The gold and silver crowd has found a new object for its affection

With gold in unending doldrums, the precious metal crowd needs a place to go and Bitcoins may be fitting the bill.

The electronic, independent, peer-to-peer currency is now being embraced by Zero Hedge and Dollar Vigilante.

Zero Hedge says Bitcoin is the one open market that truly reflects the status quo.

“Illiquid as it may be, today’s Bitcoin prices (and volume) says a lot about the headlines of the day,” writes Zero Hedge with a chart showing a spike in Bitcoin prices after Boris Berezovsky was found dead and a similar spike after yet another EU and IMF deal did not pan out.

“The more I learn about Bitcoin, the more I support it,” writes Zero Hedge.

“In fact, the only donations we accept on this site are Bitcoin donations. As I mentioned in a post late last summer, 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.”

The website Dollar Vigilante, which has the tagline Surviving & Prospering During And After The Dollar Collapse, lauds the introduction of a new Bitcoin ATM saying that it could be the “next multi-billion dollar business venture.”

“I am convinced Bitcoin will be the currency of the future… and all the attacks on it by governments and central banks shows they know it.”

But Doug Casey at Casey Research will need some convincing.

Bitcoins are just an electronic abstraction. They can’t be used for anything else, nor are they made of something that can be used for anything else. They are like one of those knots in a string that disappear if you pull hard enough on the ends of the string. They are not backed by anything at all. Like government fiat currencies, they are a con game, functioning only as long as people have confidence in them, regardless of whether that confidence is well placed or not.

I’ve always said that the dollar is an “I owe you nothing,” and that the euro is a “Who owes you nothing.” With Bitcoins – which no individual can be held accountable for and which have no value in themselves – I’d have to say they are a “No one owes you anything.” It was inevitable, therefore, that the scheme would collapse… at least in its present form.

Creative Commons image from lizjones112