Bitcoin News

Bitcoin Money blog (@BitcoinMoney) gives a monthly wrapup on Bitcoin for the month of January, 2013. Excerpts:

“The closing price of $20.41 USD was up nearly seven dollars from the 2012 year-end close resulting in more than a 51% increase for the month — Bitcoin’s largest monthly gain since December 2011. The one-year gain, calculated from the January 2012 close of $5.48 is whopping 272%.”
-
“The 111,100 bitcoins issued which Bitcoin miners took in during the month is valued at $1.72 million using the average daily valuation for the month of $15.49. Miners had been suffering ever since the block reward subsidy “halving” that occurred in November last year.”
-
“A dollar’s worth of ASIC hardware performs hashing at the rate that is nearly two orders of magnitude over what a dollar’s worth of GPU hardware does so we are likely just a couple months (or less) away from seeing the end of any GPU mining that is profitable.”
-
“Certainly greater demand occurring due to Bitcoin gaining traction as a payments and money transfer system is partly responsible for a higher valuation but there appeared to be no massive jump that would account for the need for an additional $75 million worth of the currency. Thus a significant portion of the rise can only be attributed to speculative interest.”
-
“Most bitcoin market exchanges provide feeds with trading results in real-time and many volume records were broken in January.”
-
“Early in January Bitcoin Foundation executive director Peter Vessenes published his Quarterly Update in which he describes an increasing level of interest from investors and shared his prediction that in 2013 there would be Bitcoin ‘liquidity problems’ (price increases).”
-
“Bitcoin remains an experimental currency. As the software gets poked and prodded, new vulnerabilities are discovered. Some vulnerabilities will result in funds being lost.”
-
“When a SatoshiDICE, BitInstant, CoinBase, or BitPay (all angel- and venture capital-backed Bitcoin-related startups) hits a home run, every person holding a bitcoin likely sees a rising valuation as a result due to increased demand for the currency from that Bitcoin startup’s success story.”
-
“Without Wall Street’s participation there are few affordable methods to take a short position or to perform price hedging. Without this relief valve, wild volatility occurs as the market tries to discover Bitcoin’s price.”

 - http://www.bitcoinmoney.com/post/42429739154

All News - Daily E-mail Subscription - Twitter: @BitcoinNews