a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment
wasoxygen  ·  3507 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What will the price of Bitcoin be one year from today?

This is a tough one. I'm going to say $235.

You mention a lot of factors that could have zero or more influence on the price, up or down. I think the biggest upward pressure would come from increased adoption, but that appears glaringly absent to date. Participants in the Greek drama, citizens of Ukraine, and the teeming masses within the Great Firewall look like opportunities for growth that hasn't happened.

An author interviewed on EconTalk only noticed one early adopter.

    Quite frankly, I think for buying things online, for a consumer, particularly an American consumer, Bitcoin doesn't offer any great advantage. There's no real reason for an American consumer to use bitcoin instead of their credit card. It's often said that Bitcoin took off in the places that needed it least. The United States--financial system works pretty well. The currency is pretty stable relative to other countries. And so there isn't so much of a need for it here. I think in the course of my book, what I found was that the places where people did see some real value in this were places where there were less stable currencies, where there was less access to credit cards in the financial system. So the most interesting place for that is Argentina, which was really essentially the only place where I saw ordinary people using bitcoin for sort of everyday transactions--because it was better, cheaper, faster than the alternatives. And these people didn't understand the underlying technology, they didn't care about the politics. They just wanted something that was cheaper and faster.