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 $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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