BTC $141 USD

https://mtgox.com/#

by niggler • 13 years ago

28 68 13 years ago

mtgox.com

pazimzadeh• 13 years ago

The latest price is always here:

http://bitcoinity.org/markets.

I'm not sure that a new submission is required every day.

rplnt• 13 years ago

I'm sure they are not required and they are annoying even. Especially when the submission adds absolutely nothing. And as a bonus links to a page that is not valid few minutes after posting.

Nursie7• 13 years ago

But it's still not a bubble, no sir, the bitcoin economy has just really kicked in to the tune of 40% growth in the last 24 hours...

freakyterrorist• 13 years ago

Surely this madness has to end soon?

Also seriously regretting not buying it when it was "expensive" at <$5 :(

nkozyra• 13 years ago

Some of us bought ours around $.85 and sold when there was no way it could go any higher around $30.

niggler6• 13 years ago

"Some of us bought ours around $.85 and sold when there was no way it could go any higher around $30."

Picking tops and bottoms is a fool's game.

3pt14159• 13 years ago

Heh some of us only sold 80% of the lovely bit coins. Muhahah.

bluedevil2k• 13 years ago

cough sell now cough

rheide2• 13 years ago

Yet people aren't. Apparently there's still enough belief to warrant this kind of growth.

(..getting ready to eat my own words, real soon..)

Matsta• 13 years ago

My 2¢ is that it's gonna crash like it did a couple years back. Then would be the best time to buy, since it will probably do this crazy business once again.

paulhodge• 13 years ago

Of course, it's not going to crash very far if enough people are thinking this.

crazytony• 13 years ago

Not being fluent in the ins and outs of bitcoin: what is driving this? Is it pure speculation? Are more people trying to get in on the BTC wagon (riding the Cyprus wave)?

IgorPartola• 13 years ago

Nobody really knows. The common thought is that as more merchants start accepting BTC, it becomes more viable as a stand-alone currency and therefore more valuable. Facts seem to contradict this theory as 40% overnight growth cannot represent a 40% growth in the BTC economy. Thus either we undervalued BTC all along, or it is against bubble.

gnu8• 13 years ago

Yes.

Nursie7• 13 years ago

Speculation.

There doesn't seem to be any evidence that (in the world of BTC) the Cyprus situation has triggered anything other than rampant speculation by non-cypriot libertarians who already distrust central banks and now have a boogeyman to point at.

Egregore• 13 years ago

What was driving the price of gold for the past decade?

bryanlarsen• 13 years ago

Standard bubble advice applies here.

1) the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. (Keynes)

2) a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Bank your profits. It turns exponential gains into linear gains, throwing away a huge amount of potential profits. But a small amount of real profit is worth more than a huge amount of potential profit.

jerguismi• 13 years ago

"a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Bank your profits. "

Are you implying that banks are safer way to store wealth then Bitcoin? #Cyprys ;)

beedogs• 13 years ago

They sure are. Just not in Cyprus.

niggler6• 13 years ago

What happened in Cyprus will not happen in the US. It's far easier to just print a ton of money than it is to confiscate or force a bank collapse (and Cyprus didn't have that option because they don't have control over EUR)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-t17wziSnA&t=26s

codesuela• 13 years ago

Just sold my BTC for about 75% profit within a few weeks, still probably gonna bite myself in the ass if Bitcoin ever hits 1000 USD

niggler6• 13 years ago

Remember the saying: no one ever gets fired for taking profits

mkr-hn2• 13 years ago

Think of it as a chance to invest in something tangible and productive.

jaimebuelta3• 13 years ago

75% profit within few weeks seems EXTREMELY good to me. I can't really see the problem (yes, I know for a emotional point of view. Just think about 75% in a few weeks)

Yuioup2• 13 years ago

I still don't understand how a nonexistent coin could be worth anything. No really. How does solving an algorithm translate into value?

niggler6• 13 years ago

Value, be it in gold or silver or USD or EUR or bitcoin or cars or art, is a perceived phenomenon. Something has value because others are willing to trade it for goods and services (or for other forms of value). Gold and silver are trusted stores of value because they have been used in that capacity for centuries (and for a very long time, USD were silver certificates so there was real metal backing the paper)

The underlying value of BTC, IMO, is the anonymity feature (the ability to conduct commerce without a clear centralized record identifying you by name). Once that is compromised, it's not clear what value BTC will have.

ragmondo2• 13 years ago

Anonymity is not really the selling feature of bitcoin - in fact it really only offers pseudo-anonymity.

