Much Ado About Bitcoin ⇥ nytimes.com

Adrian Chen, for the New York Times:

Still, there’s a zaniness about the currency. Bitcoin is built on a weird mix of the most old-fashioned kind of speculative greed, bolstered by a contemporary utopian cyberlibertarian ideology. Boosters say that bitcoin is the currency of the future. I’d argue that the phenomenon is a digital gold rush perfectly emblematic of the present.

There was a great tweet from the Visual Idiot the other day:

1848: thousands in San Francisco mine for gold, hoping to be rich.

2013: thousands in San Francisco mine for Bitcoin, hoping to be rich.

The crazy thing about bitcoin, from my perspective, is that it’s a currency that behaves more like a volatile commodity.