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Comment by ruswick | Hacker News Reader

I own half of a Bitcoin. I purchased about two weeks ago. In the intervening time, the value of Bitcoin has gone up 40%. I can't complain, and I'll probably buy more in the near future. It is somewhat disappointing that they can't be used for anything, though. Without practical applications, Bitcoin is subject to massive volatility and doesn't have any sort of foundation to prevent against collapse of the market.

Incidentally, I also developed a Bitcoin Twitter ticker. If anyone would like to keep up with hourly prices via Twitter, I suggest that you check it out.

http://twitter.com/bitcoin_ticker

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Buy some gold or silver if the price of btc gets up to where you want it:

amagimetals.com

goldsilverbitcoin.com

I fixed up my house with a Lowe's giftcard bought with btc:

gyft.com

It is at least useful as savings. Isn't it a "practical application"? It's being very useful for me to store value in long term.

I'd say it's horrible for savings. Savings is something you actually want to "save", meaning its likelihood of retaining value is as close to 100% as possible. With low risk comes low return, which is okay for savings. Bitcoin is an investment at best, a speculation at worst. It definitely isn't a guaranteed store of value. It's easy to confuse the fact that it's going up with the idea of storing value. Not very long ago your "savings" would have been about 1/2 its peak value in April, and in a year it might be worth 10X or 1/10th.

I trust more Bitcoin than dollar, oranges or woods to save my money.

At this point it is way too volatile for use as as long-term wealth storage. The current state of Bitcoing only makes it suitable for high-risk, high-reward investing, which is not conducive to saving.

No. It's only useful as savings if it can be reasonably expected to hold long-term value. But with a valuation based almost entirely on speculation there isn't really a rational reason to assume that (unlike, say, gold or silver which still have commercial use providing a price floor).

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