During the last couple of months, various universities have showcased a growing interest in blockchain and bitcoin technology. In fact, universities like Stanford have introduced bitcoin-specific courses, in order to prep people up for the future of finance.

According to recent reports, it seems like the MIT has just created something known as the Bitcoin Developer Fund, a program meant to support the constant work of top bitcoin core developers such as Gavin Andersen, Wladimir van der Laan and Cory Fields. These three developers joined a program known by the name of MIT Media Lab’s Digital Currency Initiative a year ago, which is why they’ll benefit from the developer’s fund.

During the last couple of months, numerous blockchain-based companies have sprouted up, in order to help this new industry develop. One of these is the London-based bitcoin blockchain surveillance and intelligence startup known by the name of Elliptic.

In a past article, we covered some of the main reasons why investing in bitcoin, the emerging digital currency that has shaken up the financial world, would bring you a nice profit.

While investing in bitcoin seems like it comes along with tons of various benefits, there are also particular risks worth looking out for prior to making the decision of betting your money on the digital currency. Without further ado, here are five reasons why you might want to reconsider the currency.

With bitcoin becoming more and more popular, and expected to reach new heights by the end of 2016, one question in the mind of investors from all around the world is whether investing in the digital currency is worth it.

During the last couple of months, the digital currency has seen an interesting evolution, as it has managed to grow from roughly $200/coin to an average of $420. The last year has also been proven to be extremely profitable for those involved with the digital currency, and reports indicate that over $314 million US dollars were poured into bitcoin-related investments.

To help better put things into perspective, we have come up with a couple of reasons explaining why investing in bitcoin is such a good idea. We have also decided to leave out some of the obvious reasons such as the coin’s anonymity, transparency and decentralized state.

In case you have used bitcoin during the last couple of months, then chances are that you have heard about the block size debate, a topic that we have covered briefly before, and which has managed to divide the bitcoin community into separate sides.

In today’s article, we’ll take a look about what the controversy really is, and get into a few technical aspects, while keeping things as easy to comprehend as possible.

During the last couple of months, numerous bitcoin start-ups alongside with already consecrated ones have published their initial public offerings (IPO), as a way of gathering investors and launching their new services on the market. While most of them have been successful, there’re also companies which sometimes decide to cancel out their IPOs in the last minute.

If you have recently used bitcoin, then chances are that you have noticed that transaction times have become significantly slower. In fact, during the last couple of days over 40,000 transactions simply idled on the blockchain, without getting the needed confirmation to go through.

The actual cause behind this delay is not yet known, but there is speculation surrounding it. While those involved with the blocksize debate believe that a higher number of transactions has taken place, and that not all could be included in their afferent blocks, others think that it has something to do with the fees included for each trades, while another group of people believe that this is a result of a systematic attack on the blockchain network.

During the last couple of months, the bitcoin community has been stirring on which ideas should be chosen when it comes down to increasing the blocksize limit. While some believe that the limit should stay as it is, others believe that a gradual increase would be beneficial for the coin, whereas another group of people believe that increasing the block size by a lot, and as soon as possible is essential for the survival of the cryptocurrency.

During the last year, the idea of using bitcoin’s underlying system, the blockchain, has been debated by numerous companies. Recently, IBM has announced that it has started working on a new project meant to make better use of the blockchain technology.

With this in mind, the company is launching a new project known by the name of ‘blockchain-as-a-service. To put things better into perspective, the project consists of a specific set of tools meant to make creating, running, deploying and monitoring blockchain-based applications on the IBM Cloud possible.

During the last couple of months, there have been numerous reports of extortionist attempts, which consist of hackers getting into your system, and locking you out of the possibility of viewing personal information. Usually, the only way to regain access to your personal information would be to provide the hackers with a ransom, usually sent via bitcoin.

Recent reports indicate that a Hollywood-based hospital was the target of such an attempt a couple of days ago. Based on this, the attack started on the fifth of February, when the staff of the Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital noticed that they were unable to access their network and the afferent files stored on it. Once this happened, the tech team at the institution was informed that they have been the target of an extortion attack, and that the only way to regain access to the files would be to pay hackers a total of 40 bitcoin, worth around $17,000.