LOL ... I just thought it was digital currency.
If I'd known about it earlier, I'd still not have bought any. I'm poor. LOL
But to hear people talking about it, you could have made yourself rich overnight and retired to your own private island!
Yeah, it’s a commodity. When my husband was talking about buying some, I got curious as to what people actually bought with it. The short answer was almost nothing. The longer answer was a lakehouse, a boat, a ski chalet, et cetera (once you sold off your investment when the price went up).
Yeah, that's about right. There are a lot of attractions to cryptocurrencies in general. There's a firm, finite supply of them (I think there can ever only be somewhere around 20 million BitCoins unless they mess with the blockchain formulae), and transactions can be conducted relatively anonymously. Mostly, I think they're going to be used as hedges against inflation eventually, the way people convert to British pounds or Euro, or gold. Some hedge funds are actually trading BitCoin futures now, which is kind of brave new worldish.
It's also literally impossible to regulate, which is why China simply banned it. It circumvents the international banking system, too, so it's making a lot of people uncomfortable. Cryptos are here to stay for those reasons alone, but nobody is going to take them seriously, with mainstream use as a currency, unless and until the volatility subsides and they stabilize. Hell, Steam was accepting BitCoin up until last week, and they cited volatility as the reason. My first thought was that some people were parking BitCoin using Steam purchases, then refunding the purchases later after there was a price change.
It's also hard to have appropriately scaled prices when there's a thirty percent change overnight.
Anyway, cryptos are weird, people are using them solely to enrich themselves or to conduct shady business at the moment, and I don't have a fifty acre plot of woodland to myself with a tiny cabin and a fishing stream, dang it.
