Bitcoin Tops $1,000 Again as Zynga Accepts Virtual Money

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-05/bitcoin-tops-1-000-again-on-adoption-by-zynga-amid-wider-usage.html

by jasonlingx • 13 years ago

70 33 13 years ago

bloomberg.com

kolev2• 13 years ago

Well, I heard it was primarily because of Sina launching a Bitcoin news portal.

trekky1700• 13 years ago

I heard it was because the last Son of Nebulus, ruler of the Five Realms had returned.

nhangen• 13 years ago

This article speaks as if it was 100% certainty that Zynga's announcement caused the fluctuation. Doesn't feel entirely accurate.

mikeyouse• 13 years ago

I guess Bitcoin's finally made it to the big leagues.

It's similar to every single day's coverage of financial stocks -- "The stock is up 1% on the expected change in the price of tea in china."

Worthless.

fragsworth• 13 years ago

That's the first impression I got from it as well.

I think there's another factor that is driving the price up more than anything else - serious hoarding by people who are just now beginning to understand the system and how it works.

barce• 13 years ago

Ya, the Stossel Show on Fox re-aired at around the time of the spike and a Libertarian was telling a bunch of folks to get into Bitcoin. My hunch is this was more influential in getting ma & pop to invest in bitcoin given Fox's viewership.

baddox• 13 years ago

Any talk like that is fundamentally flawed, because the market price is simply a reflection of individuals buying and selling. No one has the information about the motivations behind every single buy and sell.

dschiptsov• 13 years ago

Sell call. But I guess there is not much demand at this price.)

mcv• 13 years ago

The price can only be that high if there is demand. The big question is the volume of the demand. If everybody suddenly starts selling, the price will quickly collapse again.

Not sure what I'll do. I bought mine at the low a few weeks ago, so this would already be unbelievable profit. But it might go up even further.

orthecreedence• 13 years ago

I'm thinking I'll give it another year before I sell. Only more companies are going to jump on the bandwagon, which means more money pouring into bitcoin and upping the value.

Obviously, nothing is certain, but I think altcoins have some serious growth potential over the next few years as they gain mainstream adoption.

LAMike• 13 years ago

Zynga didn't do this

Cakez0r• 13 years ago

But this is probably why they did it :)

firegrind• 13 years ago

The headline and the article do not propose causality, but coincidence.

wellboy• 13 years ago

It was most likely the Zynga announcement. 10M monthly users is quite something and there were no other relevant news around over the last couple of days.

okamiueru• 13 years ago

http://www.coindesk.com/chinese-web-giant-sina-launches-bitc...

Sprint• 13 years ago

They don't accept Bitcoin as Bitcoin. They only employ a third-party service to take Bitcoin on their behalf and exchange them for US dollars. It's not showing any trust in Bitcoin, just hopping on a bandwagon for PR.

jasonlingx• 13 years ago

Just goes to show, you don't need to trust bitcoin to use bitcoin ;)

josu2• 13 years ago

How is that different from accepting credit cards via a third party?

xander7b• 13 years ago

If they had faith on the long-term future of BitCoin, they would have accepted them as BitCoins and stored them as some sort of an investment rather than immediately converting them to USD.

jedc• 13 years ago

I think the first half of your statement is true (employing a third-party service to take Bitcoin) but the second half (automatically exchanging them to USD) is an assumption that can change over time as Zynga gets comfortable managing Bitcoin.

I would think it's valuable for the entire Bitcoin network to have more merchants accepting it than less, so how is Zynga accepting Bitcoin a bad thing?

poolpool2• 13 years ago

They are not accepting bitcoin. They are partnering with a company to handle whatever needs to be done to give them real live USD they can put in their bank accounts.

They are still only accepting USD: just making it easier for people with bitcoin to give USD to them.

drcode• 13 years ago

This is like arguing that accepting credit cards means you don't accept dollars, because no green pieces of paper are being exchanged.

kolev2• 13 years ago

I got into a public dispute with Max Keiser and his psychotic followers about this and people said it was semantics. There are three distinct moments: 1) Accepting Bitcoin (kudos to BitPay and Coinbase for making it so easy!), which is primarily a cheap PR move; 2) Having real commerce going thru this channel (i.e. volume as USD equivalent) - everybody seems shy about it; and 3) Truly accepting Bitcoin into a Bitcoin wallet!

Bitcoin Tops $1,000 Again as Zynga Accepts Virtual Money

Related Stories