They seem to mean "which has the biggest increase in spot price this year?", which is a kind of weird thing to judge a currency on.
I'd argue that if it were possible to isolate effects from hoarding and speculation, that the spot price would represent the intrinsic value of its liquidity and other intrinsic benefits. And thus, to the degree that prices are not influenced by speculation, the price reflects performance.
But since we know that prices are heavily influenced by speculation, I'd argue that the better metric for performance should be daily trading volume. Because that is a more direct measure of liquidity. It might be meaningless by itself (the trading volume doesn't "represent" anything more than the total value that exchanges hands everyday), but contextually it is important. The 24 hour bitcoin trading volume is currently $1.6B. The currency trading volume across all worldwide currencies is $5T [1]. So BTC can roughly be considered to have 3-ish orders of magnitude of difference in liquidity over the worldwide currency market. As someone who has no involvement in BTC whatsoever, I find that pretty impressive.
[0] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/
[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/global-markets-currency-volum...
This might be clear to someone with more experience in the field, but it's not apparent how the benefits of such a constraint is quantified. For example, the fed raising interest rates is not translated to a deterministic response from the stock market and so using bitcoin might have sound fundamental advantages but equivalent pragmatic limitations?
It's definitely possible to exchange cryptocurrencies for goods and services. I paid for a plane ticket with BTC just the other day (AirBaltic) and it was more convenient than using my debit card (because my bank requires a particular proprietary 2FA scheme that I don't always carry).
There are many people who charge for their programming services in cryptocurrency... there are huge dark markets... several cafés accept cryptocurrency (Paralelni Polis in Prague just switched to Litecoin from Bitcoin)... etc etc.
The top cryptocurrencies are valuable, liquid, and offer many benefits over other payment methods, so it's obvious that you can use them for exchange.
In way tells you what lies behind a price
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/10/business/dealbook/winkelv...
I don't know whether the SEC's reasons for rejecting it would apply to other proposed cryptocurrency ETFs or not.
Also ETFs are great, but they are not a panacea for every asset class. Sometimes there are fundamental reasons why they don't work, but the idea is so buzzy that you can make a buck off selling garbage and calling it an ETF. Reminds me of something...
coinbase
gemini
poloniex
rule 2. don't leave coins on exchanges.
Expect it to take around a week to get $1K in to play with, and plan to get real cozy with the security folks at your credit card company. Plan to spend a few hours just futzing around with everything involved. Easiest path is likely a credit card on coinbase, they have a $500/week limit on credit card. You can do a bank transfer, with a higher limit, but you will buy Ether/Bitcoin and then not be able to trade it for anything else for a week until it clears. Great if you want to get Ether, bad if you want to turn your $1K into Ripple. Unless Ether doubles the week you are sitting on it.
Aren't we 5/12-s into 2017? Given the volatility of these currencies, a month could make a lot of difference.
Others are platforms (ETH) or ledgers (XRP) that are seeing significant growth in usage.
But in the grand scheme of things, ALL of these are speculation plays at this point. With maybe, just maybe, the exception of bitcoin.
