From banks to bitcoins

Bitcoin was first mined in 2009, following a paper by Satoshi Nakamoto on peer-to-peer money transactions

The price of bitcoin has surged dramatically over the past few months, hitting a whopping $20,000 in December. But the rally seems to have only just begun. An analyst told CNBC this week that the cryptocurrency could reach $400,000 in due course, making it the most valuable currency in the history of mankind.

For a currency that was trading at about $800 just a year ago, the rise has attracted interest from long-time optimists as well as naysayers who have called the mindboggling growth a bubble. One reason for the uncertainty is the lack of information about the digital currency, a