How to check bitcoin and ethereum prices when Coinbase is downCoinbase, one of the leading platforms for cryptocurrency exchange, had a rough week.With the prices of two leading virtual currencies — bitcoin and ethereum — dropping on Thursday, the money-trading platform announced it was offline due to "sustained heavy traffic."Both the Coinbase website and mobile app were down.The surge in traffic is being credited to people wanting to buy and sell their digital alternative currency.Similar outages took place earlier in the week, CNBC reported: On Monday the site was inaccessible due to high traffic and on Tuesday the platform cited two cases of "degraded performance."And it's not just happening when prices plummet: Coinbase went offline in May when bitcoin's value soared and was trading at then-record highs.Coinbase's platform crashing during the volatile extremes of digital currency trading is inconvenient, but it can be bypassed depending on what you want to do.You can get an assortment of data from closing prices and weekly data to hour-by-hour prices.If you're looking for an alternate exchange platform for transactions, you can turn to sites like Blockchain, BitGo, Circle, BTC-e and Bitfinex.

Just know that problems aren't exclusive to Coinbase and other trading platforms are not immune to technical issues that can block you from making a transaction.konto na bitcoinTake BTC-e and Bitfinex, for instance, which suffered denial-of-service attacks on Monday and Tuesday, respectively.o que é mineração bitcoinThese attacks did not impact clients' funds, but prevented them from accessing the platforms and their services.buy bitcoin by wmzMORE FROMHow to use the Snapchat Map while everyone else continues to be confused about itPlanet 10?bitcoin/litecoin cpu minerScientists may have discovered a hidden planet in our solar systemScientists created a robot that will iron your clothes for you Moth eyes have inspired the touchscreen of the futureTwitter was flagging tweets including the word "queer" as potentially "offensive content"How Mark Zuckerberg wants to transform society through Facebook GroupsHow to use the Snapchat Map while everyone else continues to be confused about itPlanet 10?bitcoin nvidia tesla

Scientists may have discovered a hidden planet in our solar systemScientists created a robot that will iron your clothes for you Moth eyes have inspired the touchscreen of the futureTwitter was flagging tweets including the word "queer" as potentially "offensive content"How Mark Zuckerberg wants to transform society through Facebook Groupsbitcoin bootable usbFor most of the history of blockchain-based currencies and assets, the story has been all about Bitcoin.ephemeral port rangeAt a market capitalization of around $40 billion, it remains the most valuable cryptocurrency.bitcoin cnn en espanolBut with the rise of a new ‘chain on the – ahem – block, namely Ethereum, and new ways to fund the development of new crypto-platforms with ICOs, the narrative is shifting somewhat to the entire cryptographic asset class.ltc bitcoin price

Today, let’s take a more in-depth look at some of the historical trends in the digital currency space, paying close attention to Ethereum and its role as the platform of choice for new cryptographic assets., a main reference site for digital asset developers and speculators alike, has increased significantly.Below is a chart compiled from the count of cryptocurrencies listed on historic snapshots of the site’s main table starting with the first snapshot on April 28, 2013 (featuring a whopping seven cryptocurrencies) and the most recent snapshot from June 4, 2017.As of the June 4 snapshot, there were 809 cryptocurrencies and other digital assets listed on the main CoinMarketCap page.As of Monday, June 5, 2017, at around 6:00 PM Central time, there were 857 cryptocurrencies and assets listed on the site.Between January 3, 2016 – the first snapshot of 2016 – and June 5, 2017, the number of cryptographic assets listed on CoinMarketCap grew from 551 to 857, an increase of about 56% in almost exactly 18 months.

As the chart shows, the pace of growth in the number of crypto-backed assets is itself growing.Based only on the listings on CoinMarketCap, 80% of the growth in the number of cryptographic assets over the past 18 months took place since January 1, 2017.The open-source nature of most cryptocurrency systems means that it’s trivially easy to make copies of the software (or “fork” its code, in developer parlance), make some modifications to the protocol, and release it as a new, wholly separate system.As Bitcoin’s price began to increase rapidly in the latter half of 2013, the aspiring Satoshi Nakamotos of the world began forking various cryptocurrency protocols to establish their own coins.By 2013, most of the forks were off of Litecoin, which is based on Scrypt.With Bitcoin’s price spike at the end of 2013, it had become inefficient to mine Bitcoin on commodity hardware (like graphics cards) because the arms race in the Bitcoin ecosystem produced a new breed of specialized hardware.

