While Price Falters, Bitcoin’s Institutional Acceptance Grows

It’s been a lackluster year for the price of bitcoins. In a few days, fans of the fledgling digital currency will come face to face with a reality that few would have thought possible at this point last year: in a one year time-frame, the price of a bitcoin has fallen.
This has been a stunning turn of events for an asset that saw extreme price growth at the end of 2013, quintupling in value during November of that year. While many in the community believed at the time that this signified a bubble waiting to pop, it was also a widely held opinion that the price would continue its historical growth pattern once the hype faded. The belief was so strong, some even made terrible bets on the matter.
Unfortunately for them, predicting the price movements of a largely unregulated, brand-new type of financial market proved to be surprisingly difficult. Instead of continuing on its previously upward trajectory, the price of a bitcoin slowly but steadily trickled downward over the course of 2014, and today sits in a familiar spot to where it was a year ago.
Critics of the digital currency might say that the falling price signifies a lack of demand and that this proves what they have been preaching all along: the Bitcoin experiment is an answer looking for a solution, something that is interesting in theory but worthless in practice because people are happy with the money they are used to.

This post was published at Coin Telegraph on 2014-11-04.