The first digital money appeared in 2008. The collapse of bitcoin has been inconclusively predicted since 2011, but it is growing from year to year. One of the active researchers of the phenomenon of this virtual currency, Joel Lopez Barata, mathematically calculated the possible cost of bitcoin at the end of 2018. The discrepancies in the assessment of his predictions are embarrassing — the price of a crypto currency may be from $ 13,200 to $ 271,277.