Hold on to Your Bitwallets, Folks

Test Ticker

Please support Mother Jones with a year-end donation. The truth is, we're a long way from our $600,000 goal, and we have to get as close as we can by Tuesday so we don't have to make hard decisions come January. If you value our reporting, please consider pitching in today.

$600,000

We still need to raise 400,000: Whether you can give $5 or $500, it all matters.

Please support Mother Jones with a year-end donation. We need to raise $600,000, or get as close as we can, by Tuesday so we don't need to make hard decisions come January. Whether you can give $5 or $500, it all makes a difference.

Let our journalists help you make sense of the noise: Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily newsletter and get a recap of news that matters.

The Guardian reports on the latest Bitcoin follies:

Bitcoin, the digital currency, lost more than $160 (£104) in value on Wednesday, just hours after hitting a record high. The currency hit a new high of $266 before falling to $105 and then bouncing back to $130. The fall is unlikely to put off speculators. Two months ago, a Bitcoin was worth $20.

….Wednesday’s wild ride came as someone gave away thousands of dollars worth of Bitcoins on Reddit, the social news site. News blog Business Insider calculated a Reddit user under the name “Bitcoinbillionaire” had given away $13,627.69896 worth of Bitcoins to Reddit users over the day. The mystery donor signed off with a quote from Ron Paul, libertarian politician and one-time would-be presidential candidate: “It’s no coincidence that the century of total war coincided with the century of central banking.”

So the monetary base of the Bitcoin empire dropped by about a billion dollars because someone gave away $13,000 on Reddit. And this is something we’re supposed to take seriously as the future of money? Seems a wee bit fragile, no?

For more on the techno-idiocy that is Bitcoin, Adam Serwer and Dana Liebelson answer all your questions here.