My only reservation would be if the usd really does collapse, then all bets are off and I have no f'n idea what will happen.

$24 

What is this 'something awful'-forum?  Firstly their green font on a black background gave me a headache, secondly, at least on that first page, there wasn't a single coherent post that smelled remotely of any kind of intelligence. I felt a bit like walking among thugs without a brain, going there. How on earth have they managed to gather so many fools on a single forum ? And why on earth does anyone indulge in any mindless drivel like this ?

Just go there and see for yourself. Imagine a foreign alien peaking into the internet, and the SA-forum is the first thing they see. He reports to his superiors: "Not sure, but it seems like they've developed a very advanced form of cryptographic communication that manifests itself as drivel. This is really advanced, let's move on to the next planet, and deal with these geniuses later on!"

THIS IS MY BET

Thanks for the analisys nrd525.  There are good reasons for a price increase this time. Here's whats different from a year ago:

Silk Road is doing at least 2mil/month.  Forum usage up hundreds of percent over last year.

A $10mil company will be releasing the BitcoinCard this year at the Vienna Bitcoin Conference. The Russian founders say 5 years of research have gone into this technology allowing a super-low-power credit card sized device to send texts, bitcoins, login info, and consumer data through an ad-hoc network instead of cell towers, at a card cost of only $10-$25

The block reward has halved, decreasing the supply of new coins to 3600 coins/day

Network transaction fees per day are up 1100% from 4 to 48

SatoshiDice has shown the potential of the bitcoin gambling market by earning $600k, including 17,266 bitcoins in December

BitInstant lets you buy bitcoins at walmart, 7-11, and CVS

Explosion in p2p exchanges for cash or bank transfers on sites like localbitcoins

There are many different bitcoin wallets for android and iPhone.

Many companies in the bitcoin community have gone public.

Coinlab and BitPay each got 500k in venture capital.  Coinbase got 100k.

Wordpress signed up with BitPay, the 20th largest website in the world.  BitPay then doubled their number of merchants in three months.

Somewhere around 3000 merchants accept bitcoin, up several hundred percent.

Bitcoin Foundation Launched in September 2012

Bitcoin can be traded on forex exchanges

New bitcoin based businesses are announced every day due to zero barrier to entry

I've lost all my understanding of life and all. I just keep saying to myself 'What the hell is going on?' since we hit 15.

Hey, I offer you an opportunity to short bitcoins. Put in any amount of your USD as collateral, and I will lend you the coins. If the value of the coins exceed your collateral, I will immediately buy bitcoins with your money. What you borrow is up to you, I'm confident I can cover whatever USD you put up with.

Yeah but that is quite long. I think you can leave out the valuation in fiat or USD part, when you say monetary base everybody understand what you're talking about. Only when writing a scientific paper you could go for the full name.

Maybe a couple of the values need some discussion but it's not far off (content-wise) - perhaps we could think about adding it to the Wiki?

Please, take profits. I dare you.

I can almost remember making a certain image...not too long ago

Suppose we divide everyone in the society into two corporate A and corporate B, (or similar to an island with only 2 people), each year banks loan out 1 Billion to A and 1 Billion to B, and they do production and consumption and trade with each other. They need to return the loan plus interest. Since the money supply is only 2 Billion, where is that extra interest come from?

Obviously, it can only come from the previous savings of A and B, so if this process continue, sooner or later A and B's saving will be depleted. Of course bankers will also spend their earned interest to buy products from A and B, but since everyone have also the need to save, it can not balance itself

There is a way to avoid this from happening: Continuously issue new loan to A and B, for them to pay back the old loan + interest. And for each new loan, same rule applies, they need future loan money to payback the interest, and if they want to have some savings, even more future loans are needed

But any business have a market size limit, after reaching certain maturity, there are less and less growth, so eventually this model will be broke for any industry

Then the hope is placed on the new enterprises in the future, but that is also non-sustainable. These new enterprises must have much higher income to digest all the existing business' higher and higher sale. With existing enterprise getting more and more, the size of new enterprises will reach an impossible level to support the earnings for all the existing enterprises

As a result, the original observation might be more close to reality: Everyone's saving is depleted slowly by the banks, and saving becomes more and more difficult

I'm not sure whether the fact that he'll continue making a profit without understanding how Bitcoin works is good or bad 

OK, it has never been my intention to force my opinion to anyone - I was merely replying to the OP's poll and arguing my view. As I stated, that was my thumb suck, and nothing else.

I am comfortable with my knowledge, I started mining with a single CPU, then moved along with the technology, well, I always ensured to stay way ahead of it. Currently I am mining with FPGAs (very profitably, FYI) and soon I will have considerable hash-rates thanks to the AISCs I will deploy. I've planned that right, and as usual, I will enjoying the results of my plans.

But you people should not worry about me being right or wrong - it is quite easy to determine if I am wrong - you just have to wait a year or two.

Fortunately, most of the ones who called the raise of BTC to over [insert your favourite unreasonable value here] will be long gone by the year end, similar to the ones who "predicted" in June 2011 that the BTC will be worth over $100 before the year end, or the others who stated that the BTC will be worth $millions by the time of the decade and one could buy a house with a single Bitcoin.

Unlike me, back in the days, where I thought the market will tolerate reasonable value for the BTC of not more than 100% of the mining cost - so we ended up with BTC=$5 and I made quite a profit with that.

So I rest my case.