Scrypt, at the time, was still economical to hash on graphics cards, and as Litecoin and a few other Scrypt-based currencies began to appreciate in value, wholly separate cryptocurrencies were forked off of the original protocols to rise anew.Remember the goofy, meme-based Dogecoin?That was a fork of Litecoin. produced some really interesting data visualizations.The goal was to create cryptocurrencies as valuable, or at least as lucrative, in the short-run, as Bitcoin.This somewhat haphazard approach of throwing cryptocurrencies against the proverbial wall and hoping that something sticks was certainly effective at expanding the scope of blockchain-based currency systems; however, that alone doesn’t explain the appreciating value of the asset class as a whole.If the forkable, derivative-by-design nature of cryptocurrencies explains the breadth of the ecosystem, what explains the growth in value?Part of it is surely market speculation, and another part of it is that cryptocurrencies and other blockchain-based assets do have real-world applications today.

But another part comes from cryptocurrency entrepreneurs wising up to the fact that their little upstart protocols, in order to be valuable, needed to have an ecosystem built around them.That, of course, takes time and money.There are two ways of approaching this.Previously, it’s been common practice for cryptocurrency developers to pre-allocate a certain amount of their new cryptocurrency to self-fund development.Once their new cryptocurrency hit an exchange, and thus had a price.This private stash of coins would then have value, enough to sell for Bitcoin or fiat, which could then sustain a project until the ecosystem of wallets and services around their cryptocurrency became self-sustaining and community-driven.Today, though, the fundraising mechanism of choice appears to be the Initial Coin Offering.As Alex Wilhelm explained in an article for TechCrunch: “An ICO is a fundraising tool that trades future cryptocoins in exchange for cryptocurrencies of immediate, liquid value.

You give the ICO bitcoin or ethereum, and you get some of Billy’s New Super Great Coin.” This is how Ethereum’s development was funded, by way of a pre-sale of Ether for Bitcoin in July 2014.That pre-sale–an ICO by another name–raised some 31,591 BTC, valued at over $18.4 million at the time.Although the mechanics of ICOs have been in practice for several years, the name and label for Initial Coin Offering events has only gained some currency recently.And the ICO market has really hit a hockey-stick growth trajectory.Based on data obtained on June 2nd from the ICO Calendar on TokenMarket.net, the total number of ICOs listed on the site increased sixfold between March and May of this year.But what’s fueling this massive growth in ICOs?Chances are, it’s similar to what drove the massive growth in the number of cryptocurrencies in the market back in 2013.Back then, early speculators in Bitcoin, flush with newfound crypto-fortune, plunged their money back into emerging cryptocurrencies.

This was done partially for fun (see Dogecoin and other novelties) but also to chase the same kind of returns they enjoyed from Bitcoin investments.A recent article from CryptoHustle suggests that there might be a similar mechanism at play today, but it’s not Bitcoin millionaires fueling this ICO boom/bubble.Instead, CryptoHustle explains that “[t]he ICO mania is likely due to early Ethereum adopters making serious returns after the last bull run.” For now, that bull run has continued unabated.Last week was the first time that Ethereum’s market capitalization reached half that of Bitcoin’s, a massive milestone for the relatively new blockchain.What explains the price increase?Speculation and other factors are no doubt at play here too, but it’s likely the architecture behind Ethereum’s blockchain system that makes it uniquely valuable, or at least uniquely flexible and extensible.Bitcoin is a relatively bare-bones blockchain system that requires layers of protocols to be built on top of it to make it a usable platform for utilities like smart contracts.

Platforms like Counterparty and Omni are both built on the Bitcoin blockchain and have sprouted their own collection of digital assets and services which ride on top of them.Ethereum, on the other hand, was launched with its own scripting language baked in, making it possible to build complex smart contracts, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), decentralized autonomous apps (DApps), and even other cryptocurrencies with relative ease.This ease of development, combined with the rising price of Ether and a desire by early stakeholders to re-invest in the Ethereum ecosystem, has made Ethereum the platform of choice for crypto-asset entrepreneurs—at least for now.Based on the same data extracted from TokenMarket we looked at earlier, we charted the proportional share of Ethereum-based assets versus all other assets that have either ICO’d already or soon will.From zero percent of the monthly asset offerings less than a year ago, to over half of all the closed or announced ICO events tracked on that page, the growth of Ethereum is impressive.

Ethereum’s flexible, extensible blockchain system makes it relatively easy for developers to build and launch their own DApps, DAOs and crypto-assets.But ease-of-use is not sufficient to explain Ethereum’s growing traction in the new digital assets space.It’s where a disproportionate amount of the money is too.For these final charts, we extracted the rows from CoinMarketCap’s listing of digital assets.The table lists names, blockchain platforms, market capitalizations and prices of some 119 assets.Although roughly a third of the assets listed were built on Ethereum, just over three-quarters of the market value of all of these assets is tied up in assets built on top of the Ethereum platform.At the time of writing, there’s approximately $3.4 billion in market value represented by the 119 crypto-assets listed on CoinMarketCap’s digital assets page.Of that, around $2.6 billion is tied up in assets based on Ethereum.Just the top four Ethereum-based assets–Golem, Augur, Basic Attention Tokens, and Gnosis–represent $1.27 billion in market value.