Topic: The fact that bitcoins are $4.25 US is amazing. (Read 1878 times)

10000 bitcoins can still buy you a pizza, unless it took another nosedive recently .

Comparing units is absolutely worthless. If anything, more fundamental is the smallest unit of currency available, but that is often misleading. For example, Japanese Yen are individually worth nearly nothing, but the Japanese economy is among the world's most successful. One Bitcoin satoshi is worth much less (currently around 8% of) a SolidCoin satoshi, but the Bitcoin economy is a magnitude (1300%) bigger than the SolidCoin economy.

At the current time, I think Bitcoin's problem is less with acceptance than it is with hoarding. This bear market will hopefully encourage people to spend more Bitcoins in its time of inflation, else Bitcoin may risk rapidly decreasing inflation in little more than 9 months.

This isn't a meaningful comparison, there are twice as many Bitcoins now than then, and the Bitcoin economy is also twice as large.

Look at how few bitcoins were traded during the first time we were at these prices compared to now. 

Depends on which M you were talking about. By the end of 1011, base money M0 was 2 trillions, M2 was about 10 trillions, world's total derivatives was 700 trillions.

Try TWO pizzas.

I think once it becomes easier to exchange bitcoins back into local currency at a low fee then that is when the price will take off.

I wonder what price Bitcoin will be when it has the market penetration that any of those listed already have...

Technomage
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Just off the top of my head... Linux, Android, Firefox, redhat, MySQL, Apache, Open Office, probably dozens or even hundreds more...

Actual question: How many other open source projects "have" $35 million?  How long did it take them to get that big?

I think it's an impressive achievement that Bitcoin has gone this far. I definitely do. But I wouldn't call it amazing, there are only 8.35 million bitcoins in circulation (of which some are lost forever) so a price of $4.25 is not as impressive as it seems at first. That is a market cap of 35 million dollars and in the grand scheme of things that amount is pocket money.

Bitcoin is still a small niche but even as a niche it seems to be growing and becoming more usable. Slowly, but surely. Something is amazing and that is what potential it has. Bitcoin can grow to be a very significant tool for international money transfers, it is perfect for gambling and any type of virtual gaming markets. Competitive gaming with money prizes is fairly common these days as well and that is Bitcoin's territory.

The list goes on, how about the porn industry? Restaurant delivery businesses? Paying at a POS with your mobile phone at any place? We already have great apps such as BitcoinSpinner and these have been developed with basically NO MONEY. What Bitcoin has already accomplished with very little monetary investment is absolutely profound. If and when investors start to invest more into Bitcoin companies, everything could change.

On top of this Bitcoin is actually a good store of value, eventually. This is not true yet because the market is too shallow but maybe in 5 years Bitcoin could be more stable. There is still a long way to go for primarily one reason, people simply don't put faith in a currency that they don't understand. Many people think that Bitcoin is either a scam or otherwise "crazy" and that it makes no sense. It takes a lot of time for this to change.

Imagine if the "gold bugs" actually understood Bitcoin, we would see a lot more people putting long term savings into Bitcoin. I know there are some gold bugs that do and I like gold myself but the truth is that Bitcoin is too weird for most gold bugs who are very conservative in some ways.

Okay, rant finished. Bottom line is that a market cap of 35 million is a sane one if you look at what Bitcoin is today but very little of the potential is priced in at the moment. Once Bitcoin starts to make more progress in fulfilling its potential, the market cap will be over a billion dollars. It will take a while to get there though, we have a long and bumpy road ahead of us.

Freemoney is right.
Cryptocurencies are the future of gambling without a doubt.

You can use Bitcoins to play poker from anywhere in the world with internet access.

The price is way too low. The total value held in coins is less than one small street of nice houses.

yeah bitcoin value is pretty chaotic but so far it looks like it has a solid bottom®

I agree, meaningless other than as a psychological barrier when we get back up there in the distant future.

Look at the weekly chart:

for 1 hour. meaningless.

Its not that amazing when you consider it used to be worth $32

But there are 21 million bitcoins and trillion (or more) dollars.

People here need to step back and realize that a p2p crypto currency called bitcoin used for NOT MUCH other than Silk Road purchases (please don't tell me about the VPS I can buy or socks etc) is apparently worth $4.25 American debt-slave dollars. That is amazing. People here are comparing the current price to the very temporary price of $30 usd.
1 bitcoin is worth 4 times 1 dollar issued by the most powerful country in the world, whose GDP is astronomically large vs almost all other countries.