The first runup was up to $33 and had nothing to do with Cyprus or any other crises. Sure, it can be used in case of bad economic situation, but the major use of bitcoin currently isn't that... ----------------------------------------------- Very interesting read how DPR was caught: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/how-the-feds-took-down-the-dread-pirate-roberts/
The problem with digital currency is, that if you take a close look at it, it is just a bunch of numbers without any underpinning, not to mention without an issuing authority.... So how is that better??? Currently the major use of BTC is speculation, so it isn't functioning properly as currency. There is just way too much hoarding.
This was the top story on Bloomberg for a few minutes this morning about the Winklevoss twins bitcoins. It got buried quickly. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-02/bitcoin-bets-feed-twitter-dreams-as-regulators-circle.html
The bit-coin phenomena is a real threat to the Fed's position as manager of the world's reserve currency. They will take down any such rivals especially if it looks likely to succeed.
History repeats itself: Once again the Winklevoss twins get beaten launching their big idea: a bitcoin trust "SecondMarket, an American online marketplace, announced today (sept. 26) that itâs launching a new bitcoin trustâa way for companies and rich people to invest in the virtual currency. Itâs a structure that looks not unlike the bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) announced in July by the Winklevoss twins; but while thereâs no date set for the launch of the Winklevoss ETF, SecondMarketâs trust is raising capital now, though investors wonât start trading shares until early 2014." http://qz.com/128442/once-again-the...-to-launching-their-big-idea-a-bitcoin-trust/ ---------------------------------------- The Bloomberg article said the Winklewii hold 1% of BTC, I remembered 10%, Looks like they owned back in April about 108K bitcoins, so 1 %....
...are not very good business men either. My confussion with their BTC holding came from the fact that they started to buy bitcoins in the single digits last year, and they said they spent 11 million bucks on it.(that would give them a 10% share of all coins, had they bought all their holdings under 10$, but they apparently didn't) So if their holdings is 108K coins, as papers indicate, then their average price is just above $100 and that also means that they had to buy lots of coins in the 150-200$ territory, to make the average price around $100. Now when bitcoin was above $200 that was still a good deall, but when like yesterday the price quickly dipped to 110$, not so much.(some exchanges had 88 as lowest price) I think any investors/speculators have to play the market in BTC and can't just hold for months. Of course when one is holding 100K bitcoins it is hard to dump most of it on the market or quickly buy them back... I guess the major reason they are not actively playing the market is that they need to hold a decent amount of bitcoins for the upcoming bitcoin trust...
1) bitcoin started as underground currency used mostly by those activities and only within last year did it really took off with legit uses, shutting down those website is a big positive and will further push bitcoin into legitimacy depsite the short term price flux. Crooks are not move in, they were the major users, and now bitcoin (along with governments) are pushing them out as the currency becomes popular/legit. 2) bitcoin has been legally recognized as currency in the us for the first time: http://rt.com/usa/bitcoin-sec-shavers-texas-231/ 3) welcome regulations, more the better at this stage, to help further legitimatize the currency. 4) There are plenty physical bitcoins since 2011 including those made from silver and gold. The 2011 first issues are now selling at 3x spot as a collectible item. https://www.casascius.com/photos.aspx 5) The difficulty(computing power) of the bitcoin network has increased at 30% every 14 days as the asic mining evolution continues and easily beat the world's top 500 supercomputers power combined...in May this year. Now the processing power of the network is truly insane, ensure bitcoin's security. Difficulty(computing power) time series: 6) You have no idea what you are talking about - in the head from ass sense. Bitcoin is here to stay and has the very real potential to become the next internet-like event as the sectors it can impact is tremendous. get on board or be left behind
$41k or 41000 coins? either way that's decent chunk of coins. I have most of mine in 2011 casacius 1btc coins, originally was just using them for cold storage, but by some sheer luck those somehow are collector items now lol.