The Bitcoin Price

In my previous post, Buying Bitcoins, I wasn't actually able to buy anything. I initiated a transfer from my bank to an online bitcoin account. A few days later the transfer completed and I exchanged my Euros for a fraction of a bitcoin. The price, which I didn't note, was something like 206 Euros per bitcoin.

How was that price determined? I'm not sure because I couldn't find an explanation of the pricing mechanism. Since the value of anything is whatever people are willing to pay for it, I imagine there are bitcoin traders scattered throughout the world exchanging their hard-earned bitcoins for various national currencies. These people -- maybe they are robots -- are setting the price.

Here is a chart of bitcoin prices since December 2012. The peak was $1145 on 30 November 2013. It's been a long downhill slide since then.

coinbase.com/charts

I'll continue to research the pricing mechanism and will report any findings in a future post.

Buying Bitcoins

Now that I've acquainted myself with the fundamentals of bitcoins, the next step is to start using them. The Coindesk.com article, How Can I Buy Bitcoins?, explains the basics, starting with 'First, get yourself a bitcoin wallet'. Of the four options for a wallet -- desktop, mobile, online, and hardware -- the best fit for me is 'Online'. I opened an account with Coinbase and transferred a small amount of money to it. Now I have to wait for the transfer to complete.

A Blog Logo

Returning once more to Admin Tasks, I assumed that adding a bitcoin logo to this blog's header would be straightforward. As so often happens with assumptions, I was wrong

The first task was to choose a logo. The several styles of logo, all built around an upper-case 'B', are also designed to serve as an eventual currency symbol. I chose a blue logo, shown on the left, to match the design of this blog.

The second task was to add the logo to the blog's header. At this I failed. All of my attempts were in some way unsuccessful and it appears the safest way to do this is to alter the blog's template. That makes the design a little less portable and I decided to save the effort for another time.

In the meantime I added the closest HTML symbol I could find, the Thai bhat, '฿'. This is intended to be a placeholder until I work out a better solution.

Market Resources

In my previous post, Admin Tasks, I mentioned the desirability of displaying market quotes in the right navigation bar. The following chart shows a list of securities++ related to the term bitcoin.

finance.yahoo.com symbol search on 'bitcoin'

The most promising symbol appeared to be Bitcoin Shop Inc. (BTCS), listed in the pink sheets plus two German exchanges. I didn't manage to find a way to show quotes for the company, so I settled for displaying the latest news. I'll continue to tinker with quotes++ as I get new ideas.

***

It turns out that when I changed the name of the blog a few weeks ago, I inadvertently damaged two navbar resources: 'Comments' and 'Blog List'. This is now fixed.