Folks Who Used To Be Fanatical About Silver And Gold Have Now Got A New Obsession...
It's portable.
It's fungible.
And it carries intrinsic value.
Surely we're referring to gold and silver, ya?
Nope.
Gold and silver bugs have now transferred these arguments — the ones they used to insist that their metals were the only safe investment — to something seemingly gold and silver's antithesis: Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is a form of electronic cash designed to bypass financial institutions. It's created by computers, which "mine" for it by cracking preset algorithms.
The biggest advocates of Bitcoin on the internet are folks that for a long time were non-stop touting gold and silver as the true forms of money that could be used to rebel against the existing regime.
Max Keiser has pushed silver like crazy for years. He even advocated the notion that somehow if you bought silver, then you were harming JPMorgan.
Another huge precious metal bug is the Canadian Jeff Berwick, who uses the monicker The Dollar Vigilante.
Now both have gotten the Bitcoin bug and are pushign the merits of Bitcoin on their websites:
Asked if it could someday match silver or even gold prices, Keiser responded by email that Bitcoin could someday capture "between 1 and 10 percent" of the entire global currency market, which "implies a price of between $100k and $1 mn."
Bitcoin will thrive because it helps merchants avoid banks, Liberty Blitzkrieg blog author Michael Krieger writes:
I think it represents another way to fight back against the current repressive and immoral monetary system that has a strangle hold on the planet.
And Zerohedge calls bitcoin "the only market that is open," and it's become a huge subject on the site.
Bitcoin remains prone to hacks and technical glitches.
But the value of Bitcoin has skyrocketed in recent weeks thanks to a variety of factors: the crisis in Cyprus, an announcement that the Treasury Department now seeks to regulate Bitcoin exchanges, and a spike in Bitcoin interest from Spaniards.
These days the price of gold and silver aren't doing much, and people have lost their obsession with it.