The companion story, the Bitkillers on ZH is worth reading and looking at the chart; it really drives home the hypocrisy in BitCoin; the libs who love it ignore the 100 or so robber barrons who at any moment can make it crash and like the Marxist pope said, let all the “ones at the bottom suffer or miss out” (paraphrased very roughly but you get the gist).
On an aside, does anyone know how to spend BitCoins? I mean how do you use them or is it like holding a 10oz bar of gold for emergency?
Gold can’t vanish like 0’s and 1’s can for BitCoin.
Scroll to the bottom and you'll see a button for paying for your purchase in Bitcoin. I've never used them, so I have no idea of the quality of service. There are plenty of other places to spend your coin as well.
Some have said that the only reason the whole bitcoin system is working is that only a few speculators and tech nerds are using it.
If it got to the point where the average Joe was walking into a restaurant to buy a cheeseburger with some bitcoin fragments, then the logging of all the transaction would become impossibly unwieldy.