

PRISM’s Effect on Bitcoin Prices - dcawrey
http://www.coindesk.com/prisms-effect-on-bitcoin-prices/

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dragonwriter
The idea that this is a result of PRISM is, well, specious. You might just as
well argue that its due to CoinDesk's article on Apple's iMoney patent which
has been read as a statement of intent for Apple to launch a competing digital
currency.

Though I think its a lot more likely its a combination of profit taking a
short-term weakness tied to the rash of recent government efforts directed at
bitcoin-related and other online money exchange businesses based on anti-
money-laundering violations. PRISM seems pretty distant (there doesn't really
seem to a plausible explanation for why the PRISM revelations would decrease
interest in bitcoin, while there is plenty of more directly bitcoin-related
news that would explain the effect.)

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hamidpalo
Causation vs correlation.

I have eaten approximately 50% more Chobani since the PRISM story broke, so
PRISM has definitely had a huge impact on my consumption on Chobani.

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marvin
You've got that backwards, your consumption of Chobani obviously caused the
PRISM leak.

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bdcravens
This theory supposes that Bitcoin is mature enough to respond to outside
influence. The market isn't stable enough to endure events inside of the
market: major exchanges getting hacked or experiencing downtime on a frequent
basis, "banks" getting "hacked" with little explanation, and whales causing
major price shifts by spending a few hundred thousand $ on a big buy or sell.

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Mahn
The market isn't by any stretch of the imagination mature, but my impression
by watching the price these past three months is that external events do
influence the price from time to time. That being said, the shifts happening
lately are most likely caused by random whales cashing out.

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3pt14159
NSA/PRISM has nothing to do with Bitcoin. I predicted this a month ago in an
HN thread. It has to do with DHS freezing dwolla and speculation that similar
things will happen elsewhere. Some of us (that bought in years ago) are profit
harvesting. That's all. It takes a while to get a lot of cash out of mtgox.

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Ihmahr
I am surprised to see the value of the bitcoin fall. Although transactions are
public, it still beats credit and debit cards, paypal, etc.

Cash is the only thing that wins from bitcoin in this respect, but is useless
on the net.

What am I not seeing?

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wladimir
Uncertainly, as usual, is my guess. For one thing (more paranoid) people are
worried that the fallout from PRISM, the realization how easily everything is
monitored, will cause a loss of trust in the internet, resulting in laws that
damage it internationally. Maybe even a balkanization of global networks.
Bitcoin will have a harder time operating without a united internet.

~~~
shubb
It does put China's insistence on a local internet, surrounded by a 'fire
wall', and serviced by local companies, in a very different perspective
doesn't it.

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warfangle
The point of bitcoin was never necessarily the ability to privately exchange
value (given that the blockchain is public, if you can tie a wallet to an
individual you know their transactions).

It was to provide a currency that was decentralized.

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aneth4
The Prism leak also seems to have caused a series of severe thunderstorms in
Bangkok. It's really been wet here.

