So apparently the thing that finally got me to buy bitcoin wasn't some libertarian manifesto or a Hacker News thread, it was watching a Senate hearing. I know how that sounds.
Last Monday the Senate Banking Committee held a hearing on virtual currencies, and I half expected it to be a pile-on. Instead you had people from the Fed, the Justice Department, and FinCEN basically saying bitcoin isn't inherently a criminal enterprise and that regulators are figuring out how to deal with it rather than just banning it outright. Nobody said "revolutionary new asset class" or whatever, but nobody said "shut it down" either, and that measured non-reaction was apparently all the market needed. The price, which had been sitting in the low $200s a couple months back, blew past $700 within days and has been flirting with $900 this week. I've been half-watching bitcoin since 2011 when it was worth about the price of a sandwich, kicking myself for not buying then, and this week I finally stopped kicking myself and just did it.
How I actually did this
I went with Coinbase instead of Mt. Gox, mostly because Mt. Gox has had a rough year with withdrawal delays and some ongoing legal mess with a company called CoinLab over US dollar processing, and I did not want my money anywhere near that while it sorts itself out. Coinbase is a San Francisco outfit, backed by some real venture money, and the whole pitch is that it's supposed to feel less like a sketchy currency exchange and more like a bank. That was worth something to me even at a slightly worse rate.
The signup itself takes five minutes. Linking your actual bank account does not. Coinbase sends two tiny deposits, something like 12 cents and 34 cents, into your checking account, and you have to log back into your bank a few days later to confirm the exact amounts before they'll trust the connection. So there's a multi-day gap between "I have decided to do this" and "I am actually able to do this," which is a weird kind of anticlimax when the price is moving 5% a day and you're just sitting there waiting on your bank's website to update.
Once it's linked, buying is stupidly simple. I put in $200, it converts at whatever the current rate is plus Coinbase's cut, and the coins land in your account wallet. I did not leave them there. If there's one thing you pick up reading about this stuff for two years, it's that exchanges get hacked or freeze up or just vanish, so I moved most of it to a wallet on my own machine and wrote the backup phrase down on an actual index card, which now lives in a drawer instead of a screenshot on my phone, because a screenshot is not a backup, it's a liability.
A small tangent that has nothing to do with bitcoin: my neighbor stood in line outside the Best Buy on Elmwood Ave until 1am Friday morning for an Xbox One, and texted me a photo of the line that looked like about 40 people deep in 38-degree weather. I did not go. I still have a 360 and a stack of games I haven't finished, and paying $499 to replace a machine that already works fine has never made sense to me, console launch hype or not. He seemed happy about it though, so, good for him.
Anyway. Is buying $200 of an internet currency that swung from $200 to $900 in two months a reasonable financial decision? I genuinely don't know. Everyone I've mentioned it to at work either thinks it's obviously a bubble or obviously the future, and both of those people say it with the same tone of total confidence that makes me trust neither of them. The transaction fees to actually move bitcoin around are close to nothing, which is the part that still seems like the real point to me, more than the price chart. Whether that matters more than the speculation is a question I don't think anyone answers honestly until well after the fact.
I'll probably write about this again once I actually try to spend some of it on something. Overstock takes it now apparently. We'll see how that goes.