Bitcoin addresses are also like mokeskin pouches for gold coins: "A mokeskin pouch is a kind of small bag that is used for storing items, which no one but the owner can get out." (Harry Potter)

...except that these pouches can be stored in your brain!

And while a mokeskin pouch looks small and unassuming but may carry very large objects, a Bitcoin address can carry huge amounts of wealth and are not merely small and unassuming but completely invisible! (Yes, the fact that it's stored in your brain entails this already, but see the previous post. People need all the implications driven home for them, or else *whoosh*.)

I've been saying this for a while.

BTC = Beam up The Coin

Beamcoin?

This reminds me of something I've been meaning to put to the community for general discussion: One of the biggest hindrances to Bitcoin adoption is that it has so many amazing features that are so unbelievable that it is almost impossible for anyone to process and believe all of those features at once because it sets off their bullshit detectors. Or it just sails by them with a *whoosh* because it's so outside their everyday experience. The more succinctly you try to present Bitcoin's value proposition, the less it really registers with people.

This is even true to an extent among people who are already sold on Bitcoin, including many in this community.

We need to capture people's imaginations and engage their emotions in order for them to fully internalize what Bitcoin has to offer, and sci-fi references provide a powerful way to do that.

The proof is right there: the fact that bitcoins have all the essential characteristics of beamable gold coins is all by itself enough to propel Bitcoin into the mainstream, yet that is only one of its many amazing features. If it only had one killer feature it would be easier to sell, but it has many so it's actually too unbelievable for most people.

How about making sci-fi/fantasy explanations for all Bitcoin's great features?

Extremely bullish bundle of news. This was unthinkable just a few months ago.

Barring decisive good or bad news, my best guess is we slide sideways in the range for a while (maybe a week or two), since there seem to be hard caps both on the upside and the downside for the short term: below $100 = instant buy, above $130 or $150 = strong incentive to take some profits since people remember the pain of being burned by the bubble.

After that, start to move toward $200.

Yeah I think we agree, but it was a good chance to talk about the epistemology of estimation.

Also, yes, I almost never post without editing it five or six times afterward. Somehow it's too hard to judge it until it's out there, and I'm always in a hurry.

I'm sort of on the fence as far as whether to use percentages (and risk portraying a false sense of precision) or words, but my reasoning is that percentages can at least be broken down into definite regular intervals, whereas natural language has more fuzzy, irregular intervals like slightly, somewhat, quite a bit, rather, significantly, substantially, considerably, etc.

On the other hand, those intervals or distinctions are born out of the natural order of language usage and therefore have passed a sort of market test for usefulness. Perhaps, for example, they are fuzzy where humans tend to be worst at estimating, making that a feature, not a bug.

However, the sphere such terms were vetted in is not investing so much as general everyday talk, like talking about the weather or how hungry you are. I tend to think at least the 11-21 distinctions allowed for by percentage multiples of ten (0%, 10%, 20%...100%) or multiples of five can be learned to be used accurately enough to provide additional utility over natural language terms.

Also consider, "She's hot, but this girl is smoking hot, and that girl over there is a freakin' goddess," versus "She's an 8, this girl's an 8.5, and that girl over there is a 9+." While one man's 6 is another man's 10, the latter is still vastly easier to work with and communicate with consistently. Hard numbers at least give a reference point; you at least know that if someone says there's a 90% chance and later says there's an 80% chance, you know the latter is supposed to be lower.

Nothing black magic, just additional info. The confidence is based on introspection on my ability to faithfully match estimated visceral sense of odds with hard percentages. It's simply not as useful to say just "30-40% chance of Yes," when that could mean "I'm 90% confident that there's a 30-40% chance of Yes" or "I reached the conclusion that there's a 30-40% chance of Yes, but I'm only 55% confident in that conclusion."

It's something I wish everyone would do when they give their estimated odds on something, so I'm doing it.

Mwahahahahaaaaa

Remember whe the price was largely insensitive to bad news, like the fork? Well now it's the opposite; we've had a ton of great news (Paypal, WU, Facebook ex-exec with Zuckerberg's ear, other big VCs at the Techcrunch conference, China, China, China!) and the price is simply coiling up like a spring exactly on the 2013 exponential trendline at a little over $100.

All in all I see three salient factors.

1) The old faithful trendline has us taking another 3-4 weeks to reach $200:



2) Coiling like a snake ready to strike (read: surge could happen faster, maybe within 2 weeks)

3) But sentiment remains somewhat pessimistic, or probably more accurate to say "stubborn to react to good news" (suggests the coiling might continue for a bit longer, more than 2 weeks)

Therefore, I estimate 30-40% chance of reaching $200, with 60% confidence on those odds. In other words, "I don't know" leaning toward "No," but that of course also still implies a not-insignificant chance of "Yes." (I voted "I don't know.")

