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.

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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.

Admin Tasks

In First Post, New Blog, I included a checklist of administrative tasks, all of which have been done. Here are a few more:-

• Logo
• Market quotes

I also need to verify that comments are working properly.

Adding a Description

Since every blog needs a description, I added one. For now it consists mainly of keywords. If I could change the name of the blog, I would now call it 'Bitcoins and Blockchains'... [...] ...and so is it now titled!

Beginning Bitcoin Videos

In First Post, New Blog, I wrote,

I entered the term 'bitcoin' into Youtube and started watching videos. This was more fruitful. General impression: lots of young, fast-talking Silicon Valley types proselytizing on the subject; many references to sinister aspects that make me wonder if it's a sound place to put any money. I'll come back to the videos on my next post.

First, here's a short, simple introduction to the concept.

The Essence of How Bitcoin Works (Non-Technical) (5:24) • 'A brief intro to the main ideas behind How Bitcoin Works, including how money is transferred, who keeps track of it, and how the whole thing is secured.'

A longer version, more technical version by the same video maker can be found at How Bitcoin Works Under the Hood, currently with 659.583 views and 1.274 comments.

For an introduction to the history and some of the social aspects, see Everything You Need to Know About Bitcoin : VICE Podcast 027; 'Reihan Salam sits down with Jerry Brito, one of the leading experts on Bitcoin.'

To hear from some of the main insiders, see The Bitcoin Phenomenon. Near the end we learn,

Starring in order of appearance:- Gavin Andresen, Peter Vessenes, Bennett Hoffman, Angela Keaton, Jeremy Liew, Fred Ehrsam, Erik Voorhees, Trace Mayer; Shot on location at Bitcoin 2013 in San Jose.

After these clips, almost anything featuring Andreas Antonopoulos is worth viewing (except when he's speaking in front of people who are eating -- 'crunch, crunch, slurp, crunch').