anyone who shouts out bitcoin has no value are simply metal hoarders that are getting hurt because the customer base that they use to sell their metals to at a premium are now buying bitcoin..

thats the more simple answer.

bitcoin has the same value as investment gold.(not to confuse with the intrinsic value of manufacturing gold)
initial price is set by the costs of mining the gold (excavators, sluice machines, labour, transportation, storage, security)

bitcoin is similar. bitcoin miners spend alot of money on equipment, electricity.. and added to that the time.

say a bitcoin miner had free electric, free mining equipment. but no other job. if it took 2 weeks to make a bitcoin. he would still only sell his bitcoin for a price to cover 2 weeks of living costs. EG $300.($150 / week minimal living cost)
now add on price of electric for the miners that dont get free electric. this may equate to $60.
now looking at the difficulty. the cost of equipment to be able to mine a bitcoin in 2 weeks is about the same as a 4 module avalon averaging $2000. and knowing that every difficulty increase over the last 3 months as been near 40% lets say that the miner would be required to buy a new unit every month($800 at 40%). just to break even.

so lets combine it all $800+$60+$300=$1160

this $1160 would become the minimal price a career miner would sell their bitcoin for which would increase in price as difficulty increases or would decrease as difficulty decreases.

prices above the 'cost' would be where value (usefulness and desirability) is added and other factors known as profit or speculation. prices below this are known as panic, loss, stupidity, or more accurately. people that dont know the true value or cost.

you will find early investors that 'got' their coins cheaper more willing to sell for less, but until people start realising that bitcoin does have value and costs, they will continue to panic sell at absurdly low prices, instead of hoarding for  few days to let the panic subside.

i can see one possible knit pick reply. which is that gold miners do not set their prices based on labour&cost. they accept whatever their gold purchase contacts offer them.

well this is where bitcoin is different. bitcoin is peer-2-peer there is no middle man who sets the price and demands miners hand over the hoarded at the middle mans prices. miners and hoarders have direct contact with customers. so there is no price fixing.

same story as gold as it is for farmers, if only farmers had the freedom of 'barter' trade that bitcoins offer. they would actually be able to sell milk and meat at its true value. and not at the reduced rate supermarkets force upon them

rant over

valuation= Ariel narrow + embolding
smart money= ariel + embolding + italic + grey colour (possibly ariel black+ italic + grey colour )
stealth phase=Calibri + embolding

you can tell by the slight diagonal cut off of the tip of the t = ariel
but "stealth" does not have the cut off so it is not part of same font family

step 1: buy a raspberry Pi
step 2: use that purely as your wallet client
step 3: no games, no free downloads, or other risky stuff
step 4: use main pc for junk and mining control with it set to send rewards to bitcoin address only the Pi knows the privkey of
step 5: never link the 2 units together and remember to follow steps 2&3 at all times

if localbitcoins was hacked,  everyone would be complaining. same for youtube

so my advice is grab the private keys to your stash, back them up on paper and digital form. and factory reset your computer as its more then likely that
A) you have used a stupidly easy password
B) your someone that likes downloading free software and have got a trojan on your PC

once recovered to factory settings. make a decision, is money more important the free, dodgy software.
then decide to continue using the PC as the money store and purchase a gaming/media PC for the fr download risky stuff
or
us your PC for the entertainment freely downloaded risky stuff and buy a basic machine/ raspberry Pi to store your money.

then on the clean money making machine. change the passwords of everything, including email to something stronger

and never mix the two machines up.

the fact that unless im silly enough to give out my private key to some third party.. this will never happen to me:
http://rt.com/business/jpmorgan-data-loss-cyber-attack-752/

LOL

3 computer IT geeks trying it out in the financial management market...

yes they know about coding a secure reliable site, but do they truly know all the legal issues around holding FIAT and being responsible for possibly millions of peoples money?

im getting a weird de ja vu image here of amir taaki, with his intersango and bitcoinca attempts.

id much prefer a proper forex management company making a bitcoin exchange rather than 3 IT scholars from oxford... just saying. but after all, the lovely freedom of bitcoin entrepreneurship.. lets let anyone have a try. and see how it goes

... high school economics.. pfft

the actual analysis is that the miners difficulty. meaning their investment and predicted returns caused the price rise as they were unwilling to sell cheap (making a loss). that is the true reason for the rise, along with alot of investors joining into bitcoin causing the demand to allow these miners to hoard for the best prices.

as for the recent sell off.. check out the charts. it has happened every first week of the month for the last 6 months. it is more apparent this month due to black friday and people wanting fiat for christmas present buying at merchants that dont accept bitcoin. the whole first week of the month sell off is usually merchants converting their hoards into FIAT to restock and pay their employee's.

it is not 100% pure speculation! there are noticable physical and meaningful factors too.

back to the topic at hand:
if running off for a year. get the private keys from your wallets. write them down in 5 locations on paper. also make a few digital copies of the wallet too. and store them al securely. dont just leave them on your PC as the only backup.

