If bitcoin is controlled by a few programmers or a group of mining farms, then it is even worse than 12 FOMC members in FED. Bitcoin should be easy to understand for everyone, no conspiracy and hidden secrets. No one in the world can use personal power to affect gold's property, so should bitcoin. Gavin is just following the early hints of Satoshi, nothing more

I think anyone with significant amount of bitcoin holding (10K+ USD) will surely setup a dedicated node on high speed residential networks, the cost of such a server is very low comparing with the safety of his investment

Mining farms on the other hand will have a trend to further centralize, that is the danger, has nothing to do with block size

This is like diplomatic negotiation between large countries, no way to vote for a decision, and hard fork/hash war will destroy every participants. Participants would have to take some compromise and reach a middle ground

In fact, the more flexible you are, the easier you can reach a solution. But the world is full of stubborn man 

Economy is not science, but politics. Science is about something that human can not change, the rule is set by nature. But economy is purely decided by human

Difficulty has just jumped 5%, some 14/16nm chips are being turned on?

Previous two bubbles in bitcoin are mostly caused by the several magnitudes of efficiency raise of mining: Because mining usually is the lowest possible cost to get coin, when mining technology shifts, majority of miners will lose the ability to get enough coin through mining, and decided to go to market and purchase, that made the exchange rate skyrocket

After technology shift is over and new generation mining rigs can be deployed at large scale, the cost of mining will again become the lowest cost to get coins, so coin's exchange rate will eventually get close to the cost of mining due to arbitraging

During the bubble, many people paid their fiat money to get mining rigs or bitcoin, directly or indirectly supported the miners to upgrade infrastructure. And after the upgrading, the whole network commands much higher hash rate and becomes much more secure. Because many of those infrastructure projects have been ROIed, they can be easily relocated to places with cheap electricity and maintain same hash rate as before

This means, the network hash rate will never go down long term wise, due to more and more mining rigs will be ROIed over time. At the same time the barrier of entry will become higher and higher: There is a cost for each mining rig, unless you can make rigs of magnitudes higher efficiency, it might never ROI. Even if you have much more efficient miner, it would still take quite some time to ROI because of the heavy investment in chips

So, bitcoin's value is not only guaranteed by the mathematics in the protocol, but also driven by the continuous increase in the hashing power. When the barrier of entry getting higher and higher, anyone who want to invest in bitcoin mining would have to throw in a fortune to get some meaningful return

This is quite different than gold. Depleting a gold mine will not increase the difficulty of future gold mining too much, you would have similar cost when a new gold mine is found. But in bitcoin, all the investment are accumulative, makes it more and more difficult worldwide to get bitcoin over time, even the supply is constant in a 4 years period

That's the reason after each bubble, the bitcoin exchange rate will stabilize at much higher level than last bottom, due to higher barrier of entry in mining. This barrier drives small investors to exchanges and raise the exchange rate

They see the possibility in using bitcoin to overcome international sanctions, similar to Chinese corrupted officers using bitcoin to transfer their wealth to western thus bypass the capital control

Exactly, people are enslaved by the fiat money, but at the same time they are addicted to it

I thought it was obvious on 4H chart  

Elephant

Euro itself is also money out of thin air, now ECB is printing 60 billion per month without end in sight. The only difference is that the trust of Euro is higher than drachma due to euro zone is bigger (that is everyone's knowledge about fiat currency: If big country print money, it worth a lot, if small country print money, it worth a little )

For private person, government has no real good way and enough resource to trace everyone's wallet, so most likely it will be regulated like cash, limiting maximum daily withdraw and deposit to exchanges, and many people will use it as a medium of saving like gold

However, businesses need to do large transactions, they will be regulated differently, their wallet address must be registered at financial regulators and periodically audited. Accenture has described such a prerequisite for bitcoin to go mainstream

After this, bitcoin will be more formalized and have more government support. But the usage would still be limited at IT people, long term saving and international commerce. Anyway, people will spend inflative fiat money instead of deflative bitcoin, they will not use it at large scale domestically, but they might use it to place international orders online

And every 4 years, following the reward halving, there will be a wave of speculation bubble raise coin's value by many folds. Early adopters start to cash out some coins, and others will be attracted and join the journey to the next reward halving

Seldom see this in bitcoin bottom, positive sign

It is a number game in exchange's database. I have seen Kraken price lower than other exchanges from time to time, maybe a way to trigger the long orders' stop loss, but without leverage they could not wipe out traders at large scale using a margin call

This has been discussed many times, large miners forming an OPEC-like organization, control the coin supply and set the market price

However, bitcoin is not like petroleum, it can not be consumed, thus the market supply mostly come from existing holders. Even if miners control majority of the daily new coin generation, that's still a small amount comparing with the daily coin cash out from previous owners. And after the next reward halving, their influence will be even less

So it is only a number game in the platform to wipe out users more quickly, like those Forex bucket shop. Gamblers like it

But if I have deposited €200 and withdrew 10 bitcoin, I might never come back to this exchange, so I guess they have to limit the amount of withdraw to be less than my deposit, e.g. I could withdraw maximum 1 bitcoin in this case, the rest 9 stays in their database, waiting to be wiped out by a margin call

Money printers usually like Keynesian economics, because Austrian economics will limit their ability to print money and enslave others

However, I don't understand why so many people who don't have the right to print money also appreciate the Keynesian economics, what a mind job

All those bitcoin start ups have huge amount of bitcoin holding, promoting the bitcoin service will raise the value of bitcoin, thus raise the value of their assets, the service is like advertisement

Anyway this is still a very new branch, everywhere is almost empty, like internet in 90s

I guess that no one in government have the slightest idea about what is going on inside banks. Because of this, when things went wrong, they always make the wrong decision, and hit the most trivial part of the system. They bailout the bank by giving them the right to create trillions of dollars, and then banks use those dollars to enslave the nation. They tried to regulate banks, but their bailout is in fact the biggest deregulation