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One Bitcoin Is Now Worth More Than One Ounce of Gold (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: For the first time ever, the price of one bitcoin has surpassed the price of one ounce of gold. While today's swap can be attributed to a good day for bitcoin (up ~3%) and a bad day for gold (down ~1.3%), the big picture is that bitcoin has more than doubled in the last year (up ~185% from a year ago) while gold is essentially trading exactly at the price it was a year ago. Even though bitcoin and gold are both thought of as alternative assets, they don't usually trade in correlation. Still, it's notable that bitcoin has (at least temporally) surpassed the price of gold. Gold is quite literally the "gold standard" of alternative assets, often used by investors to hedge against potential losses in more traditional assets like real estate and the stock market.
If you want a good laugh, go read through all the old /. articles on Bitcoin, particularly around when it was reaching $1 in value.
So many naysayers. Well they're not laughing now!
There is only one reason that bitcoin is so high in value right now, ransomware
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But bullets magically would continue to work, right?
As long as they are not electrical ones (not sure where you are going with that).
They last for an amazingly long time too being sealed units, for example, fairly much the entire world supply of 50 cal rounds were manufactured in WWII and we still use them today.
It was, "The power goes out. How much is your bitcoin worth then?".
...
It's much easier to make bitcoin totally unusable, and hence worthless, than it is to do the same for most other currencies or currency-like commodities.
Strange that of all the different possible media of exchange, so many people choose to use bank cards to buy things, cards that would be equally worthless were "the power to go out".
There are people out there that will pay real money for a virtual shield in a video game, a garden gnome for their virtual garden, etc.
There's a sucker born every minute.
Bitcoin has zero value unless you're the electricity utility company. I find the entire virtual currency ecosystem to be laughable.
> Still, it's notable that bitcoin has (at least temporally) surpassed the price of gold.
Bullshit, it has not.
There's a cap of 21 million bitcoins. Of this, over three quarters have already been mined. It is supposed to get progressively harder to mine bitcoins, with the intention that the huge numbers of bitcoins that are sitting fallow will eventually appreciate in value, that it will still be worth mining them even as they get harder, etc. Regardless of your views on this, or cryptocurrencies: there's only 21 million bitcoins total.
1 bitcoin is one twenty-millionth of all bitcoins. It is about .000005% of the total blob of bitcoins that will ever be. .000005% of all the gold mined to date- which is definitely not all the gold ever- is around 300 ounces of gold. And that's a very low estimate for the total gold available- some sources have it at over ten times that in available gold. The fact that no one has it pinned down to at least a solid order of magnitude is depressing, but the point is that even the low estimates, the percentage of one bitcoin compared to all the bitcoin, versus that same percentage of gold compared to all the gold, is nowhere close in bitcoins favor.
Hey Bruce,
Your lack of understanding of this amazes me. I've been reading your comments on Slashdot for years and thought you were an intelligent guy!
Anyway, I don't think the value that people give to bitcoin is entirely delusional as you seem to state. It's value, I believe, is in the fact it can be used to transfer value safely over the internet without a 3rd party - well an 'aware' 3rd party that allows or disallows it. It's free from the the control of the banks, nobody can just decide to 'print more bitcoin' on a whim.
It may be mostly built on illegal markets and speculation currently but that will change as it becomes more accepted and trusted. I spend it whenever I can but my choices are limited...so it's mainly Steam games! (I do not use illegal markets...and I'm not just saying that to stop the NSA from tracking me...not that it will)