Category Archives: Bitcoin

The war on Bitcoin
Bitcoin is on its last leg...

By: AlmostCirculated

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The war on Bitcoin - Video

The price of bitcoin rose as much as 12 percent today after falling by 21 percent in the previous five days to the lowest level in 11 months.

The virtual currency was up 10 percent at $340 as of 4:40 p.m. in London, according to Bitstamp data compiled by Bloomberg. The currency fell 14 percent during the weekend.

Bitcoin users must grapple with volatility in the unregulated currency even as it wins wider acceptance from mainstream businesses such as online travel-booking service Expedia Inc. and satellite-television company Dish Network Corp. Recent price declines were reinforced by the unique way in which new bitcoins are added, said Gil Luria, an analyst with Wedbush Securities in Los Angeles.

Miners, who authenticate transactions using the currency and record them in bitcoins public ledger, receive new bitcoins for their services. Because their work requires fixed investments in expensive hardware, the lower the price of the coins they generate, the more they have to sell to cover their costs.

All this describes a negative, self-reinforcing cycle, Luria said in an e-mail. And bitcoin does not have liquidation value to set a bottom - not cash on the balance sheet, no hard assets.

Unlike traditional currencies, virtual currencies such as bitcoin often have a fixed supply and cant respond to changes in demand, making them prone to greater volatility, the Bank of England said in a report last month. By July 9, there were 41 million bitcoin wallets registered, the Bank of England said.

Nicholas Colas, chief market strategist at New York-based ConvergEx, said the murky and sometimes illicit uses to which bitcoin is put on the so-called dark Web may also play a role in sudden price declines.

My best guess -- and it is only a guess -- is that a dark Web drug site or other very illegal site got taken down, and demand took a dip, Colas said in an e-mail.

To contact the reporters on this story: Amy Thomson in London at athomson6@bloomberg.net; Carter Dougherty in Washington at cdougherty6@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Kenneth Wong at kwong11@bloomberg.net Kenneth Wong, Cecile Daurat

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Bitcoin Price Rises After 21% Five-Day Decline Amid Volatility

"The view is that some early adopters are making moves at the moment and you can see that in all of the publicly available exchange trade data," he added.

Bitcoin was the center of a media frenzy last year after it rose 8,000 percent from January to early December. Prices halved soon after amid regulatory concerns.

The cryptocurrency has since fallen out of the spotlight, save for a brief flash crash in August, when prices fell 12 percent during one day, due to concerns about state-specific regulation in in New York. Prices are down 73 percent their all-time high of $1,147 hit on December 4, 2013.

Read MoreBitcoin company Coinbase to launch eurozone consumer service

Interest to remain

Price declines over the weekend are unlikely to deter investors, said David Moskowitz, director at Singapore-based bitcoin trading firm Coin Republic.

"I think the price is really irrelevant to the technology. Obviously it hurts investors when the price goes down but most people who are buyers are in it as long term investors and can withstand the short term gyrations," he said.

"Adoption has continued to increase there has been a tremendous amount of good news over the past year especially with more well-known merchants taking it on," he said.

Read MorePanic or real risk: Could bitcoin cause a crash?

Sharp price swings could be positive for bitcoin ANX's Madden said: "It creates headlines and as a result people start to read about it and [attracting] a lot of interest."

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Bitcoin: Are investors losing faith?

Over the past three months, the price of the cryptocurrency bitcoin has fallennearly 50 percent going from $630 per bitcoin to $320 per bitcoin, according to CoinDesk's Bitcoin Price Index, which averages the prices on major exchanges.

That's obviously an extreme shift but bitcoin trading prices are notoriously volatile, sometimes making similar percentage drops in a matter of hours or days.

The difference here is that it appears to be a slow, measured pattern of decline. There have been bits of major regulatory news in the past few months, including New York's proposed rules for virtual currencies and Russia's proposal to punish their use. But that doesn't seem to haveproduced the same type ofseismic shifts as when China ordered local payment processors to stop transactions involving digital currencies such as bitcoin.

