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Re:Bitcoin exchange rate reached $100 USD per BTC by kiba on Monday April 01, 2013 @11:07AM (#5473477)
But that is only one side of the coin. If people are hoarding BTC, then they aren't spending them on goods / services.

Sure they are. BitPay reports 2 million dollars in sale this month. The rate of transaction is accelerating too.

What you meant is "they will horde more and spend less on goods / services", but sales and transactions are clearly accelerating. How do you account for this?

Re:Bitcoin exchange rate reached $100 USD per BTC by saalweachter on Monday April 01, 2013 @11:31AM (#5473655)
Is $2 million really significant? BTC famously passed $1 billion in the money supply recently. That means that about 0.2% of the money supply is turning over each month, and 99.8% being hoarded from month to month.

The US GDP is about $15 trillion, so about $1.25 trillion in transactions happen in a month. If you take M2 of about $10 trillion as the US money supply, about 12.5% of the US money supply turns over each month and 87.5% is being hoarded. If you take M1 of about $2 trillion as the money supply, about 62.5% of the US money supply is used in a transaction each month, with only 37.5% being hoarded.

Compared to 62.5% or even 12.5%, 0.2% seems pretty unhealthy.

Re:Bitcoin exchange rate reached $100 USD per BTC by mapt on Monday April 01, 2013 @12:27PM (#5474056)
$2M and growing is significant, although it's only one of many companies. Every other day another business sets up with Bitcoin as a medium of exchange that is a low-fee, no-chargeback transactional currency. The fundamental value of such a currency, with a quasi-fixed money supply, scales as some multiple of real circulation. The momentary value is proportional to that fundamental value multiplied by short-term expectations of the BTC as an asset, which is driven by growth in usage and hype.

It's entirely possible that 99% of the value of a bitcoin is a self-reinforcing set of asset-bubble expectations, but this is something that really didn't exist before, that we don't have great paradigms to explain, that is undergoing massive daily shifts in its usage. It is explicitly not a stable national floating fiat currency with people who circulate the money their banking system provides & pay their taxes in those notes & denominate their salaries and grocery bills in sticky quantities of those notes, and so it's not directly comparable.

Re:Bitcoin exchange rate reached $100 USD per BTC by kiba on Monday April 01, 2013 @11:41AM (#5473727)
It's one company's business. I didn't cite any other businesses such as silk road, transactions on bitmit, and businesses that's outside bitpay's sphere of influence.
Re:Bitcoin exchange rate reached $100 USD per BTC by dragontamer on Monday April 01, 2013 @11:27AM (#5473621)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5473508

I don't have to. The fact is, no one prices their goods in BTC. Its absolutely ludicrous to price goods in BTC in the current market.

I think BTC has utility as a currency for exchange however. But on that side, you don't want to be in the position of hoarding BTC. You hoard dollars, and then use BTC to transfer dollars between people. Services like Bitpay allow you to keep most of your money in hard cash.

Re:Bitcoin exchange rate reached $100 USD per BTC by philwelch on Monday April 01, 2013 @11:11AM (#5473498)
The size of the Bitcoin economy in general is growing, so both hoarding and spending will increase. By the time spending actually starts going down it's too late.