My Bangkok Bitcoin Bonanza

[cdnmatt]

And to what is the value of EUR or USD anchored?

Land, natural resources, militaries, taxation systems, GDPs, etc.

A better example would be what's gold linked to? Previously, it had worth due to its uses within industry & products, but these days there's substitutes for most applications that previously used gold (ie. computer chips / boards). Nowadays, it only has value because people believe it does, and people are willing to accept it in exchange for barter / currency.

Same goes for bitcoin. Or hell, beanie babies, or pet rocks, or exotic fish, or artwork, or whatever...

[frequent]

https://www.theguardian.com/technolo...es-a-hard-sell

[cdnmatt]

Have you checked the price of bitcoin lately? Oh right, it absolutely skyrocketed.

It's not difficult to flip bitcoin over to fiat, in basically any payment method you'd like. Deposit into your account, PayPal, Western Union, or whatever. Takes about 30 mins. Not to mention the dozens of debit cards that are now available, allowing you to withdraw your BTC directly from any ATM on the planet.

Keep scoffing if you want, but it's been around since 2009, the price has recently surged drastically, and I can promise you bitcoin isn't going anywhere soon.

[frequent]

Keep scoffing if you want, but it's been around since 2009, the price has recently surged drastically, and I can promise you bitcoin isn't going anywhere soon.

Your original assertion, way back when, was that Bitcoin was the ideal way for lonely foreigners to send money to their monogamously-coupled-but-poor "boyfriends" in Thailand. That was then and still is a load of tosh. It's a form of speculation, just like gold, but non-physical so the ideal "investment" for hi-tech wankers

I'm merely interested in Bitcoin as a means of exchange - you know, like real money - which clearly it is not. The point of the story was that there are vanishingly few ways of actually spending Bitcoin and it is, as the very first shopkeeper says, valued by pimps, blackmailers, drug dealers and cyber criminals, but not by real people. And if you want to, you know, buy some then you'll be charged a whopping commission for the "privilege" - something well over 5% as I recall from the story