01 Dec 2013 / Reuters – Something of a milestone was reached very early in the morning of Friday, November 29, a time when most Americans were either sleeping off their Thanksgiving excesses or out seeking Black Friday bargains. At the end of Wednesday, the price of gold, on Comex, had closed at $1,240 per ounce; that market would not reopen until Friday morning. And then at about 1am Friday, EST, there was a trade on Mt Gox, the largest bitcoin exchange, which valued each coin at $1,242. If only briefly and theoretically, at that point in time a bitcoin was worth more than an ounce of gold.
Bitcoin, by its nature, is a highly volatile asset, which is prone to astonishing run-ups in price. Check out these three one-year charts of the bitcoin price:
The first chart is the year to June 2010; the second is the year to April 2013; and the third is the current chart. Without looking at the y-axis, they’re basically identical.
To put it another way, there is nothing surprising about what bitcoin is doing right now; it has done it many times in the past, and it will probably do it in the future as well. After all, there’s no way to calculate the fundamental value of a bitcoin: indeed, it’s probably easier to justify a price of $1,000 per bitcoin than it was to justify a price of $10. At least now it’s increasingly looking like a Thing, complete with Congressional hearings and front-page-of-the-FT publicity stunts…… Read more
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2013/11/30/waiting-for-bitcoin-to-get-boring/
