Thursday, November 28, 2013

Octonary oblivion...


Happy Thanksgiving to my US family and friends and of course all of our transatlantic cousins as well. Tommorrow is Black Friday and no doubt billions will be spent in the shops. One man who won't be celebrating Thanksgiving - probably because he's Welsh and in Wales and is more worried about looking like a turkey rather than eating one tonight - is James Howells from Newport who is desperately digging through rubbish to find his old computer hard drive which he threw away earlier this year. The reason? It contains 7,500 bitcoins now (Thursday 6:50pm GMT) worth over 8 million US dollars. Not quite in the Top 100 but he'd better get a move on: yesterday Zerohedge posted some scary charts that could point to a not unfamiliar fall. And, in agreement with ZH, as one comment HERE says, most Bitcoin owners are just speculating ON the currency and not actually using it as a currency. That spells "bubble".

Update: bursting...

3 comments:

Paul said...

Watching the ups and downs of the Bitcoin is like watching an economic theory being played out in real time. However people want to dress it up it's gambling in the sense that you can only afford to take the risk if you can afford to lose your investment.

Good luck to those investors in the short term though, an article in the Independent last week said that when it was launched it was so widely derided (not enough info) that people took a punt on it just out of curiosity and like James Howells many forgot about it until the recent news coverage.

Span Ows said...

Widely deride probably due to security because it is all untraceable (i.e. also any theft cannot be traced) and the fact that it solely depends on encryption...and, as that same comment from Daniel on the BBC thread says:

- NSA has backdoors written into some encryption algorithms
- quantum computers will render current encryption techniques useless

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