Bitcoin exchange Coinbase watched its iOS app surge to the top of the free apps chart in Apple's App Store yesterday, amid a speculative frenzy surrounding the blockchain cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin prices on Coinbase's GDAX exchange flew past $16,000 to almost $20,000 in around 90 minutes on Thursday, reported Bloomberg, extending its record-breaking run and causing the software to crash and the service's website to go down intermittently in the process. The digital currency fluctuated during a turbulent Asian session, before falling back to about $16,000.
BREAKING: Coinbase unavailable. The company now has more customers than Charles Schwab and has opened as many as 300,000 accounts in a day. Today has unprecedented volume and demand. There are litterally so many people trying to buy Bitcoin that exchanges are crashing. pic.twitter.com/ZzMKkplyga — Bruce Fenton (@brucefenton) December 7, 2017
The rise and rise of bitcoin has brought it into the mainstream in the last few weeks, but many observers are warning that the cryptocurrency could be a bubble. Investors have also been reminded of the dangers of hackers, after bitcoin mining marketplace NiceHash lost $64 million in BTC following a "sophisticated and professional attack".
Apple has had its own problems with cryptocurrencies in the past. In August 2016, the tech giant had to remove several fake bitcoin wallets from the App Store after users of the digital currency were scammed out of thousands of dollars.
For anyone interested in observing the hourly fluctuations of bitcoin while maintaining a safe distance, free app CoinHub offers real-time quotes and up-to-date cryptocurrency news all within an impressive-looking dark-themed dashboard. [Direct Link]
Top Rated Comments
(View all)Just last month I tried to download two completely different MacOS Bitcoin applications from macupdate.com and after the DMG files downloaded my antivirus gave me an alert both times that the files were infected and it deleted the downloads.
Still going to be really difficult on iOS. Almost akin to a userland instant jailbreak. Then again, there would be monetary incentive that the current jailbreak teams might not have...If the MacOS community files are infected you can imagine how much more the Windows community.
It's only a matter of time that some clever hacker infects an Apple App Store and iOS App Store with some type of root crack.
The ugliness of unregulated free market.
But the beauty of potentially world-changing disruptive technology. It's going to have a rough start but let's see where we are in five years.
like entering a blank password?It's only a matter of time that some clever hacker infects an Apple App Store and iOS App Store with some type of root crack.
like entering a blank password?
Too soon.... just, too soon.[doublepost=1512736207][/doublepost]
The ugliness of unregulated free market.
Possibly the money of the future world.Like a startup, there is risk. The ones who want to make it big know how to mitigate the risk.