As of December 2018, the average price of a bitcoin is $3,500. The highest price since the last cycle low was (cycle high). Moreover, short-selling gives them a better chance to earn profits even if the price of an asset drops. This means these zero-proof cryptocurrencies could potentially be used for youtu.be even more unsavory practices, like financing terrorist actions, human trafficking or government black ops. The U.S. government this year is decommissioning for political reasons more nuclear power than is necessary to essentially power the entire Bitcoin network. This is computationally unlikely to happen, as it would require the fraudster to leverage at least 51 percent of all the processing power in the system. There are no physical bitcoins, only balances kept on a public ledger than everyone has transparent access to, that - along with all Bitcoin transactions - is verified by a massive amount of computing power.