Bitcoin is absolutely the Wild West of finance, and thank goodness. It represents a whole legion of adventurers and entrepreneurs, of risk takers, inventors, and problem solvers. It is the frontier. Huge amounts of wealth will be created and destroyed as this new landscape is mapped out.
Like the Internet, Bitcoin will change the way people interact and do business around the world.
The big exchanges that hold customer deposits are a big target for hackers, and unfortunately, most bitcoin exchanges store user funds.
Bitcoin is two things which share a name. One, it's a payment system, and two, it's a currency. You use the Bitcoin payment system to send bitcoins as currency from one account holder to another. The transfer is instantaneous, carries no fee, works anywhere in the world, and is private.
Whenever the price of cryptocurrency is rallying, people start spending a lot more.
I'm much more confident with crypto than with banks or fiat currency because I can actually control it, and the money supply is transparent, stated up front. It makes online shopping a lot easier and a lot safer.
Bitcoin is open-source, global, and requires no permission from anybody, so thousands of entrepreneurs are gravitating in and building their vision.
If you see a market that has slow and steady growth long enough, you'll start to front-run it, and that slow and steady growth will start turning into steeper growth, and that will accelerate the process.
Credits in your PayPal account are really just USD-backed - they are not a unique currency themselves. Other 'digital currencies,' such as Facebook Credits, can be created out of nothing and without limit, so they are not serious money.
In the longterm for Bitcoin, Gox needed to go away.
Most 'digital currencies' are not really digital currencies at all.
Bitcoin will hit thousands of dollars per coin, because it's worth at least that much, or it's worth zero.
ShapeShift, like SatoshiDICE before it, demonstrated how an old business could operate in a brand new way because of the properties of cryptocurrencies.
Digital currency is now a misnomer for Bitcoin. It can be used as currency, but it can be used for many things.
Bitcoin is very ideologically fulfilling, it's my form of political activism, but it's also a huge business opportunity.
I have no problem with the financial industry inviting the Trojan Horse of blockchain technology into their walled garden. Because I know how powerful the technology is.
The number of industries, communities, habits, traditions, and even interpersonal interactions that Bitcoin has the potential to revolutionize is massive.
Personally, I had over 550 BTC in Gox. I will never get any of that back.
Unfortunately, slow and steady in any financial market is actually impossible.
You cannot have an asset that goes up in price 1% every month or 1% every six months or every day without people starting to start thinking it'll do the same tomorrow, so that's why these bubbles form.
