Bitcoin price soars above $9 for the first time in almost a year
July 19, 2012
(Credit: inbonobo/Tumblr)
The price of Bitcoins surged this week, rising above $9 for the first time in almost a year, Ars Technica reports. The increase suggests growing public interest in the peer-to-peer cryptocurrency.
Vices like pornography and gambling continue to be a significant factor in the currency’s value.
But other new uses for the currency continue to pop up. Coinbase, a startup aiming to make Bitcoin more accessible to the masses, has been accepted by Y Combinator’s summer class. That comes with a $164,000 investment.
The Verge notes that a student in Germany has built a Bitcoin vending machine. Insert a €1 coin in the slot and it will dispense a slip of paper with a link that can be used to cash in an equivalent value of Bitcoins, currently around 0.13 BTC.
And New World Notes points out that that there has been a growing volume of transactions between Bitcoins and Linden Dollars, the official currency of Second Life. Given that exchanges that convert Bitcoins to dollars have faced legal challenges, the ability to convert Bitcoins into other virtual currencies that are more readily tradable for dollars could boost the liquidity of the cryptocurrency.
Comments (16)
by Gali
Remove this article.
And maybe make another to denounce this scam, its getting dangerous right now.
by Editor
If you could provide evidence for your position and post it here, wouldn’t that be more effective than removing an article?
by Gali
Would you accept GaliCoins as a paiement?
They work just as Bitcoins. You can create them with your computer (you’ll get one or two a month if you have a powerful computer).
Oh, did I mention I already own 2000000 (10% of the total) of them? It was very easy to do in the beginning, tens of thousands in an hour…
But that doesn’t matter right?
Good news: Galicoin price soars above $9 for the first time in almost a year
by Editor
Well then, I guess we need a global coin exchange. Now there a business to get into! :)
by snake0
I’d take Bitcoins over PayPal any day.
PayPal, now THERES a real scam. Freezing your account whenever they feel like it and taking huge cuts of every transaction? They need to just die already. Something like Bitcoins might one day lead us to a true Internet currency, stop being so closed minded.
by Gali
Bitcoin = Scam
Beware. Most bitcoins are owned by a few guys who would become multi trillionaires if bitcoins were to be accepted.
One, for sure, dont want to give the power to buy the whole USA to a gang of scammers, right?
by CarlBeckel
You can exchange bitcoins for dollars and it takes over 8 USD to equal 1 BTC.
If what you say is true then these guys are already multi-trillionaires. Even if that’s true then I’m fine with it if it means I have a safe place to stash my monetary worth where it won’t get whittled away by fees or taken away from me if I happen to get suckered by an unrelated financial scam.
by Neo
“dont want to give the power to buy the whole USA to a gang of scammers, right?”
I am sorry, isn’t this the case already ? wall street ?
by Sick of Fascists
why do people think that moving towards ‘unified systems’ is better how does it foster unique creativity and points of view to eliminate languages and cultures? It just creates a system of MBA and scientific group-think where people all parrot the same mantras. Logarithmic growth is based on technology being freely available to the masses and freely expressing themselves, not some authoritarian clone factory. You want to convert our society into a giant Japan, instead of a vibrant multicultural US.
by GatorALLin
..it will be interesting if the world would suddenly have a universal currency…. maybe the world is getting smaller…. maybe we move to one mixed race…one language, one currency, one global standard for things like the metrics system, etc… As better ideas float to the surface (hey even capitalism is taking over China in a Communist country). I grew up in a world that was always USA vs. Russia, or then maybe USA vs. China… what if it was all humans on the same side (what if we all were on the same team to get humans to colonize the moon or mars?). What if it was humans vs. hunger…or disease or lack of education? I think some would ague that a table with 10 legs is less likely to fall over than if it has one giant leg… so maybe there are stability factors to having so many different systems in place (Euro goes down, but does not take dollar down as much for example). The future is more about letting good ideas win….vs. just the group with the most power or money…. when good ideas win, we should all win. Good ideas now are like their own organism and as the dominate being on this earth for the moment it would sure seem all good ideas must first benefit us…. but I could see that changing in the future as we may prove to be only a stepping stone in the evolutionary process (maybe we invent computers that can only create smarter/better computers on their own and even become self aware and then leave us behind because we can’t keep up and is the singularity, or maybe we diverge as a human race to have some stay at human 1.0 and another group advance due to knowledge, money and other advantages to be human 2.0 and beyond).
If there was a way to switch Bitcoin to Dollars we could accept it for our company…..just like we do for credit cards from anywhere in the world. Hard for some to understand a different form of currency, but at the end of the day if it works…it works.
by Bri
Sounds like a singularity to me. It can have as many currencies as it takes. The important part is in seeing the whole.
by BB
“If there was a way to switch Bitcoin to Dollars we could accept it for our company…..just like we do for credit cards from anywhere in the world.”
You don’t need to accept bitcoins directly. There are front end companies such as BitPay (https://bit-pay.com/home.html) that accept bitcoins from the customer and pay the merchant in dollars. And their rates are cheaper than CC and Paypal.
by BB
And there are no foreign exchange fees, and they do all the accounting.
by Allucinator
> If there was a way to switch Bitcoin to Dollars we could accept it for our company
Bit-pay.
by Zen
I wonder which country will be the first to allow taxes to be paid in BTC?
by Rob B
You mean “I wonder which country will be the first to mandate declaration of all bitcoin holdings for tax purposes.”