It's literally doubled in a month. This is out of control.
Can a global financial system conceivably give the world just 10% of the value of Facebook? Because just ten percent ... and one BTC is $500.
Oh, but clearly society demands Farmville, you say? Clearly we don't need a new financial system ... more than we need to know who Joe Bob hooked up with this weekend.
As if there's no pain being solved here by Bitcoin. As if there are no problems with USD or the EUR. As if Cypriots are just pissed off over spilled milk right now. After all it's only a "haircut".
It's so funny to see how most people on HN are here to make businesses that scale infinitely. What could possibly, POSSIBLY, scale faster and more widely than an open source global currency? The price increase in the last month represents a trickle of people around the globe exchanging fiat for BTC. Just a trickle. Whereas most people are obviously hesitant to invest. That would include most people on HN.
The supply of Bitcoin is ridiculously tiny. Only 11,000,000 in total are in circulation today, let alone available for purchase on the market.
Sellers wanted. I acquired enough BTC to make me happy without being over the top - and I'm not ever exchanging it back into any other ass backwards asset class, gold and silver (and USD) included. Early adopters of BTC are from what I can tell mostly the same way, if crazier than I am.
Bitcoin is valuable because the world desperately needs to escape the current financial system. Individual sovereignty and financial privacy are the most scarce resources on the planet, bar none. It's not too late to acquire BTC, put it in a brainwallet and carry around $10k at all times. Now let's all go back to flinging monkey poop at consumers over the Internet.
Bitcoins can be divided to 8 decimal places at the moment (it could be expanded). So instead of 1.1e7 units, isn't it 1.1e15 units?
One Japanese Yen currently costs $0.0104715 USD. The price fluctuates down into the lower decimals. People deal with this every day.
Someone needs a way to sell firearms, ammo, and canned goods for BTC. That sounds funny, but I'm dead serious. Local laws against shipping arms can often be worked around.
This is as predicted by those who say that Bitcoin is a deflationary currency.
I don't think Bitcoins are the answer to the problems they are trying to solve.
If you still have Bitcoins, sell'em and don't buy more, except as an intermediary exchange for your discreet transactions.
-_-
So far we're spending more money on accountants handling the non-trivial
reconciliation of our BTC transactions than revenue we're making in Bitcoin,
haha. Hopefully it will get better.
This is what traction looks like, sometimes it's messy. That doesn't mean it's not legitimate.
What does legitimising a currency mean anyway? It's already used as a medium of exchange and a store of value, that's legitimate.
But if you are going to try and compare it to the "legitimacy" of fiat money, you're not going to find what you're looking for.
Bitcoin is an anarchist concept, it does not seek to be legitimised. It is achieving exactly what is set out to do.
you could just see the fluctuations as the currency being honest about its value as opposed to fiat money which is just as vulnerable yet artificially stabilised (legitimised?).