Not an April Fools joke

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(This is a screenshot from Bitcoinity.org with real-time trading stats. The guy who runs it is funny, he pops in animated gifs and changes the background for the lols.)

As I write this, coins are trading for $99.89 and there's a lot of trading volume moving the price around, but the mark has been broken.

ok, now 100.58...

What would a random individual do with a bitcoin? If I can't pay my bar tab with it...

I generated about 5 or 6 BTC a long time ago, now seems like a good time to cash them out... Just have to find the wallet file on an old HD

Remember Warren Buffet's "Mr Market". Normally we all know that it's good to buy something when it's cheap and bad when it's expensive. The fact that Bitcoin is so high means that it's low a risky time to buy it. Buying something because it ha a high current value for a low price is investment. Buying something for it's possible future value is speculation, i.e. gambling.

they were overvalued then. Let alone now. Though I keep wishing I held onto my 56 bitcoins longer. Sold at 17.

There's supposedly malware on Skype which will mine bitcoins for the miscreant. And if it took off, governments would try to quash it since they'd have a hard time controlling it (taxing it, preventing transasctions they don't like such as drug payments, putting out huge amounts of their own to buy votes with, etc.)

I never really paid any attention to bitcoins because I thought there would be hundreds of other copycat bitcoin currencies making all digital currencies worthless before they even got above a few dollars. Why hasn't it happened and will it happen?

The reason there hasn't been "competing" digital currencies is because there's no point. Bitcoin is open. Nobody stands to gain by introducing a viable competitor.

It's like a good open source project. With closed source software there are 30 identical wheels to choose from, all of them equally square. There's nothing to gain from creating an equal competitor (i.e., exact same features, no actually enhancements) to open source software. You can already do everything you could want with the original one (namely, use it, modify it, distribute it, and distribute modified copies).

One thing that I foresee as being potentially crippling is monopoly men that control the world currencies currently choosing to choke the Bitcoin market by buying them all up and hording them. The system promises stability because the number of Bitcoins is limited. If they are all taken away then the system becomes useless. You either need to create more, which could make it unstable through inflation, or the system just becomes useless since none of the currency is in circulation anymore.

In theory, if everybody then agreed that Bitcoins are and always will be worthless then we could prevent any harm, create a whole new system again, and take comfort in the fact that the monopoly men just threw away that "money". Except you can't control what people place value on so I'm sure that if they started circulating Bitcoins again people would adopt them, and they control the world's existing currencies so you can't actually cost them any money, and therefore it wouldn't really do them any harm... So yeah, I'm not sure what we can do to prevent that...

there's been a bunch of other wannabes. especially a year or two ago. They all pretty much failed right away. They got boosted super high, and the value against bitcoin eventually made it unprofitable, and people bailed.

Last time I did something like that the price was $30, and it dropped to $4 not long after.

I'm working on Bytecoin. It's like bitcoin, but they are worth 8 times more.

I bought a good amount when they where 5$ and mined another good amount when it was quite profitable to mine with a single FPU. Yay!

I was expecting for the price to catch up again after the flop (so I'm happy I didn't sell due to the panic, although I did a bad operation back in the day losing about 8 BC, which by that time wasn't that much, but now...), but I didn't expect to go this high

You have to balance the cost of mining them against the value you get back out. It was already not really worth it a year or two ago to mine bitcoins. At least not without specialized hardware using an FPGA or ASIC.