it is not. there are new people joining into bitcoin daily. and they are not all geeks or freaks. they are investors and forex traders. personally as a forex trader i love the ups and downs. movement means profit. if something only moved $1 value per year unless i had $1m invested i would not make $10k a year profit. but with movements of $100's a month i can make soo much more using so far less initial investment.


taking bitcoin and manually cashing out at the end of the night back into fiat. you are right shop owners get hurt. but for shop owners that don't actually want or have interest in bitcoin, but are just using it to gain more customers. they can use bitpay which removes the hurt by fixing the value. instead of accepting bitcoin and risking the value change that may occur by the time they cash up in the evening. merchants should not be thinking ok if i accept this bitcoin at 10AM and i cash out at bitstamp at 7pm after i close for the day, wht am i risking. they should be thinking either
1) if i need to cash out today lets use bitpay
2) if im going to hold for the long term growth/investment ill do things manually

i personally had FIAT, converted it to bitcoin sent it to another country and that person converted it to their native currency.. all within 10 minutes and at better rates then travelex bureau de change could offer. but if your going to wait all day, then accept the risk. or use a service to protect the volatility.

and as i said before. bitcoin is still young. everyone that has researched the first days of using gold, has found 'bartering' volatile initially. same as the first days of bank notes. no one knew how to value it. one baker would charge a totally different amount of bread loaves compared to another baker for the same bank note. untill everyone got used to it and it became common.

so calm down, bitcoin is YOUNG!!!

many people think that in a few decades governments will crumble and every single person of the 7 billion people in the world will be using bitcoin. this is just not the case.

so far with lets say only 1.5m people only ever having to invest $10k (once in their life) comes to the valuation of 12mill coins at $1300 value each. so imagine only 20 million($7k per coin once all 21m are 'minted'/mined) people or 50 million($18k  per coin once all 21m are 'minted'/mined) people use bitcoin, thats still some large valuation numbers.

so it does not require whole world adoption to outvalue gold.. and of those 50million people. lets say that they work internationally, or work from home, or prefer payment in bitcoin so that they can easily use it when their vacation days come around.

there will be more stability and ALOT more merchants.

alot of you beleive that bitcoin is near the end. YOU ARE ALL WRONG, there is over a century to go of mining and beyond that.. well lets allow our great great grandkids worry about that,

at the moment bitcoins is going through its teenage rebellion stage of life, resisting authority and trying to find its own way in life to become fully independant.

no one should be worrying about volitility. as there are services such as bitpay that will give instant valuations and a good enough time buffer for customers to pay wthout the merchant losing out. and then when bitcoin has 'sowed his wild oates' so to speak and calmed its volitility down then you will see the future of bitcoin.

at the moment bitcoin is too young to see whats in its future. all we know is that it has a future, and a long way to go yet.

now to be more direct about your answer.
i like to see a near future that when i go online from the UK i dont see just £ prices or $ prices. meaning if i go to an american site i have to convert  it to pounds. or if i go to a euro site i have to convert euro to pounds or if i go to a japanese, ill have to convert yen to pounds. id like to see a universal valuation in bitcoins. and when i go abroad for vacation i dont have to worry about travellers cheques, currency conversion rates, i just use my phone with a local person to do transactions and get more cash without trying to find a ATM that accepts my UK FIAT card and know a universal conversion rate.. of bitcoins

10 years ago i complained that a game was 1GB and was filling up 25% of my hard drive (i had 4GB hdd at the time)
now Call of Duty Ghosts is 30GB, and no one is complaining.

give it 10 years and no one will complain about blockchain sizes as we will all have internet of 100mb/s + and harddrives of atleast 10TB where as the blockchain would only be half a TB

what if you make your own coin with such protocol changes.. and see if your own coin takes off.. call it byte coin with the moto something like "its like bitcoin, but 8 years in length". (EG bit x8=byte)

no one want to hear their bitcoins would evaporate within 8 years. by having bitcoins protocol that can delete TX's that are 8 years old and then increase the standard block reward to cover the amount deleted would just make it so bitcoins can be reprinted.. which would ruin bitcoin

so how about make your own coin and see if it catches on, not change bitcoins protocol

scenario
oh and by the way, that $20k FIAT your grandma has put away safely under her matress for the last decade. its now gone.. tell her its been burnt, she cant have it back, but now someone else is $20k richer just by being the lucky worker at the US mint that day the certain printing batch came out that had an extra $20k in it. tell her you allowed FIAT law to change so that if she didnt spend it in 8 years she would lose it, and its all your fault.

or better yet. tell her theres a new currency coming out that has a 8 year lifespan, she can put her money under the matress into. see if she would buy into it or stick with the old unchanged rules that means what is her's is hers for life

as for worrying about blockchain sizes..

in 1999 a 4gigabyte hard drive was considered big. a decade later a terrabyte hard drive was considered big. 5 years after that 2terrabyte hard drves can be bought for under $100.

now then at 1mb block. if every block was filled to the top. that would be 52gb a year growth of the blockchain*. so far in 4 years we have not even gone that far. and lets say in 10 years it did manage to contain 100% full blocks that is only half a terrabyte.

im sure in the next 10 years the price of terrabyte hard drives and internet speeds would make the potential blockchain length a non-issue. so again bitcoin protocol changes are irrational and would cause more damage then help.

*6mb per hour x24 = 144mb per day x 365 = 52.56GB per year

satoshi invented the concept and made the first design.. gavin andressen carried on, debugged, added more features, made it more user friendly and continues to work on it today. so atleast learn about the who's who of bitcoin before hailing a ghost as your god.

bitcoin is still in its teenage rebellion stage of life.. it is not yet truly ready for the big wide work of business. it is still growing. so calm down and relax, bitcoin will stabilise as soon as its 'sown its wild oats' and got control of its volatile hormone induced decisions without thoughts of others.

bitcoin is not a commodity!
its an asset
commodity = raw product with international standard of quality and vale, used to make other products
asset= possession held for storage of value.

assets can be used as part of trade as a currency for barter or held in storage for a store of wealth and should not be thought of as shares of a company or a raw material investment.

those worrying about the tank, dont panic. there is alway negative news the first week of each month. this has happened ever since april.. then folowed by 3 weeks of growth.

atleast research the past and dont panic about the future. bitcoin is still young. it is at the teenage rebellion stage fighting authority.. it is not at retirement age yet.

the 7 stages of life.. bitcoin life
2008- Birth: satoshi white paper
2009- first step: bitcoin pizza
2010-2012- troublesome toddler stage: silk road propoganda
2013- rebellious teen: fighting authority
the future- marriage: agreement with Fiat to be together for mutual benefit
the future- midlife crisis: maybe a major technical disaster to test bitcoins resolve
2140- retirement: no longer required to work(mine) for income but still useful around the community

+1


+1

i smell a finshaggy sock

everyone is obsessed with satoshi..

this is not a religion, people!

lets compare bitcoin to Apple. please watch the first 20 minutes of the Jobs movie. and realise it was Wozniak that "invented" the first design of the apple computer.

so that makes steve Jobs comparable to Gavin Andressen.. and wozniak compared to satoshi

so why doesn't wozniak get all the fame of Apple, much like satoshi seems to get the fame here.

if you want to make anyone your religious cult leader atleast get it right and follow Gavin..

tulip mania started because tulips were new to a country and demand was high. the downful was that there is no fixed supply of tulips, and once everyone has them they can all grow their own and make supply outweight demand.

bitcoin however has a fixed supply. and as more people get bitcoins there are less left to get in the world. sure there are minutes/hours when the daily 3600 generated coins along with hoarders selling old coins out-supplies the amount of people buying that day. but that lasts for maybe 2 hours..

generally bitcoin supply (through mining) is always going to be outside of the hands of 'everyday joe' thus people will continue buying coins or opening businesses to get coins forever increasing the price

there are many mathematical formula's to suggesst bitcoin is still very early in its growth.

take for instance this scenario
imagine 1.5million people only ever put a single $10k into bitcoin. with todays slightly over 12m coins in existance that equates to a
market cap of $15,600,000,000 with a individual coin value of $1300.

thats just 1.5 million people, thats just an average of a persons tax free allowance for one year.

and with each day there are only 3600 new coins available which if you continue on the bases that each investor on average invests $10k into bitcoin ever in their life. then the newly mined coins would only allow for 468 new people to join the bitcoin ecosystem without the price fluctuating.

yes there are sellers that leave the bitcoin ecosystem, but the supply of bitcoins only allows for 468 population growth at a $10k per head spend. or 4680 population growth per day at a $1k spend. (you can play with the numbers as you deem fit)

now to put this into reality. i am only talking about 1.5million people so far in bitcoin and only allowing for under 500 each day to join in just t keep bitcoin at $1300

there are 7 billion people in the world and some of them want to invest ALOT more then just a one time only $10k investment.

bitcoin is still at the start of global growth. and there will not be a saturation point because there is no endless supply. bitcoin will never be a tulip mania

1300 today they say.

well that means the new 3600 coins generated as miner reward comes to a daily total of $4,680,000. so as long as more then $4.7mill of Fiat which gets put into exchanges per day then the price will continue rising because of demand (more then $4.7m) exceeding supply (3600 coins)

is there any way of tallying up the exchanges $ deposits easily, to see the combined daily dollar volume of bitcoin?

if she wants bitcoins she can ask for them herself. there are too many people trying to be fund raisers for people /charities they are not personally in contact with.

and just having her receive bitcoins is not good PR. but having her doing an interview asking for donations directly is. so please dont attempt to manage a fund and say it will go to her.. theres been too many scammers running off with the funds.

if she wants bitcoin she can ask for them. simple.

well with her family wealth she can buy them herself and live off the profits of the price rise each year.