This is just a taste of what’s to come.
This is just a taste of what’s to come.
The largest market for trading bitcoins, Tokyo-based startup Mt. Gox, went down for about an hour today, after the alternative currency’s value swung more than 20% this morning. It’s clear as day in the charts above, and Mt. Gox confirmed its downtime in a statement: “Due to high volume trading at the moment, there is a lag in trading and order cancellation.”
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It appears that normal trading has just resumed, according to several bitcoin investors contacted by Quartz and others who use Reddit $RDDT to follow the currency, but it remains to be seen whether trades during the downtime will be honored.
Disruptions in bitcoin trading are fairly common—I wrote about how a software glitch caused a market crash just a few weeks ago—but this is a bigger deal for several reasons:
All that attention is messing with the market for bitcoins, which is what I and many others predicted would happen. More attention brings more demand, which inclines people who already have bitcoins to hold onto them, expecting their value to rise, which reduces the available supply of bitcoins in the market, driving the price higher, increasing attention, pushing up demand, encouraging still more hoarding…
That’s sometimes referred to as a “deflationary spiral,” but I prefer the term “demand crisis.” Whatever you call it, this is what it looks like.
If you need a crash course in bitcoin, watch this video:
