Rise and fall of cryptocurrencies

The first cryptocurrency appeared on the world stage in 2009. Several years later, in 2011, the value of the most popular cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, exceeded $1. From that time, the cost of Bitcoin began to grow steadily and exceeded $100 in 2013. In 2014, the cryptocurrency became popular enough to become an object of criminal activities. In 2015, we saw a further growth of the cost of Bitcoin to $200-300. In 2016, the value of one Bitcoin exceeded $600 for the first time ever.

Now cryptocurrency is accepted by many companies around the world. Still, their popularity is not high enough to become a decisive factor in commerce and trade. According to statistics taken from several sources, including Coinmarketcap and CryptoCurrency Market Capitalizations, there are more than 1000 cryptocurrencies used worldwide. The number of cryptocurrencies grows constantly and we now see new currencies being added almost every day. This makes us think about the future of cryptocurrency and whether it will play a more significant role in commerce and trade in the future or not.

If cryptocurrency will be widely used in commerce and trade around the world, it will bring a positive change to these spheres. All pros and cons of cryptocurrencies should be studied before they come into wider use as well as before they are adopted by larger companies around the world or by state authorities.

Today the cryptocurrency market is of a considerable scale, having undergone a long and steady growth which has been based on a number of fundamental factors. The first and foremost among them is the growing usage of the cryptocurrency network. According to data, collected in 2017, the total number of operations carried out on the network has exceeded 250 million. The similar indicator for 2016 was as little as 102 million. At the same time, according to Statista data, around 20.5 million users transacted with cryptocurrencies in 2017 and this number rose to 34.7 million in 2018.

The importance of cryptocurrency during the recent several years raised to significant attention that is devoted to the investigation of this potentially beneficial element of the payment system. With emergence of new cryptocurrencies and various approaches to their use, it is worth looking at how well do people really perceive such monetary units and whether there are any negative attitudes towards them. Specially for this purpose, social scientists from the University of Illinois conducted a research in which they examined the opinions of adults from five countries, including Russia.

The authors used a cross-cultural method to determine correlations between cognitive representations of cryptocurrency and the socioeconomic characteristics of participants, as well as the degree of their openness to innovation, i.e. their attitude towards the use of cryptocurrency. It turned out that adults' attitudes depend on several factors: gender, age, level of formal education, income level and openness to innovation.

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