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Vast Bulk of BitCoins Are Hoarded, Not Used

another random user writes with this news from Ars Technica:"More than three-quarters of the digital coins in the Bitcoin digital currency scheme aren't circulating because they remain dormant in user accounts that have never participated in outgoing transactions, a recently published study has found. The figure translates to more than 7.019 million BTCs, the term used to denote a single coin under the digital currency, which uses strong cryptography and peer-to-peer networking to enable anonymous payments among parties who don't necessarily know or trust each other. Based on exchange rates listed on Mt.Gox — the most widely used Bitcoin exchange — the coins have a value of more than $82.87 million. On May 13, the date the researchers analyzed their data, there were slightly more than 9 million BTCs in existence."

2 of 438 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Gridlocked with No Way to Prime the Pump by binarylarry · · Score: -1, Redundant

    Shocking that people wouldn't be doing transactions with a currency that few people know about or understand and that even fewer people are willing to accept as payment.

    Based on exchange rates listed on Mt.Gox — the most widely used Bitcoin exchange — the coins have a value of more than $82.87 million.

    That is referred to as an inferred value. Same thing happens with companies. Say you buy 5% of a company for $1 million. By doing so you think the entire company is worth $20 million (5% of $20 million is $1 million). That doesn't mean it is actually worth that much, it just means someone paid an amount that implies the value of the company. On a thinly traded commodity inferred values can be wildly misleading because the person doing the transaction might have overpaid compared with the going market rate. If most of the bitcoins are sitting on the sidelines, that $80 million valuation is almost certainly far higher than is realistic.

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    Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
  2. Re:Mod Down, Copy-Pasted from another post by Falkentyne · · Score: -1, Redundant

    Your post about his sig complaining of people modding him down due to global warming bias... or maybe it should be because he copy-pasted other people's posts up to higher threads hoping to gain karma back through some trickery?

    The post before this post is clearly copied from one five minutes earlier somewhere else. And this isn't the first one in this thread that he's done that with, there are others further down.