Money & Banking is a Medium publication with posts on Bitcoin, finance, startups, and data storage business strategy.
Commenters point to its Felix Salmon piece on the Bitcoin bubble as a worthwhile read and also cite its post on data gravity and storage disruption.
>Oh i have 1BTC now and it is worth $10000. It used to be worth $.001 when i bought a pizza
Most likely the guy who got the pizza now thinks "gee, that other guy is now sitting on a BTC treasure that could buy him a house, a car and a lot of nice holidays. I got a pizza".
BTC and $ (or €) are competing for value - and as long as the BTC story is intact, it makes more sense to hoard BTC and spend $$. When there is inflation, it makes sense to invest or consume your money, with BTC this does not make sense if you can hold off your purchase for a while.
I therefore would not be surprised to see a tremendous spike in the BTC valuation but I have no idea what the distant future would be - it can only be a hard crash or the stifling of the BTC economy.
Edit: see also:
https://medium.com/money-banking/2b5ef79482cb
This is actually a serious problem, if you’re trying to put together a currency, rather than a vehicle for financial speculation. If the currency of a country ever fluctuated as much as bitcoins did, it would never be taken seriously as a medium of exchange: how are you meant to do business in a place where an item costing one unit of currency is worth $10 one day and $20 the next?
[...]
If millions of people started using bitcoins on a regular basis, the soaring value of bitcoins would actually be disastrous. You’ve heard of hyperinflation: this would be hyperdeflation
I tend to subscribe to the ideas that Joyent has around their manta product -- it's about "data gravity" and "data velocity". There was an article submitted earlier to hn that didn't get many votes -- and no comments -- but is well worth a read:
"Building a Black Swan: Disrupting NetApp, EMC, Amazon’s S3 … maybe all BigData":
https://medium.com/money-banking/b8427c23bf0f
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6028334
Also worth skimming is the blog post introducing Manta:
"Hello, Manta: Bringing Unix to Big Data":
http://www.joyent.com/blog/hello-manta-bringing-unix-to-big-data
And, (more closely) related to the "you don't have big data", I found this little post about Manta also interesting:
http://building.wanelo.com/post/54110156963/a-cost-effective-approach-to-scaling-event-based-data
(as an example of how keeping things simple (here: simple log files) can combine to provide the scalability needed to collect "BigData" -- and then the Manta architecture can help with turning that data into information)
(No affiliation with Joyent/Manta -- but it does seem like they have a pretty good product concept/idea -- and even if not using Manta or Joyent -- building on their ideas and architecture -- seems like something that might be useful also for smaller installations).
Here are a few recent articles I found to be relatively accurate and fair (several of which have already appeared on HN):
http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/47135650437/are-bitcoins-the-future
https://medium.com/money-banking/2b5ef79482cb
https://mises.org/daily/6399/The-Moneyness-of-Bitcoins
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timothylee/2013/04/03/four-reason-you-shouldnt-buy-bitcoins/
http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2013/04/bitcoins-plunge-protection-team.html?spref=tw&m=1
there are no real facts in economics, but there are some pretty easy concepts to grasp. here is another explanation:
"Inflation is bad, but deflation is worse. The reason is that in a deflationary environment, no one spends money — because whatever you want to buy is sure to become cheaper in a few days or weeks. People hoard their cash, and spend it only begrudgingly, on absolute necessities" from https://medium.com/money-banking/2b5ef79482cb
It's worth going back to read what Reuters finance journalist Felix Salmon wrote about Bitcoin almost exactly a year ago.
The Bitcoin Bubble and the Future of Currency
https://medium.com/money-banking/2b5ef79482cb
Why bitcoin’s rise is nothing to celebrate
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2013/04/03/why-bitcoins-rise-is-nothing-to-celebrate/