Cryptocurrency in the context of "Speculation"

In economics, a medium of exchange is any item that is widely acceptable in exchange for goods and services. In modern economies, the most commonly used medium of exchange is currency. Most forms of money are categorised as mediums of exchange, including commodity money, representative money, cryptocurrency, and most commonly fiat money. Representative and fiat money most widely exist in digital form as well as physical tokens, for example coins and notes.

The origin of "mediums of exchange" in human societies is assumed by economists, such as William Stanley Jevons, to have arisen in antiquity as awareness grew of the limitations of barter. The form of the "medium of exchange" follows that of a token, which has been further refined as money. A "medium of exchange" is considered one of the functions of money. The exchange acts as an intermediary instrument as the use can be to acquire any good or service and avoids the limitations of barter; where what one wants has to be matched with what the other has to offer. However, there is little evidence of a pre-monetary society in which barter is the primary mode of exchange;instead, such societies operated largely along the principles of gift economy and debt.

Digital currency (digital money, electronic money or electronic currency) is any currency, money, or money-like asset that is primarily managed, stored or exchanged on digital computer systems, especially over the internet. Types of digital currencies include cryptocurrency, virtual currency and central bank digital currency. Digital currency may be recorded on a distributed database on the internet, a centralized electronic computer database owned by a company or bank, within digital files or even on a stored-value card.

Digital currencies exhibit properties similar to traditional currencies, but generally do not have a classical physical form of fiat currency historically that can be held in the hand, like currencies with printed banknotes or minted coins. However, they do have a physical form in an unclassical sense coming from the computer to computer and computer to human interactions and the information and processing power of the servers that store and keep track of money. This unclassical physical form allows nearly instantaneous transactions over the internet and vastly lowers the cost associated with distributing notes and coins: for example, of the types of money in the UK economy, 3% are notes and coins, and 79% as electronic money (in the form of bank deposits). Usually not issued by a governmental body, virtual currencies are not considered a legal tender and they enable ownership transfer across governmental borders.

Silicon Alley is an area of high tech companies centered around southern Manhattan's Flatiron district in New York City. The term was coined in the 1990s during the dot-com boom, alluding to California's Silicon Valley tech center. The term has grown somewhat obsolete since 2003 as New York tech companies spread outside of Manhattan, and New York as a whole is now a top-tier global high technology hub. Silicon Alley, once a metonym for the sphere encompassing the metropolitan region's high technology industries, is no longer a relevant moniker as the city's tech environment has expanded dramatically both in location and in its scope. New York City's current tech sphere encompasses a universal array of applications involving artificial intelligence, the internet, new media, financial technology (fintech) and cryptocurrency, biotechnology, game design, and other fields within information technology that are supported by its entrepreneurship ecosystem and venture capital investments.

A central bank digital currency (CBDC) is a digital version of a country's official currency, created by the nation's central bank rather than by private companies. Unlike cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, CBDCs are issued by a state and may work alongside physical cash. As of 2024, the Bahamas, Jamaica, and Nigeria have launched CBDCs, and 134 countries are researching their own versions while other jurisdictions, such as Florida, have banned CBDCs citing privacy concerns.

CBDCs could enable faster, cheaper payments and improve financial inclusion, but raise concerns about privacy and the potential for them to be used as a "tool for coercion and control". CBDC implementation could affect banks' financial stability, requiring careful policy design.

A trader is a person, firm, or entity in finance who buys and sells financial instruments, such as forex, cryptocurrencies, stocks, bonds, commodities, derivatives, and mutual funds, indices in the capacity of agent, hedger, arbitrager, or speculator.

An alternative investment, also known as an alternative asset or alternative investment fund (AIF), is an investment in any asset class excluding capital stocks, bonds, and cash.

The term is a relatively loose one and includes tangible assets such as precious metals, collectibles (art, wine, antiques, vintage cars, coins, watches, musical instruments, or stamps) and some financial assets such as real estate, commodities, private equity, distressed securities, hedge funds, exchange funds, carbon credits, venture capital, film production, financial derivatives, cryptocurrencies, non-fungible tokens, and Tax Receivable Agreements. Investments in real estate, forestry and shipping are also often termed "alternative" despite the ancient use of such real assets to enhance and preserve wealth. Alternative investments are to be contrasted with traditional investments.

Bitcoin (abbreviation: BTC; sign: ₿) is the first decentralized cryptocurrency. Based on a free-market ideology, bitcoin was invented in 2008 when an unknown entity published a white paper under the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto. Use of bitcoin as a currency began in 2009, with the release of its open-source implementation. From 2021 to 2025, El Salvador adopted it as legal tender currency before revoking it. As bitcoin is pseudonymous, its use by criminals has attracted the attention of regulators, leading to its ban by several countries.

Bitcoin works through the collaboration of computers, each of which acts as a node in the peer-to-peer bitcoin network. Each node maintains an independent copy of a public distributed ledger of transactions, called a blockchain, without central oversight. Transactions are validated through the use of cryptography, preventing one person from spending another person's bitcoin, as long as the owner of the bitcoin keeps certain sensitive data secret.