On Sat, Dec 2, 2017 at 4:29 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org> wrote:

Didn't Bitcoin just plummet by 20%? It was all over the business pages

Cryptocurrency seems a different underlying perspective... https://i.redd.it/yupauofcel101.jpg

I wouldn't invest in anything that I couldn't exchange for the shiny stuff; isn't that called "fungible" or something?

No, that's called ability to barter, often occurring on third party exchange, which is specialized market in market economy... https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungibility https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Barter https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchange_(organized_market) https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_(economics) https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_economy There should be little problem exchanging retail amounts of crypto, at minimum there are... https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_currency_exchange

Precious metals "should" never go down

Not really, and since they're put to market, they do all the time. In fact, everyone's precious Gold has *lost* 31% of its spot since July 2011, was a complete bear from 1980 to 2001, and only went up a puny 7.4x in 11y to 2011, not even a third doubling. For 28 out of 47 years since 1971, it lost, at least in terms of USD. The IMF killed off the last gold backed fiat (Swiss) in 1999. https://www.bloomberg.com/markets/commodities/futures/metals http://www.kitco.com/ https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold Here is a price chart of a new [crypto] currency being adopted... https://blockchain.info/charts/market-price?timespan=all You can play around with historical forex charts online to compare behaviour of other currency sets..

diamonds are only as valuable as deBeers wants them to be (or

Then change the price.... prospect and stake your own claims, switch to lab / simulated versions or other shiny dirt rocks, or quit buying them as bling.