People in this thread are so frickin' jumpy.

I suggest never looking at Bitcoinity at anything less than the 30-day scale, unless you're about to make a trade, and always look at the long-term charts afterward to maintain some perspective.

This runtime error is happening even without lockscreen. Just BOOM, shutdown while scanning transaction history. Restart, same thing. Can't use it at all now.

The wealth distribution in Bitcoin is NOTHING LIKE the wealth distribution in fiat money, simply because the fiat-rich have all sorts of other kinds of power besides money: political connections, power over the media, controlling stakes in major corporations, power over the clergy, etc. Without that kind of power, the Bitcoin-rich will have no way to hold on to their position nearly as strongly; when they spend, their money gets distributed to everyone else. When the fiat-rich spend, they just get more back because they have some control over the money flows.

The reason wealth is centralized in the fiat world is because power is also centralized in that world. There is some power centralization in the Bitcoin world, but it is dramatically less. And what power concentrations do exist are vastly less about to control where the money goes. None of the Bitcoin millionaires have influence over the central bank or government or media or church or major corporations.

With Bitcoin there will still be some concentration of wealth - that is unavoidable simply because some people are better at making money than others and care more about it - but it will be way less concentrated than in the fiat world.

As for what happens when the big players cash out, well, many of them have most definitely been cashing out all this time, and you can see what's happened so far.

Easy:

1) A whale wanted in with no slippage (huge bid wall)

2) Eventually another whale who wanted to take a large, no-slippage profit seized the opportunity

3) The market overreacted to the whale mating as expected (whales prefer to mate with no slippage)

4) Nice buying op (window closing fast)

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area

This isn't any kind of charting technique. I'm simply point out that it's premature to call the end of the trend when we've been above it just as much as below it. It's expected that the bubble will result in a lull of some degree of protractedness. I'm not saying the trend will continue, but that there's no particular reason based on the price data itself to believe it won't.

The comment about grasping at straws is especially ironic, because the OP was intended exactly to prevent people from grasping at straws to declare the trend as over. It may be over, but the mere fact that we happen to be below it now does not imply that, any more than the fact that we happened to be above a few weeks ago - especially since we've not even been below it any more than we've been above it.

We need a weighted average price from all the major exchanges.

It's not so much that this price woud be more useful (it'd be almost the same as the MtGox price usually), but that by popularizing this as the standard it would help dethrone MtGox at the standardbearer, aiding in much-needed decentralization.

Seems plausible. We still may get our $10,000 Christmas present, but in characteristically suprising and volatile fashion where we spend several months in a relative lull then explode higher on the tails of some major news.

If Bitcoin fails catastrophically but there is a small fix that can make it work perfectly again in like a month with the same private keys controlling the same amounts of coins, the new Bitcoin would probably be adopted by 100,000 people in a snap.

It's speculation using historical trends of varying lengths to try to find some kind of usable pattern in the price action.

At any given time, an ongoing trend is more likely to continue than not (thus the old investment adage, "The trend is your friend"). So there is a lot of interest in identifying what "the" trend is. People present different trends and try to explain why they think the price is tracking their trend and what might have triggered that trend. Trends can be multilayered; there can be trends within trends (within trends).

In this case we had a remarkably steady, clear trend of fast exponential growth from mid-January until April. Just a few weeks after it started, I asked what might happen if it were to continue, then in mid-February I extrapolated that trend to predict $100 by the end of April even though a bitcoin was only $25 at the time.

Then the bubble started it onto double-exponential (exponential growth in the rate of price growth, rather than just exponential growth in price) and went way above the trendline, exceeding even my incredibly bullish predictions that were laughed at. That was great for a while, but then the bubble popped and the price fell quite a ways below the trendline. What now?

Well the question arises: Are we still following that same trend? Right now we are well below the trendline, so it could be argued the technical damage from the bubble broke whatever fundamental reason that was driving the exponential growth since mid-January. However, it can alternatively be argued that it is pointless to say we are no longer tracking the trendline when we haven't been below the trendline any more than we've been above it (the green and red regions in the first graph are about equal). It could be argued that we should at least wait until we've been below the trendline for a lot longer than we were above it before we start to wonder if the 2013 exponential growth trend has been broken.

Moreover, if we go with the assumption that the trend will continue (since "the trend is your friend"), then the fact that we've spent this much time this far below the trendline indicates we are likely to go higher in the coming weeks. Conversely, if we spend a lot more time below the trendline, it would give reason to start to doubt the 2013 trendline, perhaps reverting to the historical trendline posted above.

The historical trend means only around $500/BTC at the end of the year, which is a lot less than the $10,000/BTC we'd have if we continued with the 2013 trendline.

I feel pretty safe then saying that the price will rise by somewhere between 4x and 100x by year-end.

That chart looks way more short-term bullish than mine. It makes this latest "bubble" look like nothing more than a warm-up.

Low volume is what you'd expect during stable periods.


Pruden = Proudhon?

I take this to mean the bubble grief has almost bled out and we are close to reverting to the exponential growth trendline that started in January.

What's happening is the environment surrounding society is changing thanks to the Internet and other technologies. With a different mix of nutrients, different bacteria will grow in a petri dish. With different technological factors like ubiquitous cameras, broadcasting, and all news and trends and old assumptions being fine-tooth-combed in totally free, anonymous debate, the nature of the structures that survive in society will inevitably change as well.

See this for an elaboration of this argument: http://mises.org/Community/forums/t/8889.aspx

The trend is massively toward decentralization, and Bitcoin is the coup de grâce, the tidal wave that has yet to hit shore. Moreover, each revolution enables the next, bigger revolution to happen even faster: agricultural revolution --> industrial revolution --> information revolution (the Internet) --> financial revolution (Bitcoin, built on top of the Internet) --> power stucture revolution (new governance-related stuff built on top of Bitcoin (smart contracts, trustless escrow, insurance, BMOT, private online arbitration, fully anonymous businesses like SR, etc.)).

Though mathematically it's just exponential growth, the pace of changes in the coming years (months??*) will feel like a singularity as the speed of change starts to cross certain human thresholds.


*That it might happen this soon is part of the whole point that the change is going to start happening at a pace that will perpetually surprise almost everyone. Get used to anticipating being surprised.

Three things seem clear from the recent discussions on forming decentralized exchanges.

1) The actual transfer of actual fiat money is the bottleneck

2) Banks and other existing institutions will have to be the trusted parties, meaning they must be interfaced with, with or without their knowledge

3) Not enough people here know enough about banking systems and protocols to discuss the possibilities at the necessary level (myself included)

Does anyone know of a forum for such topics? There seem to be forums for everything nowadays.

Prediction:

We start pounding at $150's door over the coming week, then bust out quite a bit higher, topping $200 by June 15.

Yes. Decentralization and price rise are mutually reinforcing, one of many virtuous cycles in the Bitcoin world.

Provided the data from the bank has the right characteristics, why couldn't an oracle be used as the escrow "agent"?

It's simply reversion the 2013 exponential growth trend. It should go higher in the coming days/weeks until it catches up. Right now it should be above $150, so it's likely to make another upward move soon.

The reasoning by which he concluded the global reserve currency would be fiat seems faulty: governments are not an aggregate blob; each one has its own interests. No single government wants to give up its fiat control, but even less do they want to use another country's fiat. They will use gold (or maybe someday bitcoins).