bitcoin additional thoughts and a great comic

Extending from an earlier post on bitcoin thoughts … Finding an exchange is tricksy as they could dissapear overnight, so many cryptocurrencies are dropping value, yet companies and governments are weighing in on the issues surroudning CCs – like implementing taxation guidelines for virtual goods.

Aside – folks I played online games with laughed at  concept of paying real money for in-game gold in WoW many years ago, despite wow, eve and many other games demonstrating that gamers have an appetite to do so. BTC is certainly different enough to not be a fantasic comparison (not decentralised, owned by one company, artificial levers on supply and demand), however WoW gold has a much better stability than bitcoin. Thank about that for a sec!

Personally speaking I think the recent adjustment downward by 30%+ on most of the leading CCs is very reasonable, and a lot more is probably on the way. This is because there is very little difference in the features and benefits of almost all cryptocurrencies, and while the different offering have useful features to offer many “investors” who helped the bubbles proliferate probably do not appreciate the details enough to differentiate. Frankly though a few countries have said they will inhibit CC growth (like China), or seriously hunt for taxation revenue from profits (Aus and USA that I know for sure), so the free and open nature of all virtual currencies is evaporating. And there is nothing stopping another CC from starting up and taking the “popular name” market share from BitCoin. e.g. A CC backed or unofficially sanctioned by China’s government would be very powerful. Maybe China is watching and learning about CCs so they can capitalise. Perhaps Google, Amazon, Alibaba, or Yandex will back or create one too which would make for a powerful market offering too. Now that bitcoin has having a huge adjustment it might be time for another virtual currency to rise, and use the brand of a big corporate as staging to market penetration.

Looking the price adjustments another way: investors who hunt for get rich quick have now seen BTC hurt them. Other CCs are following downward. What is the intended use for virtual currency? I’d like to know why people are still buying CCs in bulk. The inventor of DogeCoin used them to donate money to charities, and Bitcoin can be used as currency for a few major companies and strange-ish products; note that these companies take regular money too – so buying a bitcoin just to buy a product isn’t always logical.

Products need customers who have problems to solve, and CCs don’t see to have enough customers (except for the speculators). Digital currencies are getting a lot of attention now due to their rise and fall, so if they stabalise it will be good to watch where the investing market goes next. No idea where the prices are going but this is so interesting to watch (my bet is downward, hard to about $450 for BTC, because at that price they might actually be useful to humans as well as investors).