For me I made my investment years ago, and it did me okay.  It's not a butterfly/fling thing.  I'm in a relationship with BTC (not wishing too sound weird), and will stick with it through thick and thin, even if that means $0, as dollars are not what I respect.

In fact I had a $100 bill that was given to me as part of a minor repayment several months ago, and I asked an American friend "do you want this?" because to me it looks like monopoly money.  He took it of course, but really I felt no loss.  I just asked that if he valued it then pay me back in nachos/beer/burritos or local food.  We shook hands on that, but if he had failed to come though, I still would have felt no loss at all.  Just glad I could convert into something material.

Looks to me on the weekly chart that we're going to be in a sideways channel for a while.

I'm in the camp of "I'd throw $1000 at it" as it's still better than a lottery ticket.  I can't conceive of a situation that would cause that though with what we know at the moment.

I'm not a margin trader, or even a full reserve trader.  I just bought the amount of coin that I'm comfortable with, and will hang on to them no matter what the price dips are, since the level of investment is in the comfortable region for my current circumstances.  I'd be a little worried if I were in the stock market - although everything is taking a hit at the moment it seems.  I just want to keep a level head whilst all around me are losing theirs, (to mess up an old piece of literature).

I'm not convinced anymore that halving will have any sustained effect.  We might see a short term fizzle of a firework that disappoints perhaps.

Too many people have the same opinion, so likely it won't happen.  If you count the number of Billionaires in the world compared to the rest of us, then herd thinking doesn't seem to make you (us) stand out.  If you want to be Neil Armstrong then you don't go purely for safety, as there are no herds on 'da moon' that I'm currently aware of.

I mean, if you're convinced that it will go up 10x or 25x by next year, then why not mortgage everything and sell your grandma, car and that half gallon of milk in the refrigerator while prices are lower than what they're anticipated to be within the next year?

Looking at how the chart is panning out, the 'random walk' could do it by end of year (not a prediction), but end of month is looking increasingly unlikely.

Efficiency isn't a factor if everybody has access to the same tech.  If you have a computer and the rest of the world has a typewriter then you have an advantage, but if everyone has the same tools then it is irrelevant.

What I'm curious about is the stuff like Tesla battery/solar units, and if they're successful (I think even the first gen will be), then power consumption isn't a drain on the planets currently finite electricity.  If it is the case that the price miners need to make to not want to sell is important whilst waiting for fees to replace coin generation, then the Tesla type stuff could change the formula.  Perhaps someone will invent a new capacitor/battery to sink lightning for storage, who knows.  There is a lot we don't know.

Scarcity and adoption would be more important imho.

I think the most probable scenario is that there is a human trader (or a group) with large resources gaming the bots.  When we get a large move it seems to rebound and then sit around for a while until the nerves settle to make sure it's not for a fundamental issue and just some gaming going on.  It also seems to sit in that area whatever 'that area' is, as if the actual price is not that relevant yet to many, just that nothing has happened that breaks the system.

XT/fork/disputes are a factor I'm sure, though less significant.

As for block size and transaction capacity, I think that depends on what Bitcoins most popular use case turns out to be.  If it's 100 people moving $10mill each per day then it's no issue.  If it's microtransactions of a few cents by a couple of billion people then it would be something that needs attention.

I think it could quite easily do it, but whether it stays there or just pops its head over the parapet is less certain.

I think the main issue is it is such a hard thing for people who have grown up with other forms of transaction to get their head around.  That coupled with the fact that most people don't understand the banking system as it is today, and how close to a cliff edge it is, I'd guess it will be a long game before we see what its true potential is and how that plays out, which will likely be something different than any of us can imagine.

With Crowd Intelligence you can aggregate the results, but there are a couple of key points that need to be followed for the  results to have any validity, which a vote like this thread will not provide:

1. Requisite Variety:  There needs to be a wide range of skills, from butcher/baker/candlestick maker etc.  Experts alone will not provide a better result, although their estimations should be included.  People who know nothing at all about the subject have just as much value when aggregating.

2.  The Crowd must not be allowed to confer, otherwise the there will be some transfer/entrainment that will reduce the accuracy, where people do not like to risk being at the outside of the herd.  Further, if all participants have access to the same information sources, then that too will cause it to fail.

