Search This Blog

Thursday, April 11, 2013

Brother, Can Ya Spare A Bitcoin?



In Yahoo News:

Advocates describe Bitcoin as the foundation stone of a Utopian economy: no borders, no change fees, no closing hours, and no one to tell you what you can and can't do with your money. Just days ago the total value of bitcoins in circulation hit $2 billion, up from a tiny fraction of that just last year.
But late Wednesday, Bitcoin crashed, shedding more than 60 percent of its value in the space of a few hours before recouping some of its losses. Critics say the roller coaster currency movements are just another sign that Bitcoin is a bubble waiting to burst.
Jackdaws are also known for their lust for shiny objects, which they hoard hither and yon.

"Bubble" is just another name for "Madness" and "Folly".

The exchange the bitcoin is traded on is Mt. Gox, and it provides the following:

Hi everyone, just a quick update on the situation and what happened last night.
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!
To give you an idea of how impressive things were here are some numbers that we would love to share with you guys:
- The number of trades executed triple in the last 24hrs.
- The number of new account opened went from 60k for March alone to 75k new account created for the first few days of April! We now have roughly 20,000 new accounts created each day.
Due to these facts we have been busy working on improving things since last week and our team has been working around the clock to improve Mt.Gox to catch up with the demand. We will continue to release several updates today and in the coming few days to improve our system overall performance.
Also please note that we may have to close the exchange for two hours in the next 12 to 24hrs to add several new servers to our system.
Thank you for your understanding and continuous support!
I can't wait to invest in something run by these fellows.
I especially am fond of statements issued by financial institutions which begin listing a number of points with an expression such as "First of all...", and then proceed to ignore all the following ordinal numbers.

New servers are the ticket !

Bitcoin avoids all the authorities who muck up the real world currencies.
It also allows every stock or currency scam in the world to be run.

Read Mt. Gox's Facebook page; it is rather pathetic:
https://www.facebook.com/MtGox/posts/453409538076792

The only person who would think such a thing a good idea is my mother's investment guy.

--

No comments: