Bitcoin broke through the $1,900 mark for the first time on Friday, hitting an all-time high, driven by global political uncertainty and key developments within the cryptocurrency world.The digital currency was trading at around $1,951.87 on Friday morning, according to CoinDesk's bitcoin price index.The current level marks a more than 6.8 percent rise from a week ago.Bitcoin's market capitalization is now $31.89 billion, up more than $4 billion from Monday.A number of factors are responsible for bitcoin's rise, from increased trading in Japan to debates over the future of bitcoin's underlying technology.Japan and Korea driving trade Trading volumes in Japanese yen and Korean won have risen and combined account for around 48.6 percent of trading, according to data website CryptoCompare.That's thanks to recently passed legislation that allowed retailers in Japan to begin accepting bitcoin as a legal currency.Since then, Japan has been a big driver of bitcoin trade.Japanese yen bitcoin markets are also trading higher than U.S.

dollar markets, with the yen-bitcoin cross trading at 228,783.29 yen or $2,058.This is higher than CoinDesk's bitcoin price index.Given that the Japanese yen has the highest share of bitcoin trading at the moment, this is helping push prices higher.fastest bitcoin gpu"Arbitrage between the fiat pairs drags markets up or down in line with leading markets.bitcoin p2p digital currencyAt present, volumes on the KRW and JPY pairs dominate trading with a combined 48 percent market share," Charles Hayter, CEO of CryptoCompare, told CNBC by email on Friday.litecoin mining rig buyPolitical uncertainty In the past, bitcoin has acted as a safe haven for investors worried about political instability and the performance of other asset classes.github bitcoin pool

equities saw a sell-off this week before rebounding, while the political establishments in America and Brazil are facing potential scandals.Investors are concerned that President Donald Trump might not be able to deliver on his promise of tax reform, deregulation and infrastructure spending.bitcoin haus kaufenAt the same time, a report on Tuesday said that Trump allegedly asked ousted FBI Director James Comey to "let go" of the investigation into former national security advisor Michael Flynn.ethereum inr chartElsewhere, Brazilian President Michel Temer allegedly authorized bribes to silence a witness in a corruption scandal.Political turmoil in the world could be supporting bitcoin, analysts said.The 'fork' debate Behind the scenes, there is a debate in the cryptocurrency world about the underlying technology behind bitcoin known as the blockchain.

At the moment, bitcoin transactions are taking an unusually long time to process and come with high transaction fees.Many in the community wanted to initiate what is known as a "hard fork".This would have led to the creation of two separate digital currencies.For the full explanation of the debate, click here.But an experiment with another cryptocurrency called Litecoin showed that a "hard fork" might not be needed and this has buoyed investors.The idea shown with Litecoin — the full explanation of which can be found here — showed the bitcoin community that there is a chance to speed up transactions and the backlog that has ensued."The new developments on Litecoin, which is experimenting with alternative scaling solutions may offer a brighter future for bitcoin, and a longer-term price increase, if those similar solutions can be applied to its network," Aurelien Menant, founder and CEO of Gatecoin, a regulated bitcoin and ethereum token exchange based in Hong Kong, told CNBC by email.

Where next for bitcoin?In the annual "Outrageous Predictions" produced by Steen Jakobsen, chief economist at Saxo Bank, in December, it was noted that bitcoin could hit $2,000 in 2017.This now looks very likely and others have put a higher price target on it.Gatecoin's Menant previously told CNBC that bitcoin prices should climb beyond $3,000 this year.Skip to content Are you a Bitcoin miner or trader, but find yourself lacking the compulsive need to check exchange rates like the drug-fuelled daytraders of Wall Street?Fear not – you too can adorn your home or office with a Bitcoin Price Ticker!The post is in Italian but you can read a translated version here.It’s a straightforward enough build – an Arduino compatible board with an onboard ESP8266 is hooked up with an HD44780-compatible LCD.It’s then a simple matter of scraping the Bitcoin price from the web and displaying it on the LCD.It’s a combination of all the maker staples, tied together with some off-the-shelf libraries – it’s quick, and it works.

The images of the LCD were photoshopped.Please ignore the next paragraph.] What makes the build extra nice is the use of custom characters on the LCD.The HD44780 is a character based display, and this project appears to use a screen with two lines of sixteen characters each.However, a custom character set has been implemented in the display which uses several “characters” on the screen to create a single number.It’s a great way to make the display more legible from a distance, as the numbers are much larger, and the Bitcoin logo has been faithfully recreated as well.It’s small touches like this that can really set a project apart.We’d love to see this expanded to display other financial market information and finished off in a nice case.If you’re wondering what you can actually do with Bitcoin, check out the exploits of this robotic darknet shopper.Oh, and Microsoft will take them, too.CEX.IO REST API allows to access market data and manage trades using custom written software.

All POST requests should be in JSON format only.Returns min/max amounts and prices for placing orders The results are shown according to first currency in request.Returns JSON dictionary representing data for all pairs by requested market(s).Market is counted by the second symbol in the pair.Minimum one currency is required for request.Last Price for each trading pair will be defined as price of the last executed order for this pair.If there are no such executed orders, then “lprice” will equal to “0”.Converts any amount of the currency to any other currency by multiplying the amount by the last price of the chosen pair according to the current exchange rate.In this example, BTC is the convertible currency, USD is target currency.Allows building price change charts (daily, weekly, monthly) and showing historical point in any point of the chart In this example, BTC and USD are currencies for getting stats.Returns dataset to build 1m OHLCV chart for a given date.Relies on historical data, is not working for current date Returns a list of recent trades, where each trade is a JSON dictionary: All private API calls require authentication.

You need to provide 3 parameters to authenticate a request: To get an API key, go to Account -> API Access Tab.Set permissions and click "Generate key".Nonce is a regular integer number.It must be increasing with every request you make.Read more about it here.Example: if you set nonce to 1 in your first request, you must set it to at least 2 in your second request.You are not required to start with 1.A common practice is to use unix time for that parameter.Signature is a HMAC-SHA256 encoded message containing: nonce, user ID and API key.The HMAC-SHA256 code must be generated using a secret key that was generated with your API key.This code must be converted to it's hexadecimal representation (64 uppercase characters).Returns JSON list of open orders.Each order is represented as dictionary: Returns JSON list of archived orders.Check the example below: Returns 'true' if order has been found and canceled.Returns JSON response with list of cancelled order ids.Check the example below: Returns JSON dictionary representing order: Returns JSON dictionary representing order: Returns JSON dictionary representing order details: Returns JSON dictionary representing order details and transactions list: Returns JSON dictionary representing order: Returns JSON dictionary with trading fee information.