin
• Bitfinex repays all its clients after losing Bitcoins
• Backdoor in Bitmain excavators, which theoretically allowed to disable 70% of the Bitcoin network
• „Buy Bitcoin” for the first time more popular than „Buy gold”
Which of the unquoted currencies in our ranking have given you the biggest return? Share information with us in the comments!
For Bithub.pl Dominik Gordel, our analyst Picasso and JPK Traders comment on 2017
Dominik Gordel:
Millions of new users, billions of dollars in capitalization and trillions of dollars in turnover. Thousands of hours of conferences, meetings, cryptocurrency market presentation. The year 2017 will undoubtedly go down in the history of the 21st century as a year of cryptocurrencies. A wonderful multi-month bust on bitcoin and sky-high increases of altcoins, which we had the opportunity to experience are unique in the world.
It started with bitcoin! And the price of several hundred dollars at the beginning of last year. After several weeks of growth, altcoins came to the fore at the end of February. The first sign was the increase in the DASH currency. A several-fold increase then attracted the other currencies, beginning with great increases in alternative currencies. Return rates of up to several thousand percent have become the norm, there has been a lot of fresh capital on the market allowing for such huge increases. Then, new currencies created in the form of ICO came to the fore. Thousands of new currencies announcing the public sale of their tokens, accumulating several billion dollars, set a new path in the approach to crowdfunding.
And all this with the constantly growing rate of bitcoins, successively $ 1,000, $ 2,000, $ 3,000, $ 5,000, $ 10,000 and more. The growth seemed to have no end. And all this around the diverse information coming from the world: ETF, Chinese ban, ban on ICO through the SEC, Futures contracts, recognition of bitcoin on the legal medium and much more. Although the second half of the year in particular was alternated with good and bad news from the world, it did not prevent us from reaching higher and higher price caps. After summer summits on the altcoins and a large autumn correction, alternative cryptocurrences returned to the bull market once again in the past year, giving traders pre-Christmas gains in the form of subsequent amazing increases.
The cryptocurrency market ends in 2017 with a capitalization of 600 billion USD, while it started from just a dozen or so. Although bitcoin has increased its value incredibly, reaching at the peak almost 20,000 $, it should be noted that the value of the „BTC dominance” index, which determines the dominance of bitcoin for all other cryptocurrencies, should be noted. While the year began with the dominance of bitcoin reaching more than 90% of the entire cryptocurrency market, on the last day of the year this value is just over 1/3 of the entire market. Next to bitcoin, hundreds of cryptocurrences like Ethereum, Ripple and Bitcoin Cash have grown in strength, valued at tens of billions of dollars. Although these currencies do not directly compete with bitcoin, because they are created for completely different tasks in the blockchain, the bitcoin is always in the first place in the rankings. However, at this moment you can realize that the first place is not given to bitcoin in advance once and for all. Although it is called digital gold, we can see how many problems that do not exist in the blockchains of other cryptocurrencies appear around bitocins.
The price increase brought bitcoin not only glory, but also popularity, with which the network of this currency has to cope, even in the context of hundreds of thousands of unconfirmed transactions. It is worth having hope that the community that continues the vision of Satoshi Nakamoto, which is becoming popular before our eyes, will be able to adapt bitcoin to its original assumptions at a time when the popularity of cryptocurrency will increase again by leaps and bounds, hopefully in the current 2018 year!
Picasso:
We could undoubtedly call 2017 the year of cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin, which is a synonym of digital money, was difficult to understand a year ago. Today, it has already gone to the mainstream and over the past year more and more people have talked about it, not only in the industry media but also in the breakfast television. I think everyone is currently familiar with someone who invests in cryptocurrencies. The topic of Bitcoin is of course only an example because the larger piece of this market definitely deserves attention too.
Currently, there are 1381 cryptocurrencies, and the fact that the topic of digital currencies has become very interesting can be primarily demonstrated by the increase in its value from almost 18 billion at the beginning of January 2017 to almost 650 billion today.
People who have invested in Bitcoin a year ago now can enjoy a profit of more than 1,300%. It is worth mentioning that in the middle of December you had to pay almost 20,000 USD for one Bitcoin, that was over 1900%. In addition, you need to add the profits resulting from the free coins received because of hard forks, which would also account for several hundred percent of profit.
Such strong appreciation of the most popular of digital currencies meant that large investment banks and hedge funds was also interested in, which resulted in the launch of BTC futures contracts.
Over the last year, we’ve also got a lot of feedback on Bitcoin and other digital currencies. Although most of them concerned only personal thoughts and did not have any scientific confirmation, one deserves special mention here. Lloyd Blankfein, president of GoldmanSachs, compared Bitcoin to paper money from years ago. He stated that at a time when paper money was replacing gold, people were also very skeptical about it. Actually, this statement could be compared to every financial „revolution” that has taken place over the years. Once people used the form of barter accounting and so they exchanged a product or service for another product or service. Later on, gold became the universal currency, which was eventually replaced with paper money. This, in turn, although it functions to this day, is increasingly replaced by non-cash transactions. Are then Cryptocurrencies another part of this puzzle?
In my personal opinion, 2018 may turn out to be even more interesting, and more will be said about cryptocurrencies. The difference that we will probably observe, will concern around specific currencies that will be discussed. Over the past year, Bitcoin’s domination has decreased from almost 88% to almost 36% today. Altcoins have an increasing share in the cryptocurrency market. One of the biggest surprises here is Ripple, which in December became the second largest of digital currencies.
JPK Traders:
The year 2017 was undoubtedly the year of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. It was a year in which at some point Bitcoin was called a scam and a bubble. One of the biggest critics of BTC was the CEO of JP Morgan, Jamie Diamond. Later, however, it reached an unimaginable value. Such a large price increase can be attributed to several factors. In the second quarter in Japan came into force the law, that was the first in the world, confirmed that Bitcoin and Ethereum are legal forms of payment. The next stimulus for growth was Bitcoin Cash fork in the third quarter of this year. The fourth quarter is another reason for increases – the introduction of BTC futures by CBOE and CME. It was also the time of Bitcoin forks, such as Bitcoin Silver, Bitcoin Diamond, Lightning Bitcoin, Super Bitcoin and others. Bitcoin’s success this year in terms of increased valuation meant that the capitalization of the entire BTC market increased from 2.2 billion USD in early 2017 to over 350 billion USD.
The capitalization of the entire cryptocurrency market during the year increased from 17 billion USD to 593 billion USD, reaching an increase of 3388%.
The price for 1 Bitcoin in 2017 increased from 908 USD to 16 100 USD at the time of writing this summary. It was an increase of 1673% and the number of bitcoins that were extracted increased to 16,755,000.
Całkowita liczba bitcoinów, które zostały już wydobyte.
Bitcoin’s success is also a strong development of altcoins. This year was successful for such cryptos like Ripple, Monero, Dash, Nem and Ethereum. It must be added that there are already thousands of altcoins, and new ones are created each day.