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Bitcoin Hits $400 Ahead of Senate Hearing On Virtual Currency
An anonymous reader writes "The value of bitcoin has surged through the $400 barrier for the first time, as unprecedented growth sees the virtual currency's value quadruple in just three months. Meanwhile, on 18 November, a Senate subcommittee is scheduled to hold a hearing on virtual currencies like bitcoin and its lesser-known competitors litecoin and altcoin. The hearing comes after a unit of the Treasury Department earlier this year issued guidelines stating virtual currencies should be subject to the same anti-money-laundering laws as traditional currency-transfer businesses like Western Union."
Yes altcoin is the best of the altcoins, there isnt an alternate bitcoin called altcoin, all alternatives are referred to as altcoins.
BTC is largely used for speculation and you know it.
The value of bitcoins is up at the news of a hearing that is probably going to make it illegal to do 95% of what is done with BTC? That makes sense.
1) It doesn't matter what the US government decides, if people want to use it it will be used. Reference: drugs, prostitution, illegal immigration, abortion, illegal guns, and other world countries.
2) People don't act because they have no alternatives. This is an alternative, but not many people know about it. High-profile senate hearings publicize BitCoin, so that more people will realize how useful it is, and this spurs demand.
3) There are no valid argument against BitCoin. There are economic "story telling" arguments, and predictive "doom and gloom by story telling" arguments, and false equivalences with closely related things (fraudulent exchanges, Silk Road, &c), and outright lies ("it's a Ponzi scheme!!!"), but no actually valid arguments.)
4) All the standard aphorisms apply: buggy-whip manufacturers, the invisible hand, liquidity, privacy and freedom.
BitCoin will become a game-changer (oh, that phrase!) simply because nothing can stop it.
We should all like this Bitcoin *concept* even if we don't all like Bitcoin itself or the culture that has evolved around it. Yeah, I know it's the "fad" to bash Bitcoin. But it's disappointing, because Bitcoin represents everything that us nerds reading slashdot should like: It's a mix of cryptography, freedom of speech, computing, networking, finance, economics, and even politics. Most of us here dig that stuff.
Get over the hype and take Bitcoin for what it really is: a fascinating experiment that has, so far, withstood the amazing barrage of publicity, hacking attempts, legal uncertainties, and remains valuable for reasons completely contrary to everyone that says it's worthless. It may become worthless one day, but consider the possibility that Bitcoin is disproving all your wildly oversimplified assumptions about what makes something valuable. It is completely different than anything else we know, and there's plenty of reasons to believe that it could succeed as much as it could fail.
Why does gold have value? Nothing is backing gold (and if it was valued only for its material properties, it would have a value only a fraction of $1,400/oz). Yet it has high value, mainly because of its properties to behave as a transferable store of value: scarcity, fungibility, density, identifiability, etc. Bitcoin is really quite similar but with some different properties. Ease of transfer over the internet, fungibility, scarcity, storage efficiency, near-anonymity and built-in escrow. I don't think it's any more ludicrous for Bitcoin to have value than it is for gold to have value. And in the end, when I want to sell WoW weapons, buy webserver space, or play a few games of poker online, why would I use credit cards or paypal, which all require me to remember log-in creditials, give away personal information to be [improperly] protected by a third-party and/or pay a bunch of fees. There's plenty of value in being able to pay people across the world, instantaneously, without sacrificing your privacy, and without paying any fees. Why is that not valuable?