You might end up paying 1.00 BTC, or 0.6 BTC, but it still works out to the be same in USD/AUD/<currency> (numbers made up for example)
No one wants to use a currency that swings 20% in hours of trading. Hell, that's prob 4-5x the margin on a lot of computer hardware.
> The net amount that BitPay merchants receive is equal to the gross amount (USD) of the order submitted, minus our fee.
> It does not matter how many bitcoins we collect, how long it takes to collect them, what we can sell them for, or how long it takes to sell them.
(not affiliated, just said the same thing last time this came up on HN)
Who's handling all the instant real money conversions, and why wouldn't they just transfer the real money between accounts directly rather than converting it?
Those are your two options. Grow until the Bitcoin economy is worth some 10 Billion at least, or it'll be evidently dead and close to 0.
Its much more unlikely Bitcoins will stay around $20 - $60 for the next 5 years. (Although still possible)
Using the only scale we have available (history) $40+ per BTC is VASTLY overpriced considering the previous historical fair market value.
How in the world can you use a currency that changes value by almost 10% every 60 seconds?
This makes for a super volatile market. Especially coupled with the new Mining ASIC rigs coming to market, small volume trading etc.
I would suspect that it will take a LONG time before we see if/how the 'currency' will actually stabilize.
One must remember, less than 5 years ago, BTC were selling for $0.001! Today it topped out at around $50.
Can you say "A market that a group of people wanting to rig value would LOVE!"
Nothing (as far as I can tell) stopping a group of large BTC owners to completely run the price on BTC to their advantage. Wouldn't even take that much money to drive prices, and impossible (almost) to detect and do something about.
This is from the Bitcoin doc [1]:
We define an electronic coin as a chain of digital signatures. Each owner transfers the coin to the next by digitally signing a hash of the previous transaction and the public key of the next owner and adding these to the end of the coin. A payee can verify the signatures to verify the chain of ownership.
Think of it as "cash" but for the online world. Some people pay cash for everything possible just to eliminate the paper trail. Not because they have anything to hide, but just to reduce their digital footprint. A noble goal, I think, and one that I'm glad to see is starting to become a realistic goal online.
edit: link for video http://www.weusecoins.com/
It looks like HN cares a lot about the topic, would anyone care to point me towards some informative sources?
I've done most of my research through the official wiki and articles regarding Mt. Gox and hardware development into ASIC
