just found an old email chain...

Right after I'd heard about bitcoin...

So, you know how everyone always says "well silver costs $5 to dig out of the ground"?

Well, there are these new computerized coins called Bitcoins or BTC, that are made by solving equations or someting, and each one is progressively more complicated than the previous one.  So the "price" of "mining" a "bitcoin" is always increasing, and they don't get cheaper unless computing power goes way up.  Right now it takes maybe 3 days to make one with a normal computer, and they are going for about $10.

I personally think they're worthless, but if people believe in them, each is more difficult than the last to "get out of the ground" and so maybe they're going to get more and more valuable.

http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/



And one week later...



Since we chatted they went from ten to thirty.

http://forum.bitcoin.org/?topic=92.0 (link that works today : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=92.0 )

This dude couldn't sell 10k of them for $50USD a year ago.  We literally could have retired had we invested $500 in these a year ago.


Normally when I  put money toward an investment, vehicle, whatever, I put in $2k.  At the time of that first email, if I'd bit the bullet, that would have been 200BTC (at the time, I had about 10k in physical gold and silver and had studied marginal cost, the gold market, the FED, etc., and had considered putting a chunk into bitcoin, but it seemed so expensive compared to a year earlier).

Today, bitcoins are "expensive", but if the marginal cost keeps going up, shouldn't they keep getting more expensive... by design ?