Its pricing is highly volatile — and therefore highly risky. For all its nosebleed ascents, bitcoin also has had some gut-punching plunges. Between November 2021 and November 2022, for example, the price of bitcoin dropped 75%, from $64,455 to $16,196, according to data on coinmarketcap.com.2024 November 19, Jeanne Sahadi, “Bitcoin has smashed records. Should you invest?”, in CNN Business, archived from the original on 04 Jun 2025:
4
Of a person, quick to become angry or violent.
a volatile man
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Fickle.
Now Mr. Bush plans to pour more arms into this unstable region and add fuel to the volatile powderkeg he has foolishly created.2007 August 1, “Unwise Arms Deal With Saudi Arabia (2 Letters)”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 26 Nov 2022:
6
Temporary or ephemeral.
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Of a situation potentially violent.
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Computing, Engineering, Mathematics, Natural sciences, Physical sciences, Programming, Sciences Of a variable etc., having its associated memory immediately updated with any changes in value.
This method stores a value into a non-volatile field called result, then stores true in the volatile field finished. The main thread waits for the field finished to be set to true, then reads the field result.2010, Jon Jagger, Nigel Perry, Peter Sestoft, Annotated C# Standard, page 467:
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Computing, Engineering, Mathematics, Natural sciences, Physical sciences, Sciences Of memory, whose content is lost when the computer is powered down.
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Obsolete Passing through the air on wings, or by the buoyant force of the atmosphere; flying; having the power to fly.
Etymology From Middle French volatile, from Latin volātilis (“flying; swift; temporary; volatile”), from volō (“to fly”).
1
A chemical or compound that changes into a gas easily.
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Computing, Engineering, Mathematics, Natural sciences, Physical sciences, Programming, Sciences A variable that is volatile, i.e. has its associated memory immediately updated with any change in value.
Operations on C++ volatiles do put the compiler on notice that the object may be modified asynchronously, and hence are generally safer to use than ordinary variable accesses.2011, Victor Pankratius, Ali-Reza Adl-Tabatabai, Walter Tichy, Fundamentals of Multicore Software Development, page 74: