No, the Bitcoin is a virtual currency that technology gurus are trying to use in place of traditional banking and currency serivces. The price of bitcoin is extremely volatile, and since you can buy pieces of 1 bitcoin the access to it is the same as anyone. This doesn't have much to do with the inequality between wage earners, but more so an alternative to traditional means of exchanging funds.
That is by far the biggest misconception about bitcoin; that you have to buy a whole one. Bitcoin is digital you can buy fractions of it, mathematically it makes absolutely no difference. A single bitcoin can be divided by 100 million. I can literally send you 0.00000001 of a bitcoin (although it would be worth about 1/100th of a penny). I don't have a lot of spare cash but I am a big bull on bitcoin investing. Every time I've got 20 quid to spare, I buy some bitcoin (which at current market price would be about 0.05 bitcoins), and send it to my bitcoin cold storage for long term secure holding.
Just yesterday I sent my friend 5 quid (about 8 dollars I'm guessing) of bitcoin with my smartphone just to prove a point of how simple it was to use. So yeah if you are interested go and buy $10 worth of bitcoin. In fact, because 1 BTC = about 600 dollars, people are suggesting we should make the standard unit mBTC (or 1/1000th of a bitcoin), so rather than say I have 0.05 bitcoins, you'd say I have 50 millibits (mBTC) so right now one millibit is about 60 cents.
There are a lot of alt-currencies out there - most are valued at prices so low, it's uneconomic to mine them.
Check out http://coinmarketcap.com/#GBP for current prices.
Bitcoin was the earliest alt-currency, so it has attracted a lot of attention - it's that which has given it a relatively high price. Of course, there is a lot of politics involved, and governments are waking up to the idea that this unregulated currency is more popular than their own issued currencies.
Their instant solution isn't to stabilise their own currency and create credibility, it's to tax the new currencies - even though theoretically, as any central-banker will tell you: they don't actually exist.
There once was a time when you could mine for bitcoin - it might even have been economical to do so, but now with all the coin-farms out there, your computer just isn't powerful enough. At the start of this year, bitcoin was valued at $1400 per coin - that made certain governments panic, and they started taxing any form of alternative coin, right now bitcoin is around $350. The amart-people who got into bitcoin early, will have sold up and made a substantial profit.
I really think that bitcoin has had its day.
This seemed like a good idea until I read it's price. This is obviously not for average income. Is this something that will cause more financial distance between income classes?
