http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-plunges-2013-4
108$ now
I guess it was a bubble. Maybe the people in Cyprus are not going to lose that much of their money after all.
Has stabilized at ~150 , for now at least.
A correction is natural, healthy and expected.
Some suspect DDoS’d hack on Mt.Gox but as far as I know it is not confirmed.
How are LiteCoins doing?
The price was really going up, recently at least.
A DDoS attack could cause a huge price swing? That’s terrible! At least with gold, the state would have to get involved to debased it like crazy.
It looks like a good deal to dump BitCoins and buy up LiteCoins instead. They are only like $3 now.
It sounds like all the miners are switching to LiteCoin too. Apparently, LiteCoins have faster confirmation times and a more difficult algorithm.
As I said before, BitCoins aren’t really scarce. People can create as much cryptocurrency as they want.
Storing your wealth in cryptocurrency might mean having proficiency at jumping onto the next bandwagon before the old one crashes.
Price now $174. Higher than it was a couple days ago and people are declaring doom and gloom = LOL.
Mmm, no. Bitcoin has already won the adoption war.
Miners are switching because of ASICs being far more efficient for bitcoin.
A distortion at best. Network effect and path dependence are likely to keep bitcoin well ahead of the others. Litecoin’s success I expect to vanish as bitcoin takes off further. It’s a crypto hot-potato.
Nah. Litecoin could just as easily crash, and I expect it will, as people band around the clear market leader. If litecoin survives long-term it will be an interesting turn since I don’t see how it can at this point when it offers no advantage over bitcoin.
Any real competitor would have to have significant technological advantage, litecoin just doesn’t.
If litecoin survives long-term it will be an interesting turn since I don’t see how it can at this point when it offers no advantage over bitcoin
It seems like LiteCoin is fairly stable at 0.02 BTC = 1 LTC:
https://btc-e.com/exchange/ltc_btc
TerraCoin and PPCoin look interesting, too.
Now this guy’s creation (Ripple) sounds like a substantial improvement over BitCoin:
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-04-11/introducing-ripple-a-bitcoin-copycat
“One reason the value of Bitcoins fell by $100 yesterday, according to reports, is that its largest marketplace, Mt.Gox, was under a denial-of-service attack and couldn’t satisfy orders fast enough. Ripple, he points out, doesn’t require such centralized servers; it is completely decentralized.”
It sounds much more decentralized than BitCoin (more robust against hacker attacks or government shut down) and won’t waste energy or harm the environment due to mining. I think this guy was one of the founders of Mt. Gox and possibly BitCoin itself.
Also BitCoin is described as an “expiermental currency”, not so with Ripple. It is being launched with the help of VC money.
Mt.Gox - "First of all we would like to reassure you but no we were not last night victim of a DDoS but instead victim of our own success!
Indeed the rather astonishing amount of new account opened in the last few days added to the existing one plus the number of trade made a huge impact on the overall system that started to lag. As expected in such situation people started to panic, started to sell Bitcoin in mass (Panic Sale) resulting in an increase of trade that ultimately froze the trade engine!.."
an increase of trade that ultimately froze the trade engine!
Exactly what you don’t want: a medium of exchange that freezes up and can’t be exchanged!
BitCoin is too centralized and vulnerable to DDOS (and government attack!). It can’t even hold up to normal use.
Huh? Author didn’t even look up what mining is. And yay, a single global ledger, I’d love to have the world’s money tied up in that.
Mining confirms transactions, so in a way he’s right. This happens on average once every 10 minutes. But to double-spend is still really hard, as the earliest broadcast transaction gets added to a mined block.
And yay, a single global ledger, I’d love to have the world’s money tied up in that
It sounds similar to the BitCoin block chain.
FYI:
https://ripple.com/wiki/FAQ
“Ripple is a distributed database secured by cryptography. The database is used to store the ledger”
i.e. the ledger is distributed.
Wasn’t it $150 a few days ago? So it tanked to $54 and now that it’s back to $127?
Someone should contact Six Flags about opening a bitcoin rollercoaster. Better hope you don’t get ripped off by being paid in litecoins…
It was $266 at the highest a day or so ago 
Are Bitcoin’s wide swings something desired for someone holding Bitcoins or wanting to use them as money or a store of value? I’m unsure as to whether the posts here about it going down and then up are congratulatory or derogatory.
Someone I was talking to tonight at a bar literally made the criticism that Bitcoin is unviable because it’s not traceable–you can buy child porn with it too easily without repercussion…