cryptocurrency

They all go under the heading of "cryptocurrency". All of them.. BTC, atm, bbbj. It's somewhat a bubble though BTC has shown itself to be stable except when external forces have made moves to destroy its credibility. Millions of dollars in BTC was recently embezzled on the dark web and many of us think it could have been the government enacting scams and honey traps to destabilitize it. It's certainly a competitor to the U.S. dollar. Right now it's all pretty speculative.. building some kind of bubble. It won't last, but yes i do believe cryptocurrency is incredibly viable. 

Listen to the JRE podcasts with Andreas Antonopolis. He's a bitcoin expert. The main draw behind BTC is that governments cannot track it or manipulate it. I suspect some people are using it in conjunction with Tor and VPNs to avoid taxes. The main drawback is that... governments cannot stabilize it and protect its value. China in particular has a major interest in destabilizing BTC. Like MW said, it's stable except for when someone hacks a vault and jacks a couple hundred mil, yet small enough that a major country legalizing its use will send it shooting up in value.

Thanks that's some excellent info. So bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency that is somewhat stable?

In my not-terribly-informed opinion, yes. There's a ton of cryptocurrencies and some of them are pure memes, like Dogecoin on reddit. However, I wouldn't recommend getting into it to make cash because very few people have done that successfully and it feels like a bubble like MW said. Most bitcoin enthusiasts integrate it into their lives because they don't like the fed or government currency interference. Although personally, I quite like the idea of government currency interference because they have a very large stake in keeping things stable. Volatile currency leads to politicians getting voted out at best and revolts/failed states at worst.

And wow I just looked it up and the price of BTC shot way the fuck up. What happened?

Yeah that's the idea.. that it's not controlled and manipulated by the central banking system.. and in fact its very nature prevents it from being manipulable because it IS "crypto" currency. 

Woberdor what exactly would it mean for a country to "legalize" it? How is it currently illegal? There are plenty of spots that accept it as currency. Or maybe I'm just assuming it because I've seen stores in both California and Vegas advertising acceptance of it as payment, but yeah you can definitely buy shit with it in the real world. Do you mean at larger grocery store chains? I'm sure there are plenty of online retailers that accept it already, yeah?  

You mean buying and selling on the dark web? ;) 

Yeah it tripled in price since last I was... "involved" last ;) 

It's illegal in several countries but there's no way in hell they can regulate that besides forcing retailers to not use it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_bitcoin_by_country_or_territory

Meanwhile in Dixieland, no one knows what the fuck bitcoin is. We're just last year figuring out chips in credit cards. Derp.

So yeah it's legal in U.S. then