what is causing the value of each coin to increase?
Anything that makes bitcoins more desirable will increase their value. This trivially includes anything that makes BTC more useful, like being accepted at more stores. Also services that make it easier to buy and sell BTC increase liquidity, so more people are interested in having them. But also, anything that increases the value bitcoins will have in the future (as trends in acceptability and ease of use increase) attract speculators. They basically gamble that the value of bitcoins in the future will be higher than their price right now. This drives up the price of BTC near the speculated future value.
There are other things that could increase their value, like if people start to trust their security more than other forms of transactions. Or if someone finally gets around to writing a cool application that uses more features of the protocol.
Well, there's a whole scripting language in there: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script Also bloom filters are not finished yet but they will reduce the amount of data a client has to download. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/BIP_0037 Currently it takes a long time to synchronize with the network.
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what is causing the value of each coin to increase?
Anything that makes bitcoins more desirable will increase their value. This trivially includes anything that makes BTC more useful, like being accepted at more stores. Also services that make it easier to buy and sell BTC increase liquidity, so more people are interested in having them. But also, anything that increases the value bitcoins will have in the future (as trends in acceptability and ease of use increase) attract speculators. They basically gamble that the value of bitcoins in the future will be higher than their price right now. This drives up the price of BTC near the speculated future value.
There are other things that could increase their value, like if people start to trust their security more than other forms of transactions. Or if someone finally gets around to writing a cool application that uses more features of the protocol.
> Or if someone finally gets around to writing a cool application that uses more features of the protocol.
What features would you like?
Well, there's a whole scripting language in there: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script Also bloom filters are not finished yet but they will reduce the amount of data a client has to download. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/BIP_0037 Currently it takes a long time to synchronize with the network.