Right now, they are trading for about $0.8 per bitcoin: http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/
I got myself 0.05 BTC at the bit faucet. http://freebitcoins.appspot.com/
The idea seems pretty ingenious. It is interesting that people could decide that governments shouldn’t play a role in currency production. Currency is faith, and if government control creates a lack of faith, these types of currencies might be the future.
Personally, I don't think what he describes in impossible, but I don't think a fork would invalidate or dilute the original network. It would be a clean fork, and the two networks would not cooperate. The incentive to maintain the first network would be as large as its value. It's interesting food for thought, however. A lot of hype about Bitcoins lately. My BTC have been outperforming my other investments. :)
I am tempted to try it on Hubski in the future, perhaps instead of flattr. We have address, http://hubski.com/bitcoin but I am going to sit on it for some time.
I understand that Bitcoins can be split to create more amount of the cash, but who will make that dicision? or when the process will be initiated?
If bitcoins became a easily convertible and widely accepted currency, and say the American dollar were to shit the bed, then people would move out of dollars and buy up bitcoins. If your dollars were buying you less and less (deflation) and bitcoins were holding thier value because they were an acceptable world wide currency, lots of people would move into bitcoins. This would drive the value of bitcoins up, the limited supply of bitcoins become more valuable as people demanded more. This is one of the main forces driving up the price of silver and gold over the past few years. Fears of the safety of fiat currency makes people desire to hold a more stable currency. Of course the rich would get more of the bitcoins than the rest of us. They have more money to throw around and can use that money to hire people who understand the economy giving them an information advantage. Money managers tell the rich to buy up bitcoins, they jump in first, the rest of us get on board a little bit later, the rich see their investment in bitcoins grow at a much greater rate than the rest of us poorer late adopters. The money managers then tell the rich that bit coins are overvalued, they sell off to the rest of us, make a heap of money, the value of bitcoins plummets and we wonder why we bought this funny internet money. Gold and silver suck to hold as they are both heavy, and not so easy to convert into goods, but they hold value well. precious metals have plenty of real world uses that help preserve their value, and a long history of use, makes em a pretty safe bet. They make a terrible basis for a widely circulated currency. The growth of the money supply becomes dependent on how many shiny things you dig out of the ground. It makes the quantity of money dependent on the discovery of mineral deposits of changes in technology. Economies in this position can rapidly inflate/deflate as money enter the system of gets pulled out due to the rich hording in time of panic.
I just recently was credited with ~6.5 BTC via http://bitcoin4cash.com So I can say that they seem legit. I have 0.000000313 of the total BTC. Now I just have to wait for it to become a global currency.
Welp... that's now worth over $130k. Well done, sir. And thank you for getting me in to crypto so many years back. Onward!
There is an effort mostly led by the Chinese to establish a new global currency that is really less than a wet dream at the moment. They hope to use Special Drawing Rights with the International Monetary Fund. It will be interesting to see what the long run future of nongovernmental currency is. The nice thing about governmental currencies is that there is an incentive for governments to maintain the value of their currency so that they can maintain their credit ratings, it has never been made clear to me what enforces the discipline of nongovernmental issues of currency. A funny thing about this digital currency is that the creators seem to think that it should guard against inflation because there is no central bank involved. It's true that central banks can create inflation, but not that inflation is only a phenomenon caused by central banks. Central banks tend to make inflation and deflation more predictable, predictability is usually considered a positive quality in a currency. This currency could change value rapidly if it became more popular, and would probably fluctuate a lot in sync with the financial cycles.
As it is a finite resource, wouldn't bitcoin's value behave in a way similar to a precious metal? I just did a little bit of looking into digital gold. According to Wikipedia, all issuers of DG keep actual bullion on hand that is equal to the amount of DG they 'print'. However, the big difference I see between BTC and DG, is that DG could be issued without the gold to back it if the providers decided to change their scheme. New BTCs (aside from the ~21M) can't be issued by their very nature. For that reason alone, I'm not sure which I trust more. -Which is pretty funny, considering how arbitrary BTCs creation was.
;) I bought $5 worth. We just had a lottery around here last week that reached $300M. My wife and I bought 5 tickets, just so we could dream about our minuscule chances for astronomic wealth for a couple of days. My guess is that $5 in BTC is a safer bet, and at least it won't be dispelled as quickly.
It has been an exciting year for bitcoin. Do you still have your $5 stake? It should be worth over a grand by now.
That $5 was lost when the exchange I was using was "hacked". I forgot the name of it, but I think the owner just stole it. At any rate, I bought more when they were ~$13. That's done well. But geez, I wish I could go back to when I first posted this. I could retire if I wanted to. :)