Cryptocurrency Highlights Of The Week

The price of Bitcoin continues to drop, but an increasing amount of venture capital manages to find its way to Bitcoin startups. Here are the cryptocurrency highlights of week 16.

1. Politics and Bitcoin seem to be a better match these days. The Bitcoin-friendly Pirate Party of Finland is participating in the Finnish Parliament election occurring on Sunday. Last week, Bitcoin became a part of the US presidential campaign when the Republican candidate Senator Rand Paul announced he would be accepting Bitcoin donations.
   

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2. Charles Bartlett, a 17-year-old student, became one of the youngest people of in Britain to have his account closed by his bank Barclays due to a “fraudulent payment”. It is suspected that the closure is related to Barlett starting to trade Bitcoins just one week earlier.
   

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3. The price of Bitcoin continued its decrease this week, now trading at about $222 per coin. Compared to last week, the digital currency lost roughly $15 or a little over six percent of its value.
   

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4. Despite the price of Bitcoin dropping like a brick, Bitcoin startups are not having any problems attracting venture capital (VC). VC investing in Bitcoin is actually well underway to breaking a record this year, given that Bitcoin startups managed to raise a whopping $229 million in the first quarter of 2015 compared to $349 million over the full year in 2014.
   

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5. One of the reasons that the price of Bitcoin is declining could be that the community is slowly starting to realize that the underlying Blockchain technology does not need Bitcoin or a digital currency at all. Those that claim these are inseparable are only partially right, as some centralized structure must take its place. The main question is, however, to what extend this structure can still contain the benefits of the Bitcoin. Given the increasing VC investing in Bitcoin startups, the market does not seem to be betting on this.

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