Bitcoin Forum

What do you mean "slipping away"? The Golden Opportunities are just emerging!

Where is the none of the above option?

lol!

Haha I doubt bitcoins would be worth >$100 right now, but definitely not below $4 ever again, maybe even $5. The great spring stability is a great indicator since during that period the price remained stable despite the amount of bitcoins circulating increasing, telling us it will have only 1 general direction:

UP  ;D

Golden Opportunities are falling under the iron grip  8)

I think we underestimate the devastating effect the MtGox hack had..

We understand bitcoin clearly so we knew this didn't mean bitcoin was not secure, and most here understand how a hack like this, after such explosive growth, was unavoidable and ... needed

but the to everyone else .....

I find the reasoning quite odd.  Why would bitcoins be worth over $100 when there is such a small spending infrastructure in place for bitcoin?

I would expect it to be a ways bit higher than it is now but definitely not a huge difference like that.

if 2X as many people hopped on board 1 year ago, bitcoin would be 10tmes bigger by now

A significant segment of the public was excited about bitcoin at the time.  After the hack, 90% of those people swore off bitcoins and made up their minds it was nothing but a scam.  If they hadn't, our community would be MUCH larger by now.  All those extra hands would have built the spending infrastructure much quicker.  But, meh... we've done well enough and it's time we are rewarded for our hard work.  We're not ready to see $100, but with slow steady growth, we will start to pull back in some of the people who thought it was a scam.

Makes sense, I haven't been around long enough to see that widespread amount of attention. 

But is this spending infrastructure really needed for bitcoin to appreciate? Gold does not have it, but still is priced very good.

I have absolutely zero regrets regarding the people that left the train during the bubble. Most of those people were either ignorant or get-rich-quick gold diggers that understood from hard lessons that Bitcoin is not meant as a tool for getting-rich-quick. We should not think of those people. Plenty of people stayed and have continued to build Bitcoin and the infrastructure of the Bitcoin economy.

We still don't need people who think this is a get-rich-quick scheme by the way. I hope the new investors that are coming on board right now understand Bitcoin better than the ones that came on board last year.

I Agree with Technomage.

You can't sustain an economy on pointless hype from people who buy BTC to get more Fiat. The crash was unavoidable, and there was no room for further growth of the type last year. Real growth needs time and action. Now that the market has re-arranged itself, and the chaos settled, we have use for more people joining. Back in the bubble, they would have just facepalmed at the chaos and left again quickly.

I think now is the time to try and spread the word. We're ready for further expansion, we just need more people to see the possibilities.

I agree with this totally... However, I would say that currently, the principal short-term value bitcoin holds is its convertibility to fiat, and that the aggregate goods and services available in bitcoins don't justify the current market cap (~50 million USD) on their own. I'd say the primary reasons for value are 1) guaranteed scarcity, 2) convertibility to fiat, and 3) growth potential of an emerging market.

I'm curious whether we're on the verge of another bubble. I think we are, but I don't think it'll go as high as the previous one because of more market maturity. I do think BTC are currently undervalued, (for me, price target is ~$8), but I think the market will overshoot.

-bgc

I think the only things capable of breaching a 2$ floor at this point are:

• some kind of fantastic effort on the part of world governments to suppress the currency, making it nearly impossible to exchange, or
• 2SHA256 getting cracked open while Bitcoin is still using it as the hash function.

I am not yet convinced that the 4$ floor is proof against "merely" large failures (e.g. the fall of a major exchange when there's a place for people to short). Perhaps I'll be more confident in the future.

I don't much (anything) about whats "under the hood" of bitcoin, so how hard would it be to change the hash function should that come up?

Hard, but doable.  Technically it's not that hard, but gaining consensus on what to move to and ensuring a smooth transition may prove to be a challenge.

Yeah, I'm mainly worried about the pushback from miners, especially the ones who've bought "endgame" ASICs whose investments become worthless if the algorithm changes. Usually cryptographic functions aren't broken overnight, which is part of why I'm not as worried about ECDSA (even if breaking the wallet key system would be far worse than breaking the hash algorithm). It's just that I don't know whether people will be willing to throw their Butterfly SCs in the garbage just because 2SHA256 is starting to look a little pale in the face.

If SHA256 starts to look pale, they will be pushed out by people who make hardware to hash faster using the exploits.  As long as that hardware is widely available, it just means higher difficulty.  When difficulty is high enough that we really only have 128 bits of 0's and 128 bits of hash, I'd say it's time to change the algorithm.