The teenager set up a fake gift voucher website and bought a haul of Bitcoins which soared in value.
Some major differences between Bitcoin and altcoins can be found in the blockchain itself. Some altcoins have an uncapped supply, which changes how the coins are used. Some altcoins have made the blockchain faster, which speeds up both mining and transactions.

OK perhaps that’s a little far-fetched. But what is behind crypto’s crazy climb over the past 18 months, we hear you ask? We don’t mean to suggest that the pandemic hasn’t been involved, because we think it has, but not in the way that this chart criminal implies — not, in other words, because it’s some kind of safe haven that traders flock to when they are worried about Covid cases rising; the data don’t bear that idea out.
The long term positive coherence relationship observed between online metrics and price may be the result of another factor which we hypothesise could be technical progress. As a project makes technical progress, it is likely to have a community form around it over time, increasing online activity and also demand, and hence price, of the particular cryptocurrency. An interesting avenue of future work would be to consider the coherence between price and technical progress (via looking at each projects source code repository—these are available as cryptocurrency projects are generally open-source).