Down almost $200 just like that. Could possibly go back under $1000 soon. Dang it was $1260 this afternoon. How can they stand this volatility ?
There's a reason a lot of people stayed away from it. A lot of early investors did very well with it, but there was no real reason to expect it to continue to go up and up and up without ever coming back down. The governments of the world were never going to allow it to operate forever in a untaxable manner
Isn't bitcoin supposed to operate outside the main fiat systems and so is it even important to assign it a value within them? I don't know much about them but I thought people used them to buy things priced in bitcoins, not dollars.
You buy them with dollars. It's like a stock in someways. If you just bought one for 1200 and its 1000 now you just lost 200 bucks
BitCoin being independent is just a wish. Sooner or later the governments of the world want oversight. For instance, China doesn't want wealth to flow out of the country, they want to control that. But with Bitcoin wealth can flow out of the country undetected. They aren't going to allow that. Imagine if Apple brought back all of their $215 Billion dollars which are overseas in Bitcoin. Would the US Gov't take notice? Would they want to tax those monies? Would the Irish (?) gov't take notice? Would any gov't want to track and tax money flow? Doesn't China now want to create it's own electronic currency.
Bitcoin is even more arbitrary in value than any so-called fiat currency. If you like "hard money" even a little bit, being a Bitcoin fan makes you schizophrenic. Hard money and Bitcoin are quite literally polar opposites.
Really it should have never been looked at as anything more than an investment, and at this point the time has probably passed where the money was to be made
Ooh, wait, I figured out what Bitcoin and hard money have in common - both are preferred by criminals.
I always thought Bitcoins would be vulnerable to the old-fashioned "pump and dump" scheme. Maybe my suspicions are at least somewhat on the money.
At least fiat currencies are worth the full faith and credit (read: ability to TAX) of a legally constituted sovereign government. Bitcoin is worth what? The ability to calculate high prime numbers, or something?!? You know, Bitcoin COULD BE, but probably isn't, a doctoral thesis on the limits of human gullibility, or the lack thereof.
This page has some interesting customisable graphs of bitcoin value over time. http://www.coindesk.com/price/
And at the mercy of said governments. So called hard currencies can be replaced at any moment with the exchange set by those governments. Me personally, I'm investing all my spare fiat dollars into collectible bitcoin errors. Might even start my own bitcoin grading service. PBGS - Pawnmonkeys Bitcoin Grading Service.
True enough, but I am not of the Patrick Hellerian school of thought that says money should be removed from governments. To me, controlling (both up and down) the money supply is as core a government function as defense and courts. Bitcoin errors. Funny. Also redundant. They're ALL errors.