What is a Bitcoin worth?
I check the Kitco website to find out nearly every business day.
The other day when I had the idea for this blog, it was $6,397.60.
That’s a lot of money, but it is below the $8,000 value I wrote about last November.
It was on the way up then
It reached roughly $20,000 in the month of November before retracing some of its gains.
Could these wild value swings not be on the up and up?
A story on CNBC caught my eye last week.
It asserts that much of the boom last year was market manipulation.
See what you think.
I defer to the financial detectives to make their case.
Valuing a cryptocurrency is hard.
From a marketing point of view, calling a unit some form of coin is brilliant.
Everybody knows what a coin is, and to apply the word to cryptocurrency implies a reality far beyond digital online records.
We had a temporary data entry person in the office early this year.
When the subject of Bitcoin came up, it was clear that she was mesmerized by the idea of it.
I don’t know if she owned some, wanted to buy some, or just was fascinated by the very idea of Bitcoin.
I didn’t ask.
But my comments about the difficulty of valuing something that has no trangible quality to it did nothing to dampen her ardor.
I hope she keeps her interest alive.
It is something shared by many people.
I also hope she did not buy it.
She would probably be in a loss position.
If you want to find yourself struggling for words, just try to explain Bitcoin to someone who has just heard about it.
I guarantee that you will feel a bit flustered and flummoxed.
Trying to avoid implying a physical existence to Bitcoin is not easy.
Buzz blogger Dave Harper won the Numismatic Literary Guild Award for Best Blog for the third time in 2017 . He is editor of the weekly newspaper "Numismatic News."
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