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Bitcoin Exchange Value Halves After Chinese Ban
An anonymous reader writes with news of the latest major fluctuation in the price people are willing to pay for Bitcoins. From the article: "China's ban on its financial institutions handling bitcoin causes world's largest exchange to cease trading, halving the value of the currency from $1,000 to less than $500 in a matter of days. The country's central bank took a hard line on Bitcoin in early December when it banned financial institutions from handling the decentralized crypto-currency, and as a result BTC China, the world's largest bitcoin exchange, has stopped accepting deposits from its users."
Just watch that line trend downward.
And this is why we're still decades away from having mortgages denominated in bitcoin. :P
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
For a certain definition of value, yes, but not necessarily for the common one. In an idealized market, you do hope this is true for the common definition also: people have independently assessed how much they value some commodity, and offer a price accordingly. The price then converges on some aggregation of values.
But in real markets, this is often recursive: someone is offering $x for a commodity not because they themselves consider it to have a certain value, but because they think they will be able to resell it for $(x+y), due to market fluctuations. They may themselves consider it a worthless pile of trash valued at $0; day-traders, unlike value investors, don't make trade decisions based on their own assessments of the underlying value of the commodities or equities they're buying and selling. Instead they base their decisions on statistical estimates of market dynamics, independent of whatever the underlying item is and whether it may or may not have any value at all (models often don't even consider the underlying item in the equation).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I wish people would stop calling these "crypto-currencies", because it is a total misrepresentation of what these things are. They are crypto-commodities. BTC is just like gold right now - it is not used to transact, it is used as a value store - except it is much worse as a value store because it is orders of magnitude more volatile. No one can use BTC as a currency because its value fluxuates so wildly. Everyone who is SUPPOSEDLY using it as a currency just has it pegged to the US dollar with a live update.
right, I'm assuming you mean you bought at a low price and cashed out at a high price?
what I'm wondering is, which BTC to $$$ service you used (Mt Gox?), how often you were able to cash out, what the daily $$$ limits were, what the transfer fees cost, etc.
I've seen alot of people yammering about BTC but few claim to have made a profit...i'd like to know more about how
Thank you Dave Raggett
Amazon doesn't use anything. Bitpay handles the conversion and the supplier of the cards gets paid in dollars (This is something I believe you said was just too difficult to implement in a previous thread). The supplier of the cards gets them from Amazon (and other places) at a discount and makes their profit that way. Bitpay takes a slice so the purchaser pays a slight premium. Then again, if you bought your Bitcoins lower, you probably still come out ahead.