One of the concerns about bitcoins for many years was how things were going forward too fast for them. The bitcoin, the distributed ledger system that makes it possible, and its blockchain have recently gotten the attention of financial institutions and entrepreneurs around the world. This is a positive development, but such intense public scrutiny can lead to one important fact being overlooked: the bitcoin is still a very new concept. Many individuals in the financial world believe the bitcoin may have matured.

Study
A new study was conducted by researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison as well as the central bank of Germany and the University College London. The results showed the popularity of the bitcoin has advanced to a point where the digital currency market no longer depends on illegal activities for its business. The study was quoted in a report from CoinDesk. It has yet to be officially released. CoinDesk is considered the world leader when it comes to providing information and news concerning digital currencies. They cover news, trends, price movements and more.

Phases Of Growth
According to the study, the bitcoin has experienced three specific levels of growth as a distributed payment system. The most current stage enables it to be driven by legal payments involving services and commerce. This has not always been the case.

Research
Three of the researchers were Liu and Adam Hayes as well as Paolo Tasca. Their goal was to anonymize a database consisting of thousands of pseudonymous bitcoin addresses. They were able to create superclusters. The next step was to put these superclusters into four distinct categories. This included black markets, bitcoin exchanges, mining pools and gambling services. The next thing the researchers did was track bitcoin transaction histories between entities over a period of time. The results showed the network’s initial two phases were mostly mining activities and sin enterprises. The third phase is considered the exchange-dominated phase.

New Activity Information
The report discovered that individuals involved with gambling usually make multiple bets during a single day. The transactions witnessed between user and dealers on the black market were much higher. The transactions between an exchange and a trader was the highest. These type of services were bought or sold approximately every eleven days.

Real Estate And Blockchain
The bitcoin is becoming more accepted as a legal form of currency from many financial institutions. These organizations are looking for more ways to utilize the bitcoin’s underlying technology: the blockchain. It utilizes advanced cryptography to build a distributed ledger system. This provides a method of possessing and spending money in a more transparent, open and flexible way when compared to traditional financial methods. The blockchain technology provides a number of benefits to the real estate market. It is able to decrease fraud, bounced checks as well as chargeback fraud and more. Investors will be better able to make investment decisions because of the amount of information stored on the blockchain. It will provide them with the ability to perform auditing and risk management in real-time.

Bitcoin Future
The popularity of the bitcoin has grown significantly in recent years. It still has a number of major hurdles to overcome. There still is no easy way for a person to use it as a form of payment at major stores. Many people consider spending with a bitcoin to be quite a bit of trouble. They need to open an app, get a store owner’s bitcoin address to transfer funds and then make the transfer. This can take several minutes to process. This will change in the near future. Popular stores are currently working with bitcoin companies to drastically streamline the process.