Extremely bullish. This feels at least an order of magnitude more advanced than five months ago, so now finally the current price seems justified again. Straight exponential growth, with the Cyprus bubble as a detour.

The segment is actually 4 minutes, and what he says in the second half is also about Bitcoin, though he doesn't mention it by name. This guy, as a very well-spoken former Facebook exec, is a one-man PR machine.

Biggest infusion of venture capital yet into the Bitcoin ecosystem, by far. It was big news a few months ago when Coinbase raised half a million, so this news is ten times as big - though it's true that back then there wasn't much big news at all so it stuck out more.

A proliferation of altcoins - like we're experiencing now - would just make people actually look at the fundamental value proposition of each altcoin (dev team, soundness of concept, uniqueness of utility, network effects, hashing power, and track record), causing most of them to die as they are sorely deficient in most or all of these. We're in an altcoin bubble right now, where even some random piece of code dropped into the forum anonymously gets investment. That doesn't mean all altcoins will fall, but the vast majority will.

Bitcoin will be unaffected, or maybe helped by the influx of new ideas. Looking at the fundamentals, it is simply undeniable that almost all the altcoins are a joke compared to Bitcoin.

I think Chamath is bigger news. He's a one-man PR machine. Oh, plus that whole China thing.

Do they call you Mr. Silver Lining?

Another big development and the price just sits there. Excellent buying OP.

I'm just saying Japanese is in total a lot harder than Chinese as far as reading goes, even though some things can be said in J without any kanji.

I have essentially native-level Japanese reading ability, only studied Chinese for few days, but I can already read a lot of Chinese. Chinese has more characters than Japanese and they often have different meanings, but they are MUCH easier to learn. For one thing, they usually can only be read one way and are one syllable, of course very unlike Japanese.

Dammit! How did I miss the best thread on the whole forum?! I'm PISSED!!

--

Anyway, this is a great insight in the OP: Bitcoin is the only (or at the least by far the greatest) open-source project where there is a direct incentive to contribute. Someone implied the Winkelvii twins are too rich to care. No no, that misses the whole thrust: when Bitcoin makes them 10 or 100 times richer than they already are, and there's "trouble in paradise" in the Bitcoin ecosystem, as owners of 1% of all bitcoins in existence they are going to want to try to fix it. Whatever kind of rich they are now, they are going to a whole new level, and then a whole new level beyond that if only certain problems would be solved. They are going to care. Not to mention, this is their chance to deliver the sweetest FU to Zuckerberg.

Also, someone wondered how Satoshi was so smart to think of all this. Well that's the great thing about the market. Satoshi understood economics enough to know that setting up a system where the incentives are right will automatically result in the system building itself, scaling just on time, maintaining exponential growth by ways that no one can anticipate because millions of minds are all working on it together and separately. Bitcoin is the market, harnessed. Harnessed more effectively than it's ever been.

Others commented about all the "speculation." Well short-term speculation may be bad, but just because someone is "in it to win it" as a long-term holder in this digital gold rush is not a bad thing; in fact it's a very good thing, a wholly necessary thing. The more strong-hand Bitcoin believers we have - people who understand the revolution-upon-a-revolution that is taking place - the better, because they drive the price higher and only sell small amounts as needed, creating a net deflation, which results in more stability as the price rises and it is harder to push the market around or do a pump-and-dump. So "speculation is the enemy of speculation"...read: long-term speculation solves all the problems now being attributed to short-term speculation.

Finally, Bitcoin is just the beginning. As amazing as the changes we are seeing now and will see in the future thanks to Bitcoin adoption, the things that are built on top of it will be even more revolutionary. It's like the Internet² or even Internet^Internet. Whereas the Internet enabled a zillion more things having to do with easy transfer of information, including Bitcoin, Bitcoin itself will in turn enable a zillion more things having to do with easy transfer of value/claim (smart property, insurance, many other things no one can yet imagine...then many many more things on top of those).

Huh? People can buy less than 1 BTC of course, so what's the problem? If a poor farmer has only X amount (like 70 yuan) to invest, if BTC rises 100x he still multiplies his investable money by 100. If 700 yuan is outright unattainable for him, he'd probably be very happy to have 7,000 yuan.

Bitcoin is the only investment I've ever seen where it's possible to invest time amounts.

I would definitely take this bet, too. If I win, awesome, and if I lose, even more awesome!

However, somewhere I believe Pietila clarified that he only places 50%(?) confidence on that outcome, so this is probably not going to happen, unfortunately