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Comment by pkfrank | Hacker News Reader

Isn't this amount of volatility, even if it's trending upwards, a terribly worrying sign, and one that points to a probable bubble burst?

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To add to that, it also illustrates the over-dependence of the bitcoin community on a single exchange site. What I was trying to show is that, despite those pretty major problems, Bitcoin is still massively popular. Hopefully it can come out on top in the end.

No one loves Mt. Gox, but it's the biggest exchange...which is why it stays as the biggest exchange, because everyone wants to use the biggest exchange.

Highly volatile doesn't mean it's a bubble

If you look at the value of a bitcoin graphed over time, it looks an awful lot like a bubble. I sure wouldn't keep any assets in bitcoins. I've seen a lot of bubbles in my 44.5 years on this planet and this looks just like all the others (right down to the claims that "this time it's different"). The biggest difference here is that there is no underlying asset behind the bubble. Heck, even the lowliest failed dotcom had, at the least, some aeron chairs to liquidate when the share price hit zero.

Heck, even the lowliest failed dotcom had, at the least, some aeron chairs to liquidate when the share price hit zero.

This got me thinking about what is bitcoins value from a book/intrinsic standpoint. Something like:

(electricity to generate coin) + (perceived value of allowing anonymous, non-government transactions) - (liquidity hassle)

I think you have the electricity on the wrong side of the minus sign.

So creating a BTC yields positive electricity?

No, but if I told you shining a flashlight on quarters made them more valuable you probably wouldn't agree.

And it is worse than that, each transaction consumes a bit of electricity (in a hand wavy sense anyway; the chain must go on for the coins to have any worth).

Bitcoin is highly volatile and it's a bubble, but these seem to be unrelated problems. The volatility hurts people who are trying to sell alpaca socks and the bubble may hurt speculators.

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