Instead, Jerry Brito, the executive director of industry-backed think tank Coin Center, believes the downward trend may actually be related to the increased popularity of bitcoin among merchants in recent months. In September, Overstock.com became the first major online retailer to accept thecryptocurrency globally.

"It's hard to tell what exactly causes these price movements, but what I think makes most sense is that as Bitcoin merchant adoption grows, there is increasing sell pressure in the market," Brito says. "Because there are not yet very good hedging instruments for bitcoin, merchants that accept bitcoin for payment will immediately sell so as to not be exposed to any volatility." Basically, merchants don't want to hold on to the bitcoins they accept as payment.

Thus, he says, there's a constant sell pressure, which he believes may have snowballed into the current downward trend. However, Brito is an optimist about the future of the market, saying that "needed hedging instruments are coming along very shortly" and that long-term investors may actually buy in the current low.

The $320 exchange rate the cryptocurrency is currently floating around is a substantial drop from the highs of last year when bitcoins reached more than $1,100 on some markets near the end of the year after dramatic surges.

Looking even further back shows just how turbulent 2013 and 2014 were for the overall currency and payment system experiencing major booms and busts at much more significant dollar levels than in its earlier year.

Bitcoin received intense media coverage as it experienced some growing pains, including regulatory turmoil, a bankruptcy scandal involving one of the most popular exchanges, and various attempts to unmask the cryptocurrency's mysterious creator.

But given all the hype the currency has received, it can be easy to forget that the system was launched only in 2009 and that the price stayed well below the current levels until the latter half of 2013.

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Bitcoin prices have dropped nearly 50% in three months

Is the world getting tired of bitcoin? The popular cryptocurrencys price rose slowly on Monday, after falling to an 11-month low over the weekend.

Experts say the price drop is a sign that investors looking to make a quick buck are losing interest, but that might not be a bad thing for the cryptocurrency. Bitcoins price plunge the currency lost more than 18 percent of its value on Sunday ended after buyers scooped up $7.8 million worth of bitcoins that were selling for $300 each on Bitstamp's exchange Monday morning, according to CoinDesk, a bitcoin resource and news site.

All the guys who are in it for the money in the short term are getting bored. Theyre losing their patience with bitcoin, which is a good thing for people who want to see it catch on as a currency, Lars Holdgaard, a software developer and former director of the Danish Bitcoin Foundation, said.

The buzz surrounding bitcoin piqued the interest of investors and the mainstream media last year, driving the digital currencys price over $1,100 in November, and again in December. Ebays CEO John Donahoe called it the future of online payments before announcing that the companys mobile transaction service, PayPal Here, would allow users to spend bitcoin at participating merchants in September.

PayPals involvement gave bitcoin a brief boost, but it has continued a fall in value since late last year. The global market is still trying to determine what the value of a bitcoin should be, and as some investors sell off large swathsof them, bitcoin miners use powerful computer rigs to release more online.

It's worth remembering that the currency is still inflating, and will do so for many years to come. So new coins constantly come onto the market that must be soaked up by new demand, according to Mike Hearn, a software developer and former Google engineer who says he now devotes most of his time to bitcoin. Volatility, he added, "has been 'normal' for bitcoin so far -- giant spikes in price caused by press cycles, followed by quieter periods in which the price slowly falls until it steadies out."

Despite its price volatility,bitcoin hasbecome popular for Asianslooking for ways to avoid taxes and fees like the 10 percent charged by Western Union for money transfers. Bitcoin also faces a major obstacle in its regulation:Russia plans to ban bitcoins use for payments much like China has, preventing financial institutions from dealing with it in the mainland. Strict regulations could halt bitcoin's development, Holdgaard said, but if history has taught us anything, it is that "technology usually prevails."

And while some short-term investors may be losing interest, Tokyo-based angel investor Roger Ver said that bitcoin's lowest price on Sunday was more than double its value a year ago.While government bans and price volatility are some of bitcoins biggest obstacles, it was "still the cheapest and fastest way to send and receive money, no matter the price," he said on Twitter early Monday morning.