There are a couple more points, but for the sake of brevity, if you think of the TV show "who wants to be a millionaire", the "Ask the audience" option is by far the most accurate choice, as they have to select an answer very quickly, don't have time to confer, and don't know what other people are choosing.  With that you can get accuracy in the 95%+ range, even if it is just guessing the number of jelly beans in a jar, or the weight of something that nobody really knows the answer to.  James Surowiecki is the go-to guy on the subject, and wrote the book on the subject.

Not sure why, but everytime I think of Ethereum I get an image of Rabbit Telecommunications (in Britain several decades back).  Great idea, but just didn't get the market penetration.

Just looking at the EMA on a weekly chart would suggest we're at a decision junction.  I would guess that it's up from here for a while, but moon I'm not so sure of since it would just be speculators rather than adoption.

I'd like to think that I never have to convert any BTC to cash (though I do find it interesting to compare it with USD).

Perhaps the use case is what will decide the price (whether for average purchases, gold alternative, or some other case we haven't seen yet).  Depending on what it becomes known for could add or remove several zeros to the price.

For the shorter term I think around $300 is all I would expect this year, then a few months before halving it could climb to maybe $400's, and then it will pause for a while, as people look around to see if that's a real price or not, then if it stays there for a few weeks we could go to $600-700 range fairly quickly.

Although there is potential for the very large numbers, I think it's still just a small seedling and not the oak tree we'd like it to be.  That I feel is 5-10+ years down the road.

I just had a play around with the "Estimate Trading" function in BitcoinWisdom, and put various numbers in there, and it looks like the difference that could be made to the market after fees might be enough to buy a newspaper and cup of coffee even if successful.

I think you'd need to team up with a lot of other people to do it, but even then, who are you going to buy/sell to/from when you want to close the position?

I hope you're right, I think it would make a lot of us very happy.  ETF, Gemini, adoption are all good additions, but they're all things that I would expect to be priced in to some degree by current watchers.  I think exposure to average Joe could be more powerful than all other influences if that should come to pass, especially if something made people lose faith in the current fiat system (though from talking to people who have never heard of BTC it seems that has a long way to go, as they still think money in the bank is something they own and is surety).

What is your reasoning for the increase, a lull and then rocket scenario in the chart?

My guess, bearing in mind that opinions are like a-holes (in that everyone has one) is somewhere in the price range of what Tzupy is saying - maybe $300-400.  Of course we can never know really, but I think that would be a decent target for end of year, as I think the bulls have been calibrated to expect moon now, when reality actually bites hard and brings us down to earth to some degree.  I mean 100%+ gain in a couple of years isn't that bad compared to buying gov't T-Bonds and 'espoused' inflation rather than 'actual' inflation.

I'm just finding myself impatient (as I guess a lot of us may be) waiting a few years to find out if that's reasonable or not, or whether the world is going to implode on itself, beforehand.

A 'slow bull market' is probably what's best for bitcoin, even if it doesn't fit the wet dream instant gratification idea.

Yeah, understand and agree.  It's just that everytime I look at the chart and people talking about how much value it's lost on a time frame that suits their statistics (as opposed to the huge amount it has gained on a longer time frame), I want to remove that large climb and get a feel for what may have been a possible less exuberant alternative, even if the +/- error is still pretty large.

We can draw lines on the charts all day long, but just a little more data might show a very different story perhaps(?).

I'm wondering if anyone has looked at removing the influence of the MTGOX Willy bot in a chart (which from what I've read appears to be at times between 25-90% of the bubble that created the ATH.

It would be interesting to see what it might have looked like without that influence, although we'll never accurately know.

It's a little beyond my current skill set, but I'm very curious.  I believe it was "WizSec" that did a lot of work on this.

If they get auctioned, I doubt they would end up on an exchange market any time soon.  The winning bidder would be buying for a reason and likely playing a long game, and wouldn't want to disturb the visible market for even a minute.

If seized, then they're potentially not going to see the market either, though that is less certain as I read it.

I think if someone is planning in the 3-5+ year frame, then anything less than the previous ATH (whether real or Gox induced), is probably not a bad place to be.

Ask:

I see various calls in direction, but am I correct in thinking that as the way the market has been playing out lately, that you're currently short term minor bearish but long major term bullish?