So..............several millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin currency has gone missing............ .........hardly surprising for a 'virtual' item...... ......'Virtual' = 'Imagined' = 'Not real' = 'Doesn't exist' = 'Can't be seen' = 'Can't be found'..........
I don't like the sound of them - lots of talk of people making many thousands with the currency going up in value - I don't want any though as it sounds too good to be true - this may prove it
To an extent all currency is virtual, there is vastly less cash in existence than the sum of people's sterling wealth.
Absolutely........ .......in fact most of the UK population is only two months loss of wages away from living on the streets.......... ..........but at least I can actually hold a £50 note....... .................how many people have seen a Bitcoin let alone held one?
Look a right div getting a gold brick out of my wallet to pay for a packet of fags.......or trying to insert one into a car park ticket machine and expecting change.
A £50 note is a bit of paper. If other folk have enough confidence in it that they will accept your £50 note in exchange for useful stuff like food and energy, then it has value. If they lose confidence and won't accept it, then it doesn't.
A lump of gold is a bit of metal. If other folk have enough confidence in it that they will accept your bit of gold in exchange for useful stuff like food and energy, then it has value. If they lose confidence and won't accept it, then it doesn't.
Yes I agree Pete.................. But a £50 note will fit in my pocket easily without me appearing to be pleased to see someone.......... ..........plus my jeans will stay up.............
But if sterling were to collapse your £50 will be worthless, regardless of it being virtual or paper. Gold is a world wide tradable commodity, if our economy were to collapse you could simply sell it elsewhere. This is actually the appeal of the Bitcoin, as its de centralised it is theoretically immune from an individual currency collapse. It is however a total unknown at this stage.
If civilisation collapses, you are starving to death, and I have all the food, will I accept your gold in exchange for my food? Sorry, no. In principle gold as a medium of exchange and a repository of value depends on confidence, just like bank notes or bank balances do.
This is quite true of course, however, gold will survive an individual currency collapse, that particular currency will not. Which would you rather have, gold or Zimbabwean dollars? People in Zimbabwe were panning the rivers for gold to buy bread only a few years ago. The currency accepted was either gold, or US dollars as their own currency had collapsed.
The interesting thing about Bitcoin, and the Blockchain technology behind it, is that there is a finite, and fixed, number of Bitcoins in circulation which are traded electronically with an algorithm attached that builds a chain from every previous transaction, a kind of checksum to verify the validity of the Bitcoin. What this means is that it is mathematically impossible to counterfeit "new" Bitcoins and they are totally independent of any government. But as Pete would say "A bitcoin is a collection of 1s and 0s. If other folk have enough confidence in it that they will accept your bitcoin in exchange for useful stuff like food and energy, then it has value. If they lose confidence and won't accept it, then it doesn't."
