So it finally happened. Sometime early this afternoon, Bitcoin crossed $1,000 on Mt. Gox. I had a browser tab open watching the number tick up while I was supposed to be doing actual work, and I just kept refreshing it like it was a football score with two minutes left on the clock.
I know I'm a little late writing about this, since half the internet has been on the bitcoin beat for two weeks straight, ever since that Senate hearing on the 18th where basically everyone testified that virtual currency isn't inherently evil and might even be fine, actually. The price has been on a tear ever since. It was sitting around $200 back in October, then $500 a couple weeks ago, then this week it just kept climbing and climbing until today it finally punched through four digits. Watching it happen in something close to real time was weirder than I expected. Not exciting exactly. More like watching a pot almost boil over and not being sure if you should turn the heat down or just let it go.
Here's my actual complaint, the personal one nobody asked for: a friend of mine, Dave, bought something like 50 bitcoins back in 2011 for around $12 each, mostly as a joke, mostly because he wanted to buy something sketchy off Silk Road and figured what the hell. He texted me this morning with no context at all, just "so anyway," and I knew exactly what he meant. I did the math in my head faster than I wanted to. That's something like $50,000 sitting in a wallet he probably still has the password for written on a sticky note in a drawer somewhere. I did not buy bitcoin in 2011. I thought about it for maybe four minutes and decided it was for people who trusted a piece of software more than they trusted a bank, which felt like a strange thing to trust right around the time the original Mt. Gox got hacked and the price cratered from about $17 to basically nothing in a single afternoon. Turns out that was not the correct read on the situation, and Dave has never once let me forget it.
I don't think this is a bubble that's about to pop tomorrow, for what it's worth, though I also thought that at $200 and again at $500, so weigh my predictions accordingly. What actually strikes me more than the number is how fast the whole vibe around this thing has shifted. A year ago if you brought up bitcoin at a dinner party, people looked at you like you'd started talking about your Beanie Baby collection. My mother-in-law asked me about it on Sunday, completely unprompted, because she'd heard something about it on the local news. That's the real story here, not the price itself. The price is just a number. It's that "internet money nobody can regulate" went from message-board fringe thing to dinner-table small talk in about two years flat.
Mt. Gox itself is kind of a mess, and I feel like that part gets lost whenever everyone's busy being excited about the price. It's basically running on duct tape. Withdrawals have been slow for months, support tickets seem to vanish into a void, and it's still functioning as the de facto price-setter for the whole market because it was first and a huge amount of everyone's money is stuck there whether they like it or not. That seems like a shaky foundation for something suddenly being treated like a real asset class, but nobody wants to hear that on the day it hits a round number.
Anyway. Tomorrow's Thanksgiving and I've got a turkey to deal with instead of a spreadsheet of exchange rates, so that's genuinely where my head is going next, not further price predictions. If any of you bought in early and are feeling smug tonight, you've earned it, go be smug at your family's table tomorrow. The rest of us will be over here doing quiet math on what we didn't buy two years ago and trying not to think about it too hard while the cranberry sauce is on the stove.