perfect lyrics to the new bitcoin rally song....!

It's pretty clear that nobody is buying bitcoins anymore.  Anyone that's going to buy up a lot of coins right now to prove me wrong is just throwing away money.    The only reason the price is staying in place is because of a select few rich individuals that can absorb enough coins to counteract any attack.  Nobody is selling because they see how much money is 'readily available' but that money would be used by now if it were intended to be used.

It's like playing a nice game of basketball, when all of a sudden Lebron James enters the game. At first you're like HELL YAH.... then you quickly realize that the only one scoring is Lebron James.

The long term trend for bitcoin value is contraction, not expansion.

Here's the fact of the matter:

+ Bitcoin just enjoyed more media exposure over the past 3 months than can reasonably be expected to occur anywhere in the near future. There's just nothing newsworthy forthcoming unless there is something scandalous that happens again, and we're just about out of interesting scandals. We've made the rounds from illegal purchasing to hacking to market failures.
  There's just nothing left to get the attention of corporate media. The fact is that no-one cares about bitcoin as a medium of exchange, except a small core constituency of idealists here on these forums. It HAD newsworthy spectacle value as prices skyrocketed and people "got rich quick," but those times are over.  There is nothing left of newsworthy value.

+ The price run-up happened SOLELY on hype alone. There's not much analysis that needs to be done here. It was clearly a bubble that started with the Silk Road coverage, inflated with the mining craze, and ended with the Gox scandal. That's it folks. Bitcoin jumped the shark 3 weeks ago.

+ The current "stability" is no such thing. There is no stability when there's no backing economy.  The only "stability" we're seeing is roughly the same sub 10-15,000 (could be exceedingly lower, and possibly a bit higher though doubtfully) "investors" propping up the price and using trading bots to maintain the appearance of a functioning market and "stability."
  The fact is that the market has been on a slow and steady DECLINE ever since Gox came back online. This is because there is no new blood entering the market, just the same old speculators throwing more of their paychecks into it; BUT, not enough to grow the market. That's why were seeing a steady loss of a few cents of USD value everyday. And this will continue for the long haul.

+ Echoing the same dilemma of 3 months ago when bitcoin began catching on with speculators, "Where is the bitcoin economy."  Well folks, this is it. The list of bitcoin merchants hasn't grown at all, and in fact if you browse the Trade section of bitcoin.org itself, and explore some of the merchants there you'll find that some of them have removed their bitcoin advertisements and no longer APPEAR to accept it. I encourage you to peruse them and see for yourself, because during that excercise you'll also see that basically all businesses listed are extremely small time, mom and pop shop operations, and most of them quite amateur at that.  That is your bitcoin economy. That is what you have to work with now, and for any reasonable foreseeable future.

This is not a thread about the speculation of bitcoin's future, these are the facts.

I salute you!!   

I sold about 60% of my BTC last week when it started to dip as I wanted to recover my initial investment so what remained was pure profit.

Now the price is a lot higher and I really wished I'd held longer, but still I am sat on roughly 25BTC and that is all profit so I am relatively happy still I do kinda wish I hadn't sold so many last year though, but thats life eh?

Also, with the advent of the Silk Road, and Asians being notorious opiate feinds, he may have died of overdose or retired to a den.

The speed at which USD is getting irrelevant is no joke. The end to petrodollar is being invented right here in the US, thanks to Tesla

dexX7 is probably right and I suppose we here saying USD in future tense usually mean "today's USD".

I do not know the answer to Gordonium's question. I, however, expect that there will be supply shocks around 2017 and 2020. See https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Controlled_supply and specifically new coin emission dropping from 9% and 4% and from ~4% to ~2%.

There is also upcoming supply shock, which will happens much sooner when current 3-5% a day difficulty growth drop to 0% or less which will also mean supply of new coins dropping by about 40%. Of course, this is only about new coin supply. There is also old coin/hoard supply and demand parts of the equation that also affect the price.

But if you want a number, I would say/speculate ~100 000$ per BTC in 2017 and closer to 1 000 000$ per BTC in 2020.

That's the point, there won't be a whole lot of international demand for dollars. Zimbabwe money's worth something in Zimbabwe but outside Zimbabwe its only real value is an example of what happens when things go wrong.

It is. I laughed quite a bit.