John McAfee You Can not Stop Bitcoin

When bitcoin futures trading went live on Sunday night, there were sniggers from the cryptocurrency community after Cboe’s website was instantly knocked offline. “Welcome to bitcoin,” went the refrain. Disruption of service is all part of daily life at several of the web’s largest bitcoin exchanges. In the last 24 hours, Coinbase and Bitfinex have both reported problems, transaction fees have reached record highs, and Ledger has also been overwhelmed. Bitcoin just can’t stop breaking things.

                                                                                        Move Fast and Break Things

Amidst breaking new price records, bitcoin has been busy wreaking a trail of destruction across the internet. Nary a week passes without the runaway currency overwhelming servers, downing exchanges, and piling up transactions in the mempool. It’s not so much the transaction volume which has been causing issues this week as the average fee, which is now as high as $24, with a median of $15. This hasn’t dampened enthusiasm for the crypto gold rush however.

it took the cryptocurrency market 24 days to grow from $200 billion to $300 billion and then 10 days to swell to $400 billion. Today, that figure stands at $500 billion – yes, half a trillion – and it took just five days to get there. Bitcoin’s rising dollar value, coupled with a huge upswell in litecoin and ethereum trading, has helped push the markets over that threshold.

The latest milestone hasn’t come without considerable pain however. Bitfinex was down for a couple of hours on Tuesday due to a reported DDoS, something which is becoming a regular occurrence there. Coinbase, meanwhile, was forced to halt ethereum and litecoin trading for a spell on Tuesday, citing a “major outage”. Not to be outdone, hardware wallet manufacturer Ledger also complained of strain, tweeting:

                                                                                                                The Perfect Storm

Infrastructure problems haven’t slowed bitcoin’s ascent: the virtual currency has been a raging bull for weeks, and there are no signs of it pausing for breath. But it’s had to content itself with sharing the headlines with litecoin this week, whose remarkable ascent has been attributed to the perfect storm of circumstances. Reports of deposit and withdrawal difficulties at Bitfinex have played their part, and high bitcoin fees certainly haven’t helped.