Skip to main content Hi, Fool!Premium Advice Help Login More LTC pages... Overview Interactive Chart Options Historical Prices Dividends News & Headlines Profile Company Events SEC Filings Earnings/Growth Financial Ratios Wall St. Opinion Major Holders Insider Trades Insider Roster Income Statement Balance Sheet Cash Flow The Company invests primarily in long-term care and other health care related properties through mortgage loans, property lease transactions and other investments.View Interactive LTC Charts Current Price: $51.14 Prev Close: $50.75 Open: $50.88 Bid: $49.31 Ask: $0.00 Day's Range: $50.78 - $51.40 52wk Range: $43.17 - $54.20 Volume: 633,422 Avg Vol 196,915 Market Cap: $2B P/E : 22.86 EPS : $2.22 Div & Yield: $2.28 (4.5%) 6 2 Powered by Wendy L. Simpson, CEO 0% Approve Based on 0 Ratings Powered by The Company invests primarily in long-term care and other health care related properties through mortgage loans, property lease transactions and other investments.

Investors are piling into the digital currency, which is not issued by a central bank but is conjured into being by cryptographic software running on a network of volunteers’ computers.This week the price of a Bitcoin soared to above $1,000, from less than $15 in January.Having long been favoured by libertarians, gold bugs and drug dealers, Bitcoin is attracting some surprising new fans.Germany has recognised it as a “unit of account”.Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, told a Senate committee on virtual currencies that the idea “may hold long-term promise”.A small but growing band of shops and firms accept payments in Bitcoin.Some like the way it allows funds to be transferred directly between users, without middlemen.Others are attracted by the potential for anonymous transfers, or by the fact that the number of Bitcoins in circulation has a fixed upper limit—so there is no way a central bank can inflate their value away by issuing more.Should the Lions pick all 15 players from one team?A new front in the legal fight over Donald Trump’s travel banQatar Airways wants a 10% stake in American AirlinesIreland and Afghanistan become the first new Test nations in 17 yearsWhy calculating a British parliamentary majority is so trickyHumanist nuptials are popular in Scotland but only beginning in UlsterBut the recent price surge, driven by Chinese investors stashing money offshore, looks like a classic bubble.

Hoarding means that Bitcoin is currently more of a speculative asset than a currency.And a crash is not the only risk Bitcoin users face.As the price rises, Bitcoin theft is increasing, both from individuals and from online exchanges that store the coins and convert them into other currencies.Around $1m in Bitcoins was recently stolen from BIPS, a European exchange.GBL, a Chinese Bitcoin exchange, abruptly vanished in October, taking $4.1m-worth of deposits with it.The system itself is straining at the seams (see Technology Quarterly).running litecoinThe amount of computing power consumed by its transaction-verification system, which has the side-effect of “mining” new Bitcoins, is mushrooming: it now far exceeds that of the world’s 500 fastest supercomputers combined.bitcoin to pkr chartAt the same time Bitcoin’s method of recording and processing transactions, and compensating those who verify them, is becoming unwieldy.asic litecoin miner

Adjusting Bitcoin’s protocols, however, requires getting the volunteers who maintain its software to agree on the necessary changes, and the Bitcoin community to adopt them, before anything goes wrong.Excitement about Bitcoin, and concerns about its limitations, have prompted the emergence of many other cryptocurrencies, or altcoins.Litecoin, for example, retains Bitcoin’s limited money supply but offers faster transactions and is intended to prevent a computational arms-race among miners.trade bitcoin mt4And whereas Bitcoin was created by a mysterious figure known as Satoshi Nakamoto, who vanished in 2010, Litecoin’s creator, Charles Lee, makes no secret of his identity.bitcoin dragons denPeercoin has no money-supply limit, built-in inflation of 1% and a more energy-efficient mining process, though, as with Bitcoin, its creator is unknown.ethereum ebay

Anoncoin and Zerocoin, meanwhile, strive for complete anonymity—which Bitcoin lacks.And so on.We’ve heard this song beforeBitcoin, then, is merely the first and, for the time being, the best-known example in a new category.In many ways it is akin to Napster, the pioneering file-sharing service that upended the music industry in 1999 by allowing internet users to call up almost any song at will.Though Napster, unlike Bitcoin, was illegal, it demonstrated that there was enormous demand for what it provided, prompting many other services to spring up in its wake.goodbye bitcoin hello bitcoinJust as Napster paved the way for BitTorrent, iTunes and Spotify, Bitcoin has triggered a surge of innovation in digital money.So let a thousand altcoins bloom.bitcoin boulevard usIn the meantime, if you are lucky or clever enough to have owned an asset whose price has risen 60-fold in a year, it might be time to sell.Correction: This article originally stated that Litecoin was intended to be more energy-efficient than Bitcoin.ethereum documentation