Here are the best stocks to buy if you want to add Ethereum to your portfolio:

KEY POINTS

KEY POINTS

The Bank of Canada is preparing for the possibility of the Canadian government requiring it to issue a digital version of the Canadian dollar. Although the central bank is leading the project for the new currency, any future decision to issue it rests with the Canadian Parliament and government.

The Bitcoin network is a peer-to-peer network of nodes which implement the Bitcoin protocol. The protocol itself implements a highly available, public, and decentralized ledger. The nodes verify that each update to the ledger follows the rules of the Bitcoin protocol.

Bitcoin Core is free and open-source software that serves as a bitcoin node (the set of which form the bitcoin network) and provides a bitcoin wallet which fully verifies payments. It is considered to be bitcoin's reference implementation.\[326] Initially, the software was published by Satoshi Nakamoto under the name "Bitcoin", and later renamed to "Bitcoin Core" to distinguish it from the network.\[327] It is also known as the Satoshi client.\[328]

Bitcoin, along with other cryptocurrencies, has been described as an economic bubble by at least eight Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences laureates, including Robert Shiller,\[192] Joseph Stiglitz,\[287] and Richard Thaler.\[288]\[17] Economist and columnist Paul Krugman has described bitcoin as "a bubble wrapped in techno-mysticism inside a cocoon of libertarian ideology",\[183] economist Nouriel Roubini of New York University has called bitcoin the "mother of all bubbles",\[289] and University of Chicago economist James Heckman has compared it to the 17th-century tulip mania.\[17]

The legal status of bitcoin varies substantially from country to country and is still undefined or changing in many of them. Regulations and bans that apply to bitcoin probably extend to similar cryptocurrency systems.\[218] Because of its decentralized nature and its trading on online exchanges located in many countries, regulation of bitcoin has been difficult. However, the use of bitcoin can be criminalized, and shutting down exchanges and the peer-to-peer economy in a given country would constitute a de facto ban.\[229]

Each cryptocurrency is built on blockchain technology. The first cryptocurrency was Bitcoin, created by a developer or a group of developers under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009.