To the trader who wants to get in. 

Free advice is worth every penny.  But here's what I think.

Put a buy order somewhere around $900.  That's still in the volatility band, I think.

In a couple weeks it may dip that low or lower momentarily and then continue gaining. It may go to $1500 before it does though. 

Then again, it might dip that low and keep falling.  If that happens put in more buys at $800, $600, and $500, if you can get them in before the price goes down that far. 

And finally, it might never get down to $900 again, but I kinda doubt it.  If that happens, your buy order does nothing harmful to you except you lose the opportunity if it dips to $925 and goes right back up.

I'm thinking in the long run it will continue to go up.  But it'll lose 50% of its value and gain it back a few more times along the way. In the past it's lost 80% or more once or twice, 50% a half-dozen times. 

You don't have to be crazy to trade Bitcoin, but it helps. It also helps if you make faint clanging noises when you walk. The line between the two is hazy at times though. 

Aaaand, it's gone.

Heh. 

First of all, this guy needs to be found and stopped and arrested and stand trial and go to jail.  He's bad for the world and he's bad for Bitcoin and this is murder we're talking about - he's as guilty as whoever pulls the trigger. 

And he's guilty of failing to learn the same lesson most governments have never learned.  If you want people to stop thinking that killing others is the solution, first you have to stop killing people.

Besides, I think most of those guys, even the ones who messed up, were doing the best they could.  But that doesn't matter, MURDER is just as heinous a crime regardless of job performance.

That said, I think he's funding the retirements of federal officials.  Look at it this way.  Ben Bernanke decides he can "disappear", calls the FBI, points them at the web site, and asks to enter America's witness protection program.  Considering the circumstances (he did after all testify about what happened in court, and that's why people want him dead) I think he's a shoo-in.  So, Bernanke sends 1 BTC to this guy, names a date, and then, with the help of the Secret Service, fakes his death on that date.  A few days later "Sam Jenkins" or somebody retires in the Bahamas.  This works for me.

https://www.bitstamp.net/market/order_book/

Someone wants to buy 1.8 million dollars worth of coin, for $925.  That is one hell of a bid wall. Actually it was over $2 million yesterday but some other holders have already been eating it.

If any large holders have been looking for a chance to cash out without destroying the market, now's the time. 

Holy Crap!

Look at the order book today!  

Someone has placed a 1.8 million-dollar wall on the 'bid' side! If the price goes down to 925, he or she or they wants to buy damn near 2 million bucks worth of coin.  That looks like a strong price support.  I bet the price won't hit 924 before New years, now, and I had been thinking it would dip below 900.  

Or, if anybody with large holdings wants to sell, they can sell right now without moving the market much. 

https://www.bitstamp.net/market/order_book/

No way to do it without bankrupting the middle class?

Um, why?  If there is no redistribution (ie, Satoshi continues to sit on his money) the money that's not in circulation simply doesn't count -- ie, the value produced will be the same whether there are 100 coins in actual circulation, or 21 million.  The difference is that with just 100 coins we'd need a unit smaller than Satoshis.  But that's easy.

The market cap of coins in actual circulation, I expect to be about equal to the value it provides in its roles relative to the banking system now in place.  If 90% is held out of circulation by the earlier adopters, then that market cap will be spread over one-tenth as many coins and the equilibrium price will be ten times higher.  As oldtimers start using the coins that have been held out of circulation, the equilibrium price will simply go down.  But if the old timers aren't complete idiots who spend their coin all at once in unison, the price won't come down more than 5 or 10 percent a year.  And people are entirely used to that kind of inflation.  

I'm with you about the Ponzi Collapse.  That's definitely going to happen.  A government-forced redistribution, I kinda doubt.

Bitcoin is and will be a coin for e-commerce, transfers, and remittances; that is what it does best  (Although I'm counting on the dev team to fix some scalability issues here).

Right now, people are holding it as an investment, just because it's been going up.  That isn't sustainable.  It already has a price *FAR* beyond the value that people are NOW getting from using it in e-commerce or to transfer money.  But we suppose that in the future more people will start using it for that, hence we suppose that its current price is far below the eventual value it will provide for those purposes.  

However, once it has the value correct for its role as a fully deployed, actually useful transfer and remittance coin, all further gains are pure Ponzi Bubble, and will collapse as the bubble comes to an end.  When that happens I expect Bitcoin to lose 90% or more of its price and *NOT* start going up again.   But I also expect that the final price will be at least two and possibly three orders of magnitude higher than where it is now, and the tip of the bubble to be an order of magnitude higher than that.  

