Bitcoin Forum

What price 'should' btc be at?  What is appropriate for it?  Doesn't the expanding market of businesses that accept btc have a valid even if intangible immediate affect?  Forget supply and demand... what about the contagious wild fire and lust for btc?

Someone said it in an earlier post, right now it's worth whatever supports the current transactions. I think that's around $7 or so? that's what it's worth as a tool to do what it was designed to do. As btc transactions grows so will the need for more btc, and the price will rise. Whatever amount is over the need for current transactions is speculation value, which will do what it will.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=924392.0

Measured by inflation and maintenance cost with an eye on google trends i'd say not more than 120$ .
At 120$ network still costs half a million dollars every day to pay miners. So i think that is maximum fair price. Everything above is overpriced.

it doesn't matter how many businesses accept bitcoin, if all of them are pegging their bitcoin prices to the exchange price. it doesn't really count as helping the BTC economy unless they offer their goods/services directly for a specific amount of BTC itself, and not just the $ equivalent amount of BTC.

inflation outweights merchant adoption and community support - it's actually a major marketforce - and it is one people do generally not understand because they can't math.

It's hard to say without an economy that only accepts bitcoins.  Silk Road was the closest to such an economy.

$50

Keep in mind that most people will buy extra Bitcoins even if they plan to spend some specific amount on the concrete product. Therefore even if all merchants will immediately convert received BTC to USD, buyers still will have some "redundant" Bitcoins left and won't convert them back to USD (these coins will be removed from the market and lower pressure on the BTC/$ price).

That was last year. Look at Google Trends for "bitcoin" (http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=bitcoin). Bitcoin is old news now. Notice that the Google Trends graph for Bitcoin strongly resembles the price graph.

Here's a useful Google Trends chart: "bitcoin" and "second life" (http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=second%20life%2C%20bitcoin&cmpt=q&tz=) Second Life was a hot concept in 2006-2007, a true 3D world anyone could visit on line and create their own content. Second Life is an excellent, impressive technology. It's still around, and it works fine. But it has 6% of the attention it had at peak.

Bitcoin's trajectory looks similar. Bitcoin's attention level peaked about a year ago, and it's now down to 25% of its peak search traffic.  That's about where Second Life was a year after its peak.

This is what a niche product in decline looks like.

I have considered this question for sometime and read, with interest, previous posts regarding this topic.

Working from the premise that Bitcoin technology is solid, stable, reliable etc and the only flaw in the system are the consumers and that it will grow and will be a success, in some form or another then I believe it's value is between $300 and $500.

Today's price is all about sentiment as opposed to need.

What i mean is this. If I am a farmer and grow a crop then the price is determined by supply and demand which is directly proportional to the amount of people to feed and the demand for that crop.

Bitcoin is in its infancy with a lot of players showing interest, about $500m invested in BTC associated development. Currently there is far more BTC swilling around then needed to buy/sell with and this is owned by investors/speculators.  As the day to day usage increases then the % held "on account' reduces.

So BTC spot price is based on sentiment created by traders not by the underlying adoption. Currently it is underpriced and a lot of panic selling has led to this but as the price drops more "investors' will buy which creaes the next rise. The next rise is important to create interest from outsiders and attract new money into the field and I can guarantee one thing... there will is another market bubble coming and we will go through this whole process again, and again...

It all depends on supply and demand, unlike regular money we can't just keep printing when needed.

There is no demand.  Nobody says I will ONLY accept Bitcoin

Except drug dealers and child pornographers.

Okay sure about the popularity but you can't really compare second life to bitcoin.  Just way too many variables to consider with btc compared to second life.  I would argue that bitcoin has a better chance of regaining popularity but I could imagine second life's popularity resurging if there was a revamp.  Well... again the same could be said for either.  But to compare the two so directly isn't really practical.