“Matt Tuzzolo, who used to split restaurant bills by sending money via PayPal, now wields his iPhone to pay his fellow diners — in Bitcoins,” Olga Kharif reports for Bloomberg News.
“‘It’s more convenient than PayPal,’ said Tuzzolo, a software developer in Portland, Oregon, who uses the Gliph mobile application to transfer digital money on the go. ‘It’s as easy as sending a text,'” Kharif reports. “Gliph Inc., which has more than 25,000 users, has raised more than $350,000 from venture capitalists including Tim Draper, who has backed such companies as Skype and Tesla Motors Inc. It’s one of hundreds of Bitcoin-related programs available from Google Inc. and Apple Inc. app stores.”
“The mini-boom in Bitcoin software for smartphones is making it easier for consumers to use the virtual currency in place of cash for quick transactions, such as paying for food or splitting a bill. The widening appeal of the digital money is also fueling a rally that has lifted Bitcoins to record levels, surpassing $1,000 apiece last week,” Kharif reports. “Since Bitcoins exist as software, apps on wireless devices are an efficient way to transfer money. While physical coins representing Bitcoins are in circulation, they either store software or are used as a proxy for a digital transaction… Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said yesterday that Bitcoin prices were unsustainably high. ‘It’s a bubble,’ Greenspan said in a Bloomberg Television interview. ‘You have to really stretch your imagination to infer what the intrinsic value of Bitcoin is.'”
Read more in the full article here.
Neat
Apple you are going to be sued over bit coin losses, In the app store. Guaranteed.
Which president’s portrait is on the bit coin?
Tommy your parochialism is showing.
or did you mean world president?
President Bitcoin is President Bitcoin again.
Well, at least they don’t have something obscene on them like In God We Trust.
I’d take bitcoins intrinsic value over the full faith of the federal govt backing the dollar.
Hmmmm… As iffy as BitCoins seem to be, you absolutely have a point there!
I don’t know if it applies to you two (Malvado and SJB), but it seems widespread with anti-fed people that they have some kind of faith in their state government.
I think the truth is that state politicians care only about their little corner of power, their little (or not so little) fiefdom. Their rhetoric is not in service of YOU, it’s in service of themselves and their buddies. They have no more nobility and care no more than the federal politicians that anti-feds types so mistrust.
Tulipmania
Louisiana
South Sea Bubble
Housing
Dot com Stocks
http://www.theonion.com/articles/recessionplagued-nation-demands-new-bubble-to-inve,2486/
Anyone stupid enough to embrace bitcoin can see me for a bridge can sell them real cheap.
PS: China Bans Bitcoin Trading By Banks
Breeze, based on the surging popularity of Bitcoin, stupidity is running rampant in the world. However, anyone who embraces the US dollar as a store of value is even more insane.
Wasn’t comparing to the US dollar, it’s a stand alone opinion.
People don’t embrace the US Dollar as a “store of value”. They embrace it as a currency. You know, something you buy food and shelter with. The Dollar is great for that, because it doesn’t swing wildly in value over the course of a year, like Bitcoin does.
The problem with the Bitcoin “boom” is that enthusiasts confuse a good investment with a good currency. Bitcoin is currently a great investment, as long as you plan to get out and convert it to real money before the bubble inevitably breaks. As a currency, though, it’s a joke. You’d have to be a complete moron to hold your life savings in Bitcoin. Next week, you could find yourself a multimillionaire, the week after that, penniless. Bitcoin is simply not stable enough to make a good currency.
——RM
either all the countries will eventually accept it or band together to crush it. future of bit coin will be interesting. what happens to bit coin if other crypto- currencies start popping up?
There are already many other crypto currencies – do a search “alt coins” and you can read about them. None of the altcoins have really gained any traction like bitcoin has though.
Sounds like ponzi to me. Anyone can nowadays come up with their own currency. I believe we can see many of these “internet currencies” in the future.
Read up on how the Bitcoin and blockchain system works before coming to a conclusion. Bitcoin and the blockchain are brilliant.
The details of how it all works is everything. I remember people who didn’t “get” graphical interfaces. Some of them were smart people, but they didn’t take the time to understand the new thing. Same thing recently with iPad.
Bitcoin and the blockchain are so cleverly constructed, and have so many benefits over fiat currency – many of them not immediately obvious – that they will succeed either in their current incarnation or another. Internet money is going to be a lot smarter, cheaper, and over time, easier to use than money has been until now.
I just discovered there are other crypto currencies. litecoin, peer coin, namecoin.
I would think if these take off, it would lower the value of bit coin?
Ah, I just responded to your other post – I hadn’t seen this one yet. Yes, LTC and PPC are the two largest altcoins. Generally though, most people dealing in the others (especially namecoin for example) simply end up exchanging them for BTC or try to profit playing the arbitrage game with the various currencies.
It’s a scheme. The bitcoin is over valued. There isn’t even enough $ to pay out everyone in the system. It’s over inflated, and the system has been (twice) hacked and ripped off – and that is it folks. Money gone.
There is no FDIC. You might as well buy gold, at least physical gold if you want to spend that kind of money.
what about just cashing out every time you acquire a coin?
Bitcoin isn’t just a digital coin, its a new system of commerce. Its a peer-to-peer funded and used startup. Like any startup with lots of risk but huge potential, its valuation far exceeds its obvious present-day value. You have to understand the specifics of what Bitcoin can do, and how it does it, to have any idea why it has grown in use so much.
Forget the price of a coin. Actual use of the Bitcoin system for transactions is small but has been growing exponentially for a few years with NO signs of slowing. When you understand why its real (not speculative) use is growing so fast, and understand how well designed the system is, then you will be ready to form an opinion of what a Bitcoin should be worth.
At $1000 for a Bitcoin the whole system is valued at $12 billion. That sounds like a lot until you compare it against the $55 trillion of fiat money and $6 trillion in gold. If Bitcoin becomes a real global currency, it is still undervalued by a lot.
Wiki “Quantity Theory of Money” to see how to calculate the worth of a money system, its actually pretty easy to do: MV = sum of all transactions in a fixed amount of time. There are a fixed total of Bitcoins, so each coins value will grow proportional to bitcoin use.