With the Crypto world buzzing due to the recent bitcoin surge, I thought it would be a good time to take a look at was happened in the past few months, what is currently happening and speculation on what will happening in the short term future.
The Past
Bitcoin has become a household name in the last 365 days and that is largely due to its increase in both price and market cap. I first started trading bitcoin just over a year ago, at that time bitcoin was trading in the $500-700 USD range. My first trading account was setup on Korbit which is a Korean exchange that offers BTC, ETH and about 6-8 other alt coins.
Bitcoin steadily increased from October to the end of 2016 and I was optimistic that maybe I could make some money by just investing in BTC and other smaller coins that were available on Korbit. Not knowing much and just trading based on nothing but volatility and stupidity I was able to make a decent profit (or at least what I thought was a decent amount). At that point I began reading up on other coins such as Ether, Ripple and Augur. Unfortunately I missed the spike of Ether at the beginning of 2017, but seeing some of my friends make huge profits, I was hooked.
Then from April to June the crypto world just exploded and almost every coin across the board was in the green. Not just small returns either. Some coins (cough, cough, Stratis) made upwards of 1000% returns and this is what I feel was the spark tha ignited the public's interest into cryptocurrency.
The Present
As more and more coins had their ICO's (Initial Coin Offering) this summer more and more investors have been dipping their toes into the crypto space. Seeing returns that make traditional GIC's and other investments look like peanuts, word has spread, governments are sweating, regulatory bodies are scrambling and miners are doing their happy dances.
There have been many hiccups over the summer with several ICO scams, investors sending coins to wrong addresses, coin sites being DDOS'ed and all around uncertainty, coins have been spiking and plummeting leaving investors FOMOing and FUDing like there is not tomorrow.
With regards to Bitcoin, it recently hardforked and a new currency BCC was created. Before the hardfork there was a lot of speculation whether bitcoin would lose a lot of its value to this new coin once the split happened. Surprisingly, Bitcoin retained all of its price and actually increased after the fork, while the new Bitcoin Cash has traded anywhere from $200-800 USD since inception. So essentially everyone that owned bitcoin before the fork received free money. This had and still has many people scratching their heads.
This leads into what is currently happening in the Cryptoverse. Bitcoin is slated to have another fork on November 1st, (lots more on that Here, holders are expected to receive another new coin at a 1 : 1 ratio and possibly another segwit which will create a third coin. So it is speculated that in November any holders of Bitcoin will end up with 2 new coins at no extra cost, which is essentially free money. Due to this, bitcoin's price has recently hit a new all time high and busting through that new high, now approaching $6000 USD.
The Future
The crypto world and the Era of blockchain is upon us, whether people want to admit it or not. For banks and traditional investment institutions this is bothersome and there has been a lot of push back. I think this will likely continue until the big time investors get some of their money into the block chain.
In comparison, the market cap of crypto currency is relatively small. If you look at the table below which I borrowed from 
| Asset | Vale |
|---|---|
| Gold | $7,823 Billion |
| Apple Stock | $805 Billion |
| Google Stock | $679 Billion |
| All Crypto | $173 Billion |
| Bitcoin | $93 Billion |
| Steemit | $249 Million |
So as you can see, some of the worlds largest companies still dwarf the crypto market cap. If you think of the potential of some of these coins, coupled with technology in the future getting better and better, it is more than conceivable that market cap for crypto currency breaks the $1 Trillion mark in the next few years. The potential that crypto has is like nothing we've ever seen before. There will most definitely be some bumps along the road, that should be expected, but the future is bright for crypto.
I would love to hear your thoughts and opinions. Am I too optimistic, not optimistic enough?
Image - Coinmarketcap GIF - Bitcoin