2013-03-19 Economist.com Daily Chart: A Bit Expensive

[bitfair]

http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2013/03/daily-chart-12

[Gabi]

Fail article.

I wonder why The Economist hate bitcoin so much 

[gilgil]

They love bitcoin, they just want to buy it cheaper

[EnergyVampire]

They love bitcoin, they just want to buy it cheaper

LOL! 

[kiba]

Stupidest bitcoin article by The Economist thus far.

[Akka]

Wrong date: 2013-03-19

[bitfair]

Wrong date: 2013-03-19

Thanks - just a slip of the finger. Fixed it.

[tjohej]

It must be difficult to write a quality article about Bitcoin without detailed understanding of it.

As more coins are generated, these problems get ever more complex

No they don't. The same code is used, but the difficulty increases, it gets harder to find a fitting checksum that is sought for a number of leading zero numbers in a hash. These are necessary technical details to avoid people writing articles which may be strongly misleading.

[thezerg]

It must be difficult to write a quality article about Bitcoin without detailed understanding of it.

As more coins are generated, these problems get ever more complex

No they don't. The same code is used, but the difficulty increases, it gets harder to find a fitting checksum that is sought for a number of leading zero numbers in a hash. These are necessary technical details to avoid people writing articles which may be strongly misleading.

Nope!  Do more research & try again!  Hint: the difficulty changes to create a constant average block creation rate as more (or less) transaction processing capacity (aka mining) comes online.

[beckspace]

It must be difficult to write a quality article about Bitcoin without detailed understanding of it.

As more coins are generated, these problems get ever more complex

No they don't. The same code is used, but the difficulty increases, it gets harder to find a fitting checksum that is sought for a number of leading zero numbers in a hash. These are necessary technical details to avoid people writing articles which may be strongly misleading.

+1

When I first heard about the "problems" that get more complex, I thought that it was several different equations, one more complex than the other. It was a bit odd.

Later, way later, I discovered that it is just one problem, that gets bigger or smaller, taking more or less time to solve (more or less zeroes at the beginning of the result).

Brute elegance.

[Vandroiy]

The minor error aside, it might not be wise to label the article as "fail" and move on.

The Economist has a brutal track record of writing correct predictions. I don't know of anything in the media that matches it. Of course they're wrong at times, everyone is -- but that's no good reason to ignore them.

There is no reason to call the article wrong anyway -- it certainly looks like a bubble, which is all they're saying. A little caution should be good advice here.

[Mike Hearn]

Tom Standage, technology editor of The Economist, has actually watched the talk I gave at the 2012 conference (the one on contracts). That's about a million percent more research than most journalists do.

That said, not all of TE's coverage of Bitcoin comes from his team. But I second Vandroiy. I am a regular reader of TE because whenever they write about things I understand, they usually nail it. It's always worth paying attention to what is written there.

[Frankie]

You DON'T think it looks like a bubble?

When I saw the price, I dusted off my loose change and liquidated it. Good luck to you.