Criminals love Bitcoin because transactions are largely untraceable, no physical objects to store and can be converted into any currency.

Speculators love Bitcoin because although the value changes wildly and is unreliable, it has risen hugely during 2017.

Lots of scammers are pushing Bitcoin as much as they can – get the punters hooked while the price is rising.

Almost certainly it will crash at some point as there are no physical assets to underpin Bitcoin.

One other group that love Bitcoin is corporate hackers – break into an organisation that has Bitcoins stored on its servers, steal them and escape. There’s no cash or gold to move – it’s all on computer.

Nicehash was broken into and $64 million in Bitcoins stolen. Nicehash doesn’t know whether client accounts have been compromised.

Nicehash is an unusual business – It’s based in Slovenia and mines Bitcoins on behalf of its customers.

This is a strange process for which there is no correlation with real world currencies. Mining is how more bitcoins are created and requires huge amounts of computing power to solve equations.

If the price of Bitcoins continues to stay at such high levels then we can expect even more of this kind of attack.

Nicehash say that “Highly professional” hackers made off with around 4,700 Bitcoin and the Nicehash service was taken down so they could assess what had happened.

At least gold can be stored in a vault.

Do enter your email address and click on the subscribe button on top right to keep up to date with new posts.