Lol I wouldn't call a £100 drop a dive for bitcoin.
Honestly i expected more but it's already recovering it was more like a minor bump in the road.
Honestly i expected more but it's already recovering it was more like a minor bump in the road.
> Prices on BTC China, the country's biggest Bitcoin trading platform -- which had stood at more than 7,000 yuan (around $1,100) each -- plunged by more than a third to an intra-day low of 4,523.12 yuan.
A 33% reduction in value is a dive. It may be constrained to the yuan, to China, to the particular exchange or just the crazy fluctuations of bitcoin, but it is still a dive no matter how you slice it.
Everywhere else the dive was much smaller, and it's already recovering.
http://bitcoinwisdom.com/markets/bitstamp/btcusd
Explore various intervals (time period). Even at the 1d interval, there are 15% swings. Is this bad, given the qualifier that "it is Bitcoin" after all? That depends on what you expect Bitcoin to be. If you expect to use it as a currency, then yes, it's very bad. If you earned your Bitcoins yesterday, and you have to pay a bill today, then that kind of swing is a big problem. You could end up taking a 15% haircut. If you expect to use it as a speculative investment, then you've got a lot of opportunities for trading.
Both of these are fine, but they're opposing goals. Most economists agree that you want stability in a currency; that is the currency should act as an accounting measure only. It is a means of storing value at as close to NET zero gain/loss as possible, with it's real value being the ability to transact goods indirectly.
I'm not sure what values Bitcoin endeavors to hold, but if we're using duck typing, it looks a lot more like a speculative investment than a currency.
'Platypus typing', maybe?
I tend to agree that Bitcoin acts more like a store of value than a primary medium of exchange. Theoretically if a lot people started to use Bitcoin the volatility should decrease. Even still I think we may see the development of an alternative cryptocurrency that's supply is able to inflate dynamically to offset deflation...
This could be a viable way of taking relatively anonymous payments and not loose more the say 5% to market fluctuations.
And you have 50 - 50 odds of loosing or gaining from market fluctuation so i don't see the problem.
Plus you can temporarily stop taking payments if your automated script notices the market fluctuate too fast and resume after the market has stabilized.