Bought at $19 too, I feel the pain.  But I bought to hold, and there's no evidence that BTC won't climb up that high again... eventually.  I just wish I'd held onto some of my investin' money for when the price came down this low.

LOL, I know it shouldn't be necessary to understand all the inner workings of the Bitcoin concept in order to use it, but this statement is pretty hilarious in light of the facts.  There's nobody to whom "the greed" could "get".  The fees are an optional feature (i.e. you can still send transactions without them) with three related functions:
- DoS prevention
- incentivizing mining
- transaction priority management

The fees get paid to the miners who process your transaction, not "the man".

Significantly, unless there's a mining boom in the next couple weeks, the next retarget after this one could be the first difficulty drop in quite some time (though it would probably be a fairly small drop).

Yes.  And I sympathize with how difficult it is to predict how long a product will take to produce, and then push it on time.  However, I sympathize less and less with their PR.  If they gave us a worst-case launch date to start with (say, next Sunday), then they could have shifted the date forward as their estimates improved instead of backward.  It's cowardly to just tell us what we want to hear when they know there's a 90% chance it'll wind up being a lie.

I've been defending Gox pretty much the whole time, but this is starting to drive me crazy.  MagicalTux hasn't posted anything on the forum since the 21st.  It should have been obvious to me when they admitted their deadlines were just there to get people off their back, that they didn't take the notion of a timely and orderly restoration of service very seriously.  :-/

Mined 6, and lost them.  Bought 20ish.

Because they're impatient, or unsure that it will ever drop to $15 again.  There are plenty of people who were left wishing that they'd bought at $1, but if they wait for the price to go back down to $1, they could be waiting forever.  Assuming the price will continue to rise more or less continuously (which seemed like a safe assumption just a couple weeks ago), it's better to buy late than never.

All assignment of value in the context of currency is a sort of "mass delusion".  People often mistake for "real value" the many methods that can be used stabilize perceived value and lower the probability of the delusion wearing off:
- fiat (i.e. you must use a particular currency to pay your taxes)
- guarantees that one currency can be exchanged for another with a more stable perceived value (i.e. the gold standard)
- the fact that a particular currency is the basis of many businesses and easily exchanged for many products

Ultimately, #3 is the most potent, if the least talked about.  This is what will stabilize the value of Bitcoin in the long run, and earn it legitimacy.

Or over a longer time scale:


This seems to roughly correspond to the mass index, implying that confidence in Bitcoin peaks just before a reversal.  Don't know how relevant that is to your original question, though.

Re: my last post

Bitcoin is entirely unexplored territory, so it seems this question will only be answered in retrospect (and even then, "risk" can be a somewhat meaningless concept in retrospect, because we only know whether something went right or wrong, not what the probability of this outcome was).  Theoretically, as best as I understand, the price at any given time should be pretty much proportional to:

number of users * average perception of reward / average perception of risk

This function experiences cycles of both positive and negative feedback, as fast gains in price increase both the perception of reward and the perception of risk.  The perception of risk has necessarily increased since the Mt. Gox incident, so I suspect the relative stability of price can be attributed to the first variable - the publicity has caused the user-base to grow faster than ever.

Based on my somewhat naive equation, we could actually come up with a rough "risk ratio" if we found some metric for user activity, such as forum posts / day.  (Though it would be a challenge to compare this to other commodities.)

Don't despair, kiba, I'm pretty sure you and your publication are well-respected in the community.  People are just distracted right now with the Mt. Gox disaster, and there has been a flood of newbies who aren't so well-acquainted with old-timers like yourself.  You might just want to wait until the market settles down and do a new advertising push.

If you're not in touch with the operators of bitcoinwatch.com, I'd look into it, because I (for one) read almost all of the articles they link to in their headlines section.  They've linked to four of your articles in the past, but the last one was on May 27th.

(I would donate a few bitcents myself, but the hard drive on my personal computer died, so I don't have access to my funds right now.  Fortunately I backed up my wallet.dat just a couple days earlier...)

I am 100+ and where am I?

But wasn't that a disaster last time we tried it?  Oh, that was a good poster / bad poster mod.

XD  Touche.

Just wanted to say, I don't necessarily agree with your position, Atlas, but I want to +1 you for being one of the most consistently level-headed and insightful posters on this forum, and for having a particular knack for not feeding trolls.

For what it's worth, so far 10 out of 15 votes are in favour of rollback.

Don't look now, but I think Jesus is about to win all the bitcoins...

+1

EDIT:  Wait, does +1 count as a zero-value post?   

@jaybny  Sorry, that is a bit of a quotepuke, isn't it?  I'll trim that down...

Don't want to derail the thread any worse than it already has been.

Something's happening, Mt. Gox just reappeared on bitcoincharts.com, but it's still not possible to log in...