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.
It's true that Bitcoin was suddenly thrust into the media spotlight as a result of several co-ordinated blog posts. It is also true that a lot of speculators charged in and bought up bitcoins through exchanges as a way of making a quick buck. Prices went through the roof as a consequence and the story of that bubble sparked more media coverage in either a virtuous or vicious circle depending on your point of view. Virtuous if you wanted a quick buck, vicious if you were hoping to get more of the economic infrastructure (like EPOS, instant transactions etc) in place before it went mainstream.
The media will grab anything and everything that will help it draw attention to itself. There are a multitude of ways that bitcoin will be able make news in the future as others earlier in this topic have shown. This news could be good "Synaptic becomes first Bitcoin Billionaire - buys island in 10 minutes". Or it could be bad, see previous headline
+ 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 crazy, and ended with the Gox scandal. That's it folks. Bitcoin jumped the shark 3 weeks ago.
I disagree with this viewpoint. I think that Bitcoin has gone through a taste of mainstream attention and the services built on it were caught entirely by surprise. The fundamental operation of the currency was utterly unfazed. Lessons have been learned, and further developments are incorporating those insights. However, it takes time to develop new and improved code and so this is a quiet time for Bitcoin while more solid infrastructure is built.
+ 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.
Here you have made a very interesting observation. In my experience Bitcoin is currently seen as a currency speculation or medium term investment vehicle (3-5 years). What is desperately needed by the economy is for more people to spend their bitcoins on goods and services just like they do with other currencies. But this flies in the face of why many people bought them in the first place: to sit on them for the long term and reap the reward. Unfortunately, the Bitcoin economy will not grow with this attitude unless first time buyers continuously arrive and purchase bitcoins. In order to reap that reward a fraction of the money investors have set aside to buy BTCs must be spent on stuff that those investors need on a regular basis. So instead of buying a new set of headphones with local currency, Bitcoin investors should attempt to seek out a vendor willing to sell them in bitcoins. The price should be about the same and the overall economy will grow just a little bit leading to an increased in the relative value of your earliest position.
+ 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.
I agree that Amazon has not embraced Bitcoin just yet. Microsoft are a little slow to the table here, and perhaps Apple could have made more of an effort. However other large organisations are taking an interest, particularly those dealing with large sums of paper cash. (It costs a lot to securely move cash to and from the bank every day). The benefits that Bitcoin can bring to large organisations are manyfold, and anything that reduces operating costs is generally seen as a good thing. But, no-one is going to start adopting Bitcoin without seeing solid proof that it works in the mainstream. And getting there is really, really hard.
This is not a thread about the speculation of bitcoin's future, these are the facts.
All discussion about the future is by definition speculation, unless it is based entirely in mathematics when it becomes a fact. Bitcoin is based entirely in mathematics.
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