The fact that no-one else can just "print" bitcoins, and that you can transfer funds at internet speed to anybody else anywhere in the world and that (after a short time), the transaction cannot be reversed are the main utilities.

Nursie7• 13 years ago

It doesn't.

'Value' comes from people's perception. The fact(s) that they can't (until the crypto is broken) be counterfeited or double spent (within reason/time limits), and that there are a limited amount ever, and that transfer is decentralised and unregulated, these things give them value to some people.

The actual hashing work done is useful to provide the above features. IMHO it is not useful in and of itself.

Note that I'm not really an advocate of bitcoins either, but I have taken a bit of time to try and understand them. The limited quantity and decentralisation are not positive features of a currency (again, IMHO)

Ntrails2• 13 years ago

I still don't understand how a piece of rock could be worth anything. No really. How do some carbon atoms translate into value?

Value is a transient concept, many things we assume to be inherently valuable are simply based on the assumption everyone else will continue to value them as much (or more) as they do now.

Yuioup2• 13 years ago

Yes but there is nothing backing up the solving of the algorithm. The rock came from somewhere and can be put back to be picked up again. A bitcoin comes from nowhere and is a magnetic action away from being wiped into nothing.

Bitcoin is b<censored>t, a nonsense bubble waiting to burst. The emperor is wearing bitcoin.

VLM4• 13 years ago

A year or two ago a group in .ch (which is not China, BTW) organized a group buy of Debian logo'd swiss army knives. I got in on the deal and unfortunately ended up paying well over 50% the cost of the knife in various transfer fees. So my "$25 knife" or whatever it was ended up costing me about $50. First I needed to convert from dollars to euros, then an international xfer, then into something kinda like a cross between what americans would call paypal and a checking account I believe it was the iban system where I basically sent money to a number almost exactly like paypal would send money to an email addrs. Nobody would do stuff like this unless they were desperate or crazy or just didn't care so the financial cartels tacked on incredible fees at each step. Oh if only we could have made a transaction with BTC. It takes about 5 minutes to make a BTC transaction so the currency risk is pretty minimal compared to the 50%+ fees from traditional currency changers. Given those numbers, even during an active crash its safer/cheaper to use BTC than traditional forms of transfer.

Anyway the value of a bitcoin solely due to transfers is (how much money the world is transferring across borders with BTC today) / (how many BTC are available for that kind of transfer/trading today) with a correction factor for velocity of money today. So if a billion bucks a day flows outta $dying_country and there's ten thousand BTC in the trading pool being used to transfer the money, and the velocity of money is the btc change hands a thousand times a day, then the price delta due to Cyprus/whatever would therefore be "about" $100 per individual BTC on top of whatever existing value due to other transfers and such. These numbers are pretty well made up but this is generally where very long term price estimates end up. So assuming BTC someday approaches 1% of paypals volume, then given paypals well known transfer volume stats, and some realistic estimates of the BTC trading pool size, the price per BTC would be...

Much like EE work this valuation benefits from a hydrologic comparison. So given hoover dam, how much does a gallon of water weigh? Well if you know how many pounds of water fell over the dam per day, and you know how many gallons of water fell over the dam per day, and one day's worth of water takes exactly one day to fall over the dam, then a gallon of water would seem to weigh x pounds...

Nursie7• 13 years ago

Wowsers.

Whereas I've sent money between accounts in all sorts of countries for next to nothing. I think whoever organised your group buy screwed up, badly. And by the sounds of it so did you.

polshaw• 13 years ago

I cannot ----ing believe it. I thought there would be a bump when it hit $100, but not this much. It's just insane, I was calling it a bubble since $30, and it's doubled again and again..

I wonder how low the crash will go? I'm guessing it won't be below $30.

Nursie7• 13 years ago

Depends how many people get badly burned by this I would have thought. It could pretty easily drop to almost nothing if confidence is completely bust, as the 'fundamentals' supporting the price of BTC are far from obvious.

kmfrk2• 13 years ago

If it drops to $15, I'm going to try to get a physical Casascius coin just for the hell of it:

https://www.casascius.com/

illuminate• 13 years ago

Whenever the crash happens, we'll have so many threads generated telling us to "get in now!" and the speculation will begin anew.

russellallen• 13 years ago

A currency which changes in value by around 40% in a 24 hour period is completely useless for the transactions I mostly deal with. We worry about a few percent change over weeks and insist on hedges.

