Bitcoin "down" to $100. They were $10 in January. They'll be over $50 at the end of this month. When I was mining 18 months ago, they were about a quarter.
Smooth the line and bitcoins are doing exactly what you'd expect from a linear-demand-growth emerging commodity market with a fixed rate of supply. Everything is going exactly according to plan.
Note well that the exact same thing (a big speculative run-up and follow-up correction) happened a couple years ago for the $0.50 to $29 spike, and will probably happen again for the inevitable $300 to $1500 run-up.
Most people who aren't risk-tolerant toward things like this are using services that instantly (or daily) convert to USD or EUR to minimize losses due to exchange rate flux.
It's really only a big deal for speculators, or people who are trying to run a btc-in-from-customers, btc-out-to-vendors business. SR is probably pretty interesting today.
Obviously, you can't. The intra-day prices have only been this volatile for 3 or 4 days out of 1000, though.
I think a half of one percent is pretty good for something that finally solved the centralization problem for digital currency and has only been really useful for a couple of years. It will, of course, continue to get better with time as the size of the market increases.
This big flux could well have been caused by a single old-school miner/collector dumping $1-2mm of BTC in one batch, too. Remember, these markets aren't really that big yet.
Hope you're right for your own sake...imaginary money is at the end of the day imaginary...doesn't matter if I hold it in paper or if it's set by an algorithm.
Smooth the line and bitcoins are doing exactly what you'd expect from a linear-demand-growth emerging commodity market with a fixed rate of supply. Everything is going exactly according to plan.
Note well that the exact same thing (a big speculative run-up and follow-up correction) happened a couple years ago for the $0.50 to $29 spike, and will probably happen again for the inevitable $300 to $1500 run-up.