Here is what I think.

Once cryptocoins are the primary form of mainstream money, their value (if supply is permanently limited) will be what you can spend them for; they won't be deflationary any more, except to the extent that the economy grows.  They'll appear to be inflationary if the economy is shrinking.

What you've got if you've got a coin then is just fairly ordinary money, except that in the long run, it represents a "share" of the economy itself, with its value growing and shrinking in exact proportion to how the economy grows and shrinks. And the economy is likely to grow not-much faster than today if you're ruling out off-earth growth.

That means your Americoin (or Eurocoin, or Asiacoin) represents a chunk of wealth that grows at the same average rate as all the businesses in the world.  It's like being invested in the biggest index fund ever. 

So, if you've spotted a business you think will do *better* than most, you're wise to invest your coin.  But that's actually difficult to do. And if you don't trust your judgment about which companies to invest in, you'll do no worse than average by just holding your coins.

I think that this is actually a pretty good future.  If average human beings can do as well by just having coins as the average among the heavily invested wealthy elite, it might be a lot more equitable.

I'd bet on it dropping to 900 or below at some point before the end of the year. 

But I also bet it'll finish the year over 1000.

Looks like somebody wants to sell 2500 coins the instant he can get US$1000 for them.

That is a price cliff that people are going to have to bid under if they want to sell their coins at all. 

So it'll be a little while I think before that gets demolished.  Maybe another couple days.   

dudes.  Look at the order book.

https://www.bitstamp.net/market/order_book/


See that very shallowly sloping line on the left?  That's bids.

See the cliff on the right?  That's asks.

Looking at this, it appears that you have deep demand and short supply.  Usually that means a price goes down.

Intrinsic material value is near worthless.  A $100 bill costs no more to produce than a $1 bill.  Intrinsic value is absolutely unrelated to the value of currency.

Fiat money has value because it is backed by the ability of governments to obtain wealth produced by productive people via taxation.

Productive people by definition, produce goods or services of value.  The government, by definition, has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force.  Therefore the government can always get a share of that value, so government-issued currency represents a share of the future productivity of the productive people who are subject to that government. 

That is not the reason why Bitcoin has value; Bitcoin has value because people doing transactions with it can do so more efficiently and are thereby enabled to produce or retain greater value than they could produce via use of fiat.  At that point bitcoin is "producing value" to the extent that it helps people to produce or retain more value than they could otherwise.

One of the most productive things to do in the 21st century is to cut middlemen out of all transactions, and that is what Bitcoin does.

If you want efficient distribution of money in an altcoin, do the following:

1.  Use a mining algorithm that doesn't reward specialized equipment, because that makes mining a specialized business that only rich people will do.  

2.  Abandon the idea of a fixed finite amount of eventual coin.  Instead, increase mining rewards by 5% every year.  In the very long run, you can build a very healthy economy with 5% inflation.  Value will fluctuate wildly in the adoption phase, but eventually you get 5% inflation.

3.  Fix it so mining rewards are not so concentrated.  Every block should reward hundreds, maybe even thousands, of people with small awards.  Not by making "pools" but directly.  Make mining reward "near misses."

4.  5% inflation, when finally achieved, progressively devalues any money that is just hoarded.  That includes the highly disproportionate rewards held by the very early adopters.  There's a motive to spend it, possibly to capitalize new businesses.


Now, if you do this, you will *still* get a wealthy elite.  But it'll be a wealthy elite who have to get that way by managing their money and investing wisely, rather than just buying in early.

The chinese government has been allowing or covertly promoting increasingly rabid anti-japanese rhetoric for a couple of years now (Including giant banners at factories that say things like "all japanese must die" and so forth.

It seems likely that they are planning a short brutal war and looking for some pretext to go to war over.

Looking for 10K by the end of 2014.  I'm about 85% sure.

100K?  I'm thinking maybe before 2017.  But it's still too far out to tell with any certainty.

Keep in mind, I'm probably wrong.

You expected it might?  You're basically talking about a worldwide payment system that undercuts him.  Adoption of bitcoin would hurt his business. 

Currency brokers are unlikely to be helpful. Bitcoin makes them obsolete.

If I wanted to buy right now I'd place a buy order at around $900 and wait.  $900 is still very likely in the volatility band.

as I write this, gox is at US$965. 

It could even happen later today.