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Bitcoin Gold Rush Is Over As Investors Get Bored Of Cryptocurrency

A bitcoin ATM machine is shown at a restaurant in San Diego, California. The price of bitcoin plummeted by 20 per cent over the weekend hitting a one-year low. Photograph: Mike Blake/Reuters

The price of bitcoin fell nearly 20 per cent this weekend to its lowest level of the year, prompting worries of a crash.

As the price is going down, some of us are under immense psychological stress, one user posted on Reddit on Sunday. Please share how you cope with it.

On Sunday afternoon, bitcoin was trading at about $300, up from a low of $286, according to CoinDesk, a virtual currency website. Some contend that bitcoins price is irrelevant and that it does not reflect the virtual currencys true value.

Bitcoin is still most popular among speculators and technology enthusiasts and has yet to find a general use that will push it into the mainstream and help stabilize its price, they say.

Bitcoins recent price decline can appear jarring, but it is nothing new. Indeed, some say the wild price swings have hindered its widespread adoption. Since it was introduced in 2009 by an anonymous programmer, or group of programmers, bitcoin has fluctuated unpredictably in price. After reaching its peak of about $1,150 late last year, the price has been in a prolonged slide. In August, a flash crash briefly set the currency world on edge, as the price dipped on one exchange to just over $300 from nearly $500.

Bitcoin ended that day down about 12 per cent. For anyone complaining about the current price of bitcoin, remember it has more than doubled over the last 12 months, Roger Ver, a bitcoin enthusiast and investor, said in a Twitter message Sunday.

But even those most confident in bitcoin are having trouble explaining the recent decline. One reason for the drop could be uncertainty over potential regulations.

In July, New York became the first state to propose regulations for bitcoin companies. The comment period for the regulations, which were introduced by the Department of Financial Services, is set to end Oct. 21.

Bitcoin has attracted the attention of a number of other regulatory agencies in the United States, including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Internal Revenue Service. The increase in the number of merchants now accepting bitcoin could also be affecting the price. These merchants, including Overstock and Dell, use third-party payment processors like Coinbase to immediately convert Bitcoin to dollars. This means there are more bitcoins in circulation, which could be helping to drive down the price. Some say that the market has been distracted with other events, including the Alibaba Groups initial public offering and the recent surge in the US dollar.

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Bitcoin price volatility sparks fear of crash

76 Million JP Morgan Chase Accounts Hacked -- FBI Lied about Silk Road? -- Bill Gates loves Bitcoin
Donate: https://blockchain.info/address/1LAYuQq6f11HccBgbe6bx8DiwKwzuYkPR3 Subscribe: http://patreon.com/madbitcoins Sponsor: http://MadBitcoins.com October ...

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76 Million JP Morgan Chase Accounts Hacked -- FBI Lied about Silk Road? -- Bill Gates loves Bitcoin - Video

Bitcoin advocates represent at Canadian Senate hearings on Digital Currency (RAW)
Bitcoin Foundation Canada, Bitcoin Alliance of Canada and Bitcoin Embassy represent at Senate hearings on Digital Currency Michael Perklin (Bitcoin Alliance of Canada), Francis Pouliot (Bitcoin...

By: Bitcoin Embassy

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Bitcoin advocates represent at Canadian Senate hearings on Digital Currency (RAW) - Video

Julian Assange: Bitcoin is Much More Than Just a Currency
He who controls the past controls the future, warned George Orwell. This dictum is particularly true in the digital world, where history can be deleted very easily, and without anyone noticing....

By: The Nantucket Project

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Julian Assange: Bitcoin is Much More Than Just a Currency - Video

The Bitcoin Selloff Continues
Bitcoin, the best-known cryptocurrency, recently slipped underthe $400 mark, a former price floor that some viewed as a bulwark against further price pressure. Currently trading for $338.83...

By: WochitGeneralNews

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The Bitcoin Selloff Continues - Video