[ExI] Bitcoin

[Mirco Romanato]

Il 04/04/2013 00:21, Anders Sandberg ha scritto:

> Well, the word you were looking for was likely hyperbolic or
> exponential. Squinting on the log-scale I would say hyperbolic.

> In a sense nobody has experience with Bitcoins, they are too new. But if
> you plot the all-time plot you will also see the peak 2 years ago, which
> looks fairly similar: accelerating price as the hype builds up, then a
> peak as it crashes. That ought to instill a healthy dose of caution.

Before the peak it was like 5 cent/BTC and after the peak it was 2$/BTC.
So, not a bad bet, in my mind.

It just moved from 2 to 12 in a year and now from 12 to 130 in three
months (but the adoption rate and useful ness is a lot larger).

> From an economical perspective, we should expect high volatility - it is
> a small currency with a value driven more by speculation than actual
> usage. And as plenty of bitcoin institutions are discovering,
> establishing security and reputations can be tough.

I do not much about actual usage, but I would like to ask something to
the person doing this

http://blockchain.info/address/159SCycgn8weAy2XGUEhD6V1RTFni7E3iq

36K BTC in a single transaction (around 4 millions US$).

Now we know what shacked the market today. Not who, but is something.

Not stranely the last big selloff was exactly 36K BTC a few days ago.


> From a theoretical perspective I feel torn. Bitcoin is a
> crypto-libertarian dream, a currency free from government control where
> you can invent new financial instruments with an afternoon of
> web-programming. This is what we were talking about back in the 90s!
> Yay! At last! But... while I think SilkRoad is very neat and that people
> should be allowed to buy drugs, it shows that bitcoin might make it *too
> easy* to run black market activity. It seems perfect for hiring people
> to rough others up, or even assassination markets - and it might allow
> buyers to avoid the currently tricky step of contacting unsavory
> characters. From our experience with viruses and exploits, the scary
> explosion happens when an economic driver appears and starts to feed a
> bad business.

This is a free market in private law enforcement, I would say.

Mirco