Imagine saying to someone - I'll put 1000 BTC into your venture when you reach the next milestone in two months. What's that going to be? USD 100,000? USD 50,000? USD 1.50?

niggler6• 13 years ago

"A currency which changes in value by around 40% in a 24 hour period is completely useless for the transactions I mostly deal with"

1. IIRC Silk road uses some average price rather than the spot price

2. Does anyone provide BTC hedging? Seems like a pretty useful and profitable service.

ragmondo2• 13 years ago

To enable hedging, someone would have to take a forward position in USD/BTC .. and at the moment, the market is in contango ( see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contango ) which means that the sentiment is that the price will continue to increase for the near term ... ie you'd have to be very brave indeed in order to put a limit on the expected BTC price.

mkr-hn2• 13 years ago

That's a lot of tulips.

AndrewDucker• 13 years ago

How are people still actually using it to _buy_ things?

My problem with this rate of change is that it makes it harder to use it as a means of buying things.

If I see an item for sale for 2.5BTC then it can take me an hour to translate my GBP into BTC. Then I carry out the exchange, and then they have to transfer it back to their currency (if they want to spend it on most things).

If the value has gone up 15% in that time then what price should they be charging me?

Should a shopfront be updating its prices on an hourly basis?

I'm all for BTC being valuable, but it needs to have _some_ stability to be used as a method of value exchange.

swinglock2• 13 years ago

I bought a domain at Namecheap. That sent me over to BitPay which I gave the current USD price in BitCoins and an hour later Namecheap had accepted the payment.

Devilboy4• 13 years ago

And two days later you regretted not hoarding the bitcoin instead.

Devilboy4• 13 years ago

Almost nobody is buying anything with bitcoin. At least 99% of the bitcoin price is due to speculation.

meerita2• 13 years ago

It makes impossible for a developer to charge BT on any service. Tell me how you do it without being overpriced the next day.

EarthLaunch• 13 years ago

Calculate the exchange rate automatically? This is not 1900.

meerita2• 13 years ago

Really? I wasn't my point. I was talking about make use of the bitcoin value as a statement. Of course I can charge in Yens and convert it on the fly to dollars or pounds, but that wasn't the point.

It's really to make Btc popular on a website when every refresh can bring you a new value. It's horrible for business. Btc right now is only useful for trade than for other low end business operations as paying one month of hosting or buying a toy.

Devilboy4• 13 years ago

Price your goods in USD and do the conversion at payment time.

Didn't think of that idea did you?

eterm• 13 years ago

But then you're not really charging BTC, you're charging USD but allowing BTC as a payment mechanism of USD.

daveungerer• 13 years ago

I'm surprised that someone hasn't started another Bitcoin yet. Is it harder than just changing some initial seed? Because the artificial scarcity of digital currency is what's allowing for these high prices.

Then all you need is intermediary parties that will exchange your V2 Bitcoins for V1 Bitcoins (which will currently have the highest acceptance for buying things). Over time, V2, V3 etc. may even become accepted directly by merchants, if they become big enough.

UPDATE: Thanks for the info on additional ones. This is getting really interesting. So my initial scarcity hypothesis was wrong, which means it's just pure herd mentality. Hopefully over time the availability of multiple currencies will lead to some sort of equilibrium though.

rarestblog• 13 years ago

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=134179.0

rheide2• 13 years ago

Litecoin. Namecoin. Ixcoin. Ppcoin. Terracoin. Devcoin.

nonpme• 13 years ago

Actually, there's a lot of other virtual curriences, see for examples: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=134179.0

Yesterday 2nd popular one, Litecoin (LTC) more than doubled its value.

nsns• 13 years ago

It's like in Germany in the 30's.

glennos• 13 years ago

I was thinking that as well, but it's actually the opposite. Germany experienced hyperinflation, where the value of the Mark decreased rapidly. This is the currency increasing in value, so "hyperdeflation" I guess.

kmfrk2• 13 years ago

I guess the y-axis should be logarithmic at his point.

BTC $141 USD

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