Although Coinye’s peer-to-peer network remains active and it’s still technically possible to mine the currency, person-to-person transfers and mining activity have collapsed to the point that Coinye is basically worthless.
In June, the Chinese Government cracked down on considerable crypto mining operations taking place in the Sichuan province and demanded that Chinese banks and payment channels stop supporting decentralised and anonymous crypto transactions.

Like all cryptocurrencies, the majors are digital assets that secure and verify transactions using computer science and complex mathematics, known as cryptography. Unlike traditional (‘fiat’) currencies, they are not currently issued or backed by a central authority such as a government. Instead, they run across a network of computers and are underpinned by blockchain technology – a permanent record of transactions that cannot be altered without the consensus of the network.
The volume of searches for particular terms is retrieved from the Google Trends service, a service provided by Google to give an insight into the popularity of different search terms over time. Search volumes returned from Google Trends are scaled from 0 to 100, where 100 represents the highest search volume within the time frame queried. In this work, the search term considered is the name of each cryptocurrency; for example, the volume of searches for “Bitcoin”, “Ethereum” etc.