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Very interesting article on Gawker the other day about shopping for hard drugs online, using a digital currency called Bitcoins. These bitcoins can be exchanged for other real-world currencies at a number of different exchanges, albeit almost all of them with very little liquidity. Over April and the first half of May, the US$-to-Bitcoin exchange rate increased tenfold; since the story to which I linked came out, the exchange rate has gone up by well over 10% in a day. The first live number I can remember seeing when I started to look into this yesterday was about US$8.9 per BTC, and the current live number is about US$10.4 per BTC.
Blog posts are not financial advice, of course. This seems to have a lot in common with well-known, long-established scams, but certainly has enough new twists on it to make it interesting. Besides, scams rely on having interesting premises in the first place, and this one has a lovely one. If anyone out there has mad money that they want to throw away - because the risk of ruin on any investment you make must be immense - then this looks like it would be likely to give you a more interesting run for your money than a lottery ticket, or a Ponzi scheme. Despite any vaguely encouraging tone in this post, I would regard this as about as speculative an investment as a penny stock tipped by someone you don't know.
The brilliance of the Bitcoin thing is the sheer number of buzzwords that it manages to trigger in its discussion. ( Read more... )
My intention is to regard BitCoins as an interesting curiosity, rather than a sensible investment opportunity for me. If it turns out that I am being the Internet equivalent of the Decca record label turning down the Beatles, or - to bring the analogy up to date - one of the twelve publishing houses that supposedly turned the first Harry Potter down, well, it's still fun to blog about, and I spotted it first when the exchange rate was just under US$9 per BitCoin. (See BitCoin watch or BitCoin charts to follow the exchanges.) Perhaps there's nothing new under the sun after all, and you can't cheat an honest human.
Blog posts are not financial advice, of course. This seems to have a lot in common with well-known, long-established scams, but certainly has enough new twists on it to make it interesting. Besides, scams rely on having interesting premises in the first place, and this one has a lovely one. If anyone out there has mad money that they want to throw away - because the risk of ruin on any investment you make must be immense - then this looks like it would be likely to give you a more interesting run for your money than a lottery ticket, or a Ponzi scheme. Despite any vaguely encouraging tone in this post, I would regard this as about as speculative an investment as a penny stock tipped by someone you don't know.
The brilliance of the Bitcoin thing is the sheer number of buzzwords that it manages to trigger in its discussion. ( Read more... )
My intention is to regard BitCoins as an interesting curiosity, rather than a sensible investment opportunity for me. If it turns out that I am being the Internet equivalent of the Decca record label turning down the Beatles, or - to bring the analogy up to date - one of the twelve publishing houses that supposedly turned the first Harry Potter down, well, it's still fun to blog about, and I spotted it first when the exchange rate was just under US$9 per BitCoin. (See BitCoin watch or BitCoin charts to follow the exchanges.) Perhaps there's nothing new under the sun after all, and you can't cheat an honest human.
