Posted on 11/20/2013 7:49:21 AM PST by Errant
Five years ago it was worth $0. Then, a month and a half ago it went to $150 a piece. On Monday it shot to over $600. On Tuesday, the value rose to over $900, meaning a 6, 445%-increase in value since the start of the year. It plummeted to $531 at midday today and then recovered reaching $793 while being traded on the Asian markets. Bitcoin: it’s the bonanza of the century.
Volatility and hikes are based on nothing except speculation and the desire to make a mint, thinking that you can predict what the markets are going to do. But, will that Bitcoin volatility lead to a bubble? Or is it bringing in a new era of a new type of currency that people are willing to use and that merchants are now being forced to accept? It might never become a legitimate currency in the future, but that’s hardly important when you can make a profit from it. Of course central banks are at risk from the use of virtual currencies as it would mean that they would have little control over what we spend and how transactions are carried out. Is Bitcoin the death of our central banks?
(Excerpt) Read more at zerohedge.com ...
This freeper here is in on this with my geek son.
We run bitcoin miners and get paid in the bitcoin.
They’re getting a “little” harder to mine, aren’t they? :-)
On a nice base they’d probably sell on ebay?
If you were smart you’d use your Bitcoin to buy Gold and Silver bullion.
It’s not harder, but it there are fewer. Bitcoin is a finite currency. Once all the Bitcoins are mined, there will be no more. As with all finite resources, they’ll become more valuable as they become fewer.
Where will they go? Is there a Death Star somewhere for bitcoins?
I went to a knock-off version of Babelfish, and the I keep getting two translations for “bitcoin” - one is “Apple stock, 1980” and the other is “tulip bulbs, 1637”.
People will “own” them, per se.
They are getting harder to mine, as the difficulty level is way up because of all of the miners working on the blockchain fewer remaining bicoins.
As with all finite resources, they’ll become more valuable as they become fewer.
What I'm thinking as well.
Where do you spend it?
Sort of, yes.
For one thing, a bitcoin stored in a wallet whose key gets deleted or lost, is lost forever. It's not like gold in a shipwreck that can be salvaged by divers. Over time, as people occasionally lose wallet keys or die without telling anyone their passwords, bitcoins steadily get taken permanently out of circulation.
For another, any finite currency whose value is primarily speculative encourages hoarding. Bitcoins increase in value primarily because everybody wants to accumulate a giant stash of them. Nobody wants to *spend* those bitcoins because they'd rather sit on them waiting for them to get rarer and rarer, as they or other people buy them up. A bitcoin sitting in the wallet of someone who categorically refuses to buy anything with it is as good as destroyed.
Thanks for the explanation.
I find the whole thing interesting, although it makes my head hurt sometimes, LOL.
Any thoughts on the recent price rise and crash?
If people must die to stop it, so be it.
Looks to me like Bitcoin already has its nose under the tent and the crony-fascists’ are having trouble organizing resistance.
They’ll find a way. The NSA knows every owner of bitcoin and their wallet key. If their wallets disappear, bitcoin disappears.
It seems that if an establishment has an on-site ATM that will convert bitcoins to dollars, the bitcoin advocates say that establishment 'accepts bitcoins' but that is not really true.
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