Bought in 2009, currency’s rise in value saw small investment turn into enough to buy an apartment in a wealthy area of Oslo Bitcoin: what you need to know This article was originally published on 29 October 2013.Due to a technical fault, it has been republished here, on a new page.Norwegian man discovers $27 bitcoin investment now worth more than enough to buy an apartment.Photograph: George Frey/Getty Images Bought in 2009, currency’s rise in value saw small investment turn into enough to buy an apartment in a wealthy area of Oslo Bitcoin: what you need to know This article was originally published on 29 October 2013.The meteoric rise in bitcoin has meant that within the space of four years, one Norwegian man’s $27 investment turned into a forgotten $886,000 windfall.Kristoffer Koch invested 150 kroner ($26.60) in 5,000 bitcoins in 2009, after discovering them during the course of writing a thesis on encryption.He promptly forgot about them until widespread media coverage of the anonymous, decentralised, peer-to-peer digital currency in April 2013 jogged his memory.

Bitcoins are stored in encrypted wallets secured with a private key, something Koch had forgotten.After eventually working out what the password could be, Koch got a pleasant surprise: “It said I had 5,000 bitcoins in there.Measuring that in today’s rates it’s about NOK5m ($886,000),” Koch told NRK.Silk Road fluctuations In April 2013, the value of bitcoin peaked at $266 before crashing to a low of $50 soon after.Since then, bitcoin has seen large fluctuations in its value, most recently following the seizure of online drugs marketplace Silk Road, plummeting before jumping $30 in one day to a high of $197 in October.Koch exchanged one fifth of his 5,000 bitcoins, generating enough kroner to buy an apartment in Toyen, one of the Norwegian capital’s wealthier areas.Two ways to acquire bitcoins Customers line-up to use the world’s first ever permanent bitcoin ATM at a coffee shop in Vancouver, British Columbia.Photograph: Andy Clark/Reuters Photograph: Andy Clark / Reuters/REUTERS Typically bitcoins are bought using traditional currency from a bitcoin “exchanger”, although due to strict anti-money laundering controls, the process can can be tricky.

A user can then withdraw those bitcoins by sending them back to an exchanger like Mt Gox, the best known bitcoin exchange, in return for cash.However, bitcoin is gaining more and more traction within the physical world too.It is now possible to actually spend bitcoins without exchanging them for traditional currency first in a few British pubs, including the Pembury Tavern in Hackney, London, for instance.dogecoin mining freeOn 29 October, the world’s first bitcoin ATM also went online in Vancouver, Canada, which scans a user’s palm before letting them buy or sell bitcoins for cash.bitcoin and rbiA small group of hardcore users also generate extra bitcoins by “mining” for them – a process that requires computers to perform the calculations needed to make the digital currency work, in exchange for a share of the built-in inflation.ethereum tuesday

Mining is a time-consuming and expensive endeavour due to the way the currency is designed.Each subsequent bitcoin mined is more complex than the previous one, requiring more computational time and therefore investment through the electricity and computer hardware required.In August, Germany recognised bitcoin as a “unit of account”, allowing the country to tax users or creators of the digital currencybitcoin en metatraderBitcoinBitcoin and Ethereum Just Crashed, Taking Coinbase Down With ThemJen WiecznerAfter both hit all-time highs earlier this week, Bitcoin and Ethereum prices plummeted as much as 25% Thursday — but many investors were unable to trade for much of the selloff.Coinbase, a leading cryptocurrency exchange, confirmed that it was completely offline by 9:35 a.m., though the outage appears to have begun several hours earlier, with investors reporting problems on Twitter throughout the night.litecoin official site

The company blamed "sustained heavy traffic," likely caused by intense Bitcoin and Ethereum trading, for crashing the Coinbase website and mobile app, which remained completely down for at least four hours.As has become a familiar frustration to blockchain enthusiasts in recent days, Coinbase went offline at the worst possible time, just as extreme price swings in the cryptocurrencies made investors desperate to buy or sell.Around 10 a.m.bitcoin babaThursday, the Bitcoin price fell as low as $2079, a more than 30% drop since breaking the $3,000 milestone last weekend (and a 19% decline in the previous 24 hours alone).Relatedhealthcare billWhy the Senate Healthcare Plan Looks Like Obamacare 2.0healthcare billWhy the Senate Healthcare Plan Looks Like Obamacare 2.0At the same time, Ethereum, a rival cryptocurrency whose eye-popping 40-fold gain this year has far outpaced Bitcoin's returns, was down as much as 25% from its price a day earlier.

The Ethereum price dipped below $274, just three days after it traded above $400 for the first time.Coinbase had a similar outage in late May while Bitcoin was trading at record highs, illustrating that new systems for trading blockchain currencies are not yet as reliable as traditional stock market exchanges — a lesson a number of investors were learning the hard way, based on their tweets.(While Coinbase initially said it had restored full access to the exchange by mid-afternoon Thursday, it was still trying to repair service for at least some users after 5 p.m., according to a status report on its website.)$BTC is down.$ETH is down.@Coinbase is down.--All the feels.//4tERCTPHLi- MONETARY MAYHEM™ (@MONETARY_MAYHEM) June 15, 2017Does anyone have a reliable alternative to #Coinbase?It seems to be down at every critical moment- Jeffrey Schmidt (@JeffSchmidt9) June 15, 2017Bearish comments by influential investors have triggered several recent selloffs in Bitcoin and Ethereum, such as when Mark Cuban said he thought they were "in a bubble" last week.

Morgan Stanley likely contributed to this week's declines by publishing a couple of research notes casting doubt on whether the surge in cryptocurrency prices is justified."Market likely getting ahead of itself as we have not seen exponential rise in use case yet, but value is rising exponentially," Morgan Stanley analysts wrote in a note Wednesday.That followed an even more skeptical research report the bank released a day earlier titled "Blockchain: Unchained?""The rapid appreciation of Bitcoin and others is somewhat surprising in light of some developments that seemingly would have put downward pressure on the currency," another group of Morgan Stanley analysts wrote, citing the SEC's rejection of a Bitcoin ETF, among other factors."Their values are too volatile and too hard to actually use for payment for most to consider them currencies," they added.The cryptocurrencies’ prices bounced back later in the day.As of 6 p.m.Thursday, Bitcoin was down less than 3% and Ethereum was down just under 8% over a 24-hour period.