So Bitcoin had itself a week. If you weren't watching the price ticker obsessively (I was, a little, and I'm not proud of it) here's the short version: right around Thanksgiving the price on Mt. Gox blew past $1,000, then kept going, and by the 29th it had touched something like $1,240 for one coin. People who bought a handful of these things in 2011 for beer money were suddenly doing math on their phones in restaurants. Then on December 5th the People's Bank of China put out a notice telling Chinese banks and payment companies they weren't allowed to touch bitcoin transactions anymore, and the whole thing came down hard. BTC China, which had been one of the biggest exchanges pushing the price up in the first place, saw trading basically seize up for a bit. By the time I'm writing this the price has settled somewhere under $900, which still sounds like a lot until you remember where it was two weeks ago.
I don't have a hot take on whether this kills bitcoin or whether it's just a correction before the next runup. Honestly I think anyone who tells you they know is guessing, and most of the guessing I've read this week has been dressed up as analysis. What I do want to complain about, because this blog is at least 30% complaints, is what the whole mining craze did to graphics card prices.
I've been trying to put together a new build since October. Nothing fancy, just wanted a Radeon 7950 to replace an aging card that's been wheezing through anything released after 2011. Three months ago that card was sitting at a totally normal $200-ish on Newegg. Now good luck. They're either out of stock everywhere or marked up to something like $340, because it turns out the 7950 and its cousins are really good at mining Litecoin and the other scrypt-based altcoins, and there's apparently a whole cottage industry of people running six of these things in a garage instead of playing games on one of them like a normal person. AMD cards specifically, because of how their architecture handles the hashing algorithm better than Nvidia's. I did not know any of this a few months ago. Now I know more about scrypt mining than I ever wanted to, purely out of spite, because I just want to play games at a reasonable frame rate without paying a scalper tax.
There's something a little funny about the timing though. The same week the actual bitcoin price gets a haircut from a Chinese government notice, the secondary effect of the mining boom (empty shelves for anyone trying to buy a video card in the US) hasn't really let up at all, because a lot of that demand is coming from Litecoin and Dogecoin miners, not bitcoin miners, and those coins didn't get touched by the PBOC news at all. So the price of the thing everyone's talking about drops 30% and my graphics card is still $340. Markets are weird.
I keep going back and forth on whether to just buy a couple hundred dollars of bitcoin as a dumb experiment, the kind of thing you do knowing you might lose it all and treating it like a bar tab you already paid. A friend of mine did exactly that back in the summer, bought in around $100, and has spent the last month sending me screenshots at increasingly obnoxious hours. He hasn't sold anything. I asked him what his plan is and he said "see what happens," which is not a plan, but I get it. There's something almost hypnotic about watching a number you have some stake in move around in real time, especially one this volatile. It's basically a slot machine you get to feel smart about because there's blockchain technology involved.
Anyway. If anyone local has a 7950 or a 280X collecting dust and wants actual US dollars for it, my email's in the sidebar. I promise not to mine anything with it. I just want to play the new Tomb Raider at more than 20 frames a second, is that so much to ask.