Bitcoin price swings examined

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…

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?

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."