They were valued at the close of Monday’s trading at $304.54 as the frenzy abated, but that still valued the company at a healthy $60.6 billion.
Or maybe not.
Sure, some banks have begun to facilitate bitcoin investments: JP Morgan Chase is preparing to roll out a bitcoin mutual fund, for instance.
Customers have to make their payments within 30 minutes of making a deal or the bitcoin price expires and they have to start over.
Bitcoin’s fans say it’s an alternative to traditional currencies, which can be manipulated by national central banks to manage their economies.
Every so often someone, often on reddit, dredges up one of the columns I’ve written about bitcoin over the years, invariably counseling readers to be wary of investing in the thing.
Sure.
This year alone there have been three downdrafts of 20% or more over the course of a week or two, and an additional fall of 16% over 12 days in March.
It’s true that the stock market has been no stranger to bear markets, defined as drops of 20% or more.
Blogger Kevin Drum lists five features that a currency should have: It should be hard to counterfeit, stable in value, easy to carry, widely accepted and 100% liquid.
As I’ve written in the past, the key test bitcoin passes is what we might call the Kenya storefront test.
Expatriates wishing to obtain the better rate would wander into a grocery or ice cream shop owned by an Indian merchant and write him a check in dollars on a U.S.
The system served everybody, except obviously the government.
This is supposed to be a great thing.
Who benefits from bitcoin security, which takes the form of the impossibility of reversing a bitcoin transaction once it’s completed? Not the average consumer.
I may never have had an account suspended over terms of service, but on plenty of occasions I’ve had to challenge a credit card bill or bank payment because I didn’t receive the goods or services paid for.
There are two keys to securing financial transactions: Oversight and an audit trail.
It’s worth noting that “security” in the bitcoin context doesn’t mean “security from loss.” The most spectacular loss may be the one connected with the defunct bitcoin exchange known as Mt.
After that I dipped it in plastisol so it cannot be read and stored it in my safe with a description written on the outside.
Drum likens it to collectibles, like baseball cards, albeit “a collectible that’s gotten a lot of hype.” It has no intrinsic value.
According to its creation document, the maximum number of bitcoins that can be “minted,” through a process of algorithm-solving by powerful computers, is 21 million.
But they’re such a pain to manage that the smartest way to get a piece of the action is the way smart gold bugs invest in that metal — they don’t buy bullion, but stocks in firms in the gold industry.
His seventh book, “Iron Empires: Robber Barons, Railroads, and the Making of Modern America,” has just been published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.