Bitcoin

Bitcoin made the news in 2013 for several reasons. It began being used as a possible form of payment from some mainstream businesses, like OKCupid and Baidu, but was still primarily being used for payment on some shady websites. 

This came into the headlines when the Silk Road, an illegal online drug-buying  website, was shut down in Oct, which led to Bitcoins losing 20% of their value. And then somehow thanks to speculators getting a whiff, from the start of November value increased by 400% in a month to over $1000 per unit.

Prices in early December are fluctuating wildly. And all of this from a currency which isn’t yet officially recognised by most financial institutions, governments. The reason that it’s made our list is that it is an excellent example of technology leapfrogging. 

Bitcoins are produced at a rate of 25BCs every 10 minutes, and apart from buying them, they can be “earned” or “mined” by through being able to process algorithms faster than competitors. This led to an arms race with groups first using CPUs, then GPUs, and now Application-specific integrated circuits dedicated to Bitcoin mining. Each technological jump almost instantly makes the competition obsolete.