People are making huge sums of money by investing in cryptocurrencies. According to ForexSQ.com experts Ethereum price started off the year with $8 and reached up to $400 in less than six months. That sort of growth staggering to say the least.
While it might be tempting to put your money into cryptocurrencies, you must know how volatile this market really is. Ethereum price, for instance, after reaching its peak at $400 in June has crashed back to $190 at the time of writing and continue to go down.
That being said, if you have long term vision for your investments and are willing to set realistic targets, you too can make a good amount of money by putting your money into cryptocurrencies with right strategies.
Ethereum vs Ethereum Classic
Before you start investing in Ethereum, understanding the difference between Ethereum (ETH) and Ethereum Classic (ETC) is vital. There has been a lot of confusion between the two. At times people end up buying ETC by mistake.
At the beginning there was one regular Ethereum. A year and a half ago, DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) was created – think of it as a crypto hedge fund of sort. It raised about $150 million in Ethereum tokens, however there was a problem – the code that was used to build DAO wasn’t perfect.
A hacker took advantage of this situation and took away $50 million worth of Ethereum tokens. It wasn’t really a hack per say, but more like the hacker was able to exploit the loopholes in the code. To this Ethereum supporters said that the code should be altered and the stolen coins should be refunded, while ETC supporters argued that “code is law” and whatever happened should be left behind.
Ethereum eventually went through a hard form splitting it into two – ETH and ETC. So essentially, ETC is what orginal Ethereum was.
Is it too late to invest in Ethereum
Since the beginning of this year the price of Ethereum has soared to nearly 5000%. This is an unprecedented growth. According to analysts, the market right now is headed towards correction. It is obvious that along the way there will be certain coins that will become obsolete and few coins will be worth much more than what they are right now.
It is always a good idea to invest in cryptocurrencies that have some use cases and are different technologies i.e. not the exact clone of Bitcoin. Ethereum was developed with Smart Contracts and computation in mind, which makes it a more powerful and versatile platform than Bitcoin. At this time Ethereum network can do more transactions than Bitcoin at lesser fee.
According to a Bloomberg report, Ethereum market cap could surpass Bitcoin’s in the near future. Some analysts go so far to say that Ether could rival Bitcoin in both volumes of usage and versatility as a platform for computation and cyber security.
Ethereum has a great team behind it working tirelessly on the project. The co-founder of the project, Vitalik Buterin learned about Bitcoin when he was 17, and soon after won the Bronze Medal at the International Olympiads in Informatics.
If you’re wondering about the legitimacy of Ethereum, recently Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) was setup to connect and help large organizations like Microsoft, Intel, Accenture among many others to use blockchain technology.
One of the many reasons why Ethereum price has shot up is because big names in EEA believe in the technology and continue to do projects on Ethereum blockchain. If you’re asking yourself, “is it too late to invest in Ethereum”? The answer is no. Ethereum is still a very good option for you to consider it as your long-term investment portfolio.
Where to buy Ethereum
Just like any other cryptocurrency Ethereum can be bought from an online exchange. Because Ethereum is so popular now, you can buy it with both fiat and Bitcoin. Some of the most popular online exchanges to buy Ethereum are Coinbase, Kraken, Bitstamp, and Gemini.
All the reputed exchanges will ask you to verify your account before purchasing Ethereum. You will need to upload a government issued id and go through exchange’s standard KYC process. Verification usually takes up to two to three days depending on how busy the exchange is at the time.
Once the account is verified you can deposit fiat into your account and buy ETH. Alternatively, if you wish to buy ETH using Bitcoin, you could also do that. Never keep Ethereum or any cryptocurrency for that matter in an online exchange for a longer period of time. There have been hacks in the past where user accounts were compromised.
Make sure you withdraw all your ETH into a wallet that you control. Also, be sure to keep the password and private key of your wallet secure or else you might have trouble transferring ETH in the future.
To sum it up
Ether functions as a commodity to serve as an exchange token to operate the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) that makes possible computer operations on the blockchains and the use of smart contracts.
Ethereum is a new technology, an improved platform to let developers build on blockchain. Big companies like Microsoft and JPMorgan are already doing projects on Ethereum blockchain. If everything goes smoothly, Ether price could eventually surpass Bitcoin’s.
The gains like these may seem unrealistic to an average investor, but the reasons behind the uptick looks realistic because the technology does have the potential to revolutionize the way how finance, the internet, and business is conducted.
This article provided by Ethprice.com
