So this is a weird week to have had a little bit of money in bitcoin.
If you weren't paying attention (and honestly, why would you have been, it's still mostly a curiosity to most people), the short version is this. Bitcoin spent most of November climbing like it had somewhere to be, cracked $1000 around Thanksgiving, and actually blew past $1200 on Mt. Gox on November 29th, which is the kind of number that gets your coworkers who've never mentioned cryptocurrency in their life suddenly asking you about it over lunch. I had two separate people ask me "so should I buy some" that week. I did not have a good answer for either of them, which in hindsight was probably the correct answer.
Then on December 5th the People's Bank of China put out a notice telling Chinese financial institutions and payment platforms they weren't allowed to touch bitcoin transactions anymore. Not an outright ban on individuals owning it, just banks and payment processors getting told to stay away. And the price did what you'd expect a thing to do when a huge chunk of its trading volume gets told to leave the building. It fell off a cliff. I watched it go from north of a thousand dollars down under seven hundred in the space of a couple days, and it's still wobbling around as I'm typing this on Sunday night.
I want to be clear I'm not some bitcoin evangelist typing this with a straight face while secretly panicking about my life savings. I bought a small, kind of embarrassing amount back in the spring mostly out of curiosity, the kind of money where if it went to zero I'd be annoyed but not ruined. What's been genuinely interesting to watch this week isn't the price chart, it's how differently everyone talks about why it happened depending on which forum you're reading. Half the comments I've seen are "China just proved bitcoin is worthless, it's a bubble, good riddance." The other half are "this is bullish actually, it shows even a government intervention can't kill it, look it's already climbing back a bit." Both of these takes are being said about the exact same 40% price drop by people looking at the exact same chart. That tells you more about how people process uncertainty than it does about bitcoin, I think.
Also, and this is the part that actually made me feel something, back in October I seriously looked into building a small mining rig. Priced out a couple of Radeon 7970s, did some napkin math on electricity costs versus expected payout, and talked myself out of it mostly because my apartment's circuit breaker situation is already sketchy enough running a space heater and a toaster at the same time, let alone a rig pulling 400+ watts around the clock. Part of me this week is relieved I didn't sink a few hundred bucks into GPUs I'd have had to explain to my landlord. Another part of me is doing that thing where you calculate what the difficulty curve looked like a month and a half ago and wonder what could've been. Neither feeling is particularly rational and I'm choosing not to dwell on it further than this paragraph.
Small unrelated thing while I'm here: Apple pushed out iOS 7.0.4 a couple days ago and it actually fixed the FaceTime bug that's been crashing calls on my phone since basically the day I updated to iOS 7. Took them long enough, but I'll take it. iOS 7 as a whole I'm still not sold on (the flat icons still look unfinished to me some days, like a redesign that shipped a beta too early), but at least I can make a video call to my sister without it dying halfway through her telling me about her dog now.
Anyway. If you're holding bitcoin right now, you already know how this week has felt without me needing to describe it further. If you're not, you got to watch a genuinely strange little financial event happen in real time from a comfortable distance, which is honestly the better seat.