Market Capital Increasing
With a current price USD1828.54 (18th May 2017) per coin(BTC) and a Market Cap of $29,872,742,782, Bitcoin is still the Big Daddy of Cryptocurrencies. But according to Forbes.com, as more coins gain currency the market sector dominance that once saw Bitcoin with a 90% market share has shifted and Bitcoin currently holds about 50% of that market sector capital.
That is not to say that Bitcoin is losing Market Capital per se, but rather that the market is rapidly expanding as other cryptocurrencies gain support via institutional and other investors and users of the novel forms of digital money.
In fact, Bitcoin is trading at an all-time-high and has doubled it’s market capital in the last 12 months approximately.
Competitors
Both Etherium and Ripple continue to make big strides in the digital money space while offering alternative features to Bitcoin.
An expanding Space
There is no doubt that as interest in the technology grows more intellectual capital and traditional investment is pouring into both companies that develop the technology and via speculative investment in the coins themselves.
A Bubble?
Everything that expands rapidly can burst and it is a truism of economics that what goes up also goes down, and even in it’s brief lifetime Bitcoin has seen several boom and bust cycles.
What appears to the right side might well be a bubble, but even if it is that trend might repeat over the next five years a number of times. Where is stops nobody knows.
Top Ten Cryptocurrencies
According to Coinmarketcap the top ten cryptcurrencies are as follows:
| 1 |  Bitcoin |
$30,092,801,323 | $1842.01 | 16,336,937 BTC | $902,515,000 | 0.78% |  |
| 2 |  Ripple |
$13,782,989,699 | $0.359814 | 38,305,873,865 XRP * | $309,718,000 | -6.30% |  |
| 3 |  Ethereum |
$8,714,968,024 | $95.03 | 91,709,765 ETH | $184,400,000 | 5.03% |  |
| 4 |  NEM |
$1,569,636,000 | $0.174404 | 8,999,999,999 XEM * | $48,367,200 | 55.75% |  |
| 5 |  Litecoin |
$1,300,544,802 | $25.42 | 51,156,832 LTC | $97,523,000 | 4.80% |  |
| 6 |  Dash |
$637,660,162 | $87.31 | 7,303,186 DASH | $11,994,800 | 3.50% |  |
| 7 |  Ethereum Classic |
$609,559,131 | $6.64 | 91,735,726 ETC | $38,852,800 | 12.79% |  |
| 8 |  Stellar Lumens |
$465,110,056 | $0.048659 | 9,558,620,670 XLM * | $42,642,600 | 10.43% |  |
| 9 |  Monero |
$434,252,854 | $29.99 | 14,480,356 XMR | $12,683,000 | 15.58% |  |
| 10 |  Bytecoin |
$342,478,685 | $0.001872 | 182,905,025,122 BCN | $46,432,000 | 66.68% |  |
