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.

these people that say its dead obviously bought in at the wrong price or sold on the low and then it increased and are now at a loss.

what you have to look at is the pattern for the last 6 months. every first week of the month you will see a larger then usual ramp-dump. then 3 weeks of steady rises..

this month might be different due to people cashing out to buy christmas gifts in FIAT or for the bitcoin merchants to sell off their coins to restock from FIAT suppliers.

apart from that bitcoin is far from dead. id give it 140 years + with no major changes to the bitcoin protocol, maybe less if some developer action causes a drastic change in direction of bitcoin (IE forks bitcoin into something useless or creates a new coin that exceeds the usability/features of bitcoin)

which is why im liking china taking over the volume of BTC making the yanks not the main hoarders. just need a few new clients developed from other countries that are as full as the QT client (include blockchain) but with other features (better UI)

pick a random number out of the air, and that will be a good enough number to work out population base of who owns what currency. I say this because i trade on bitstamp, btc-e and china.. yet im british. so where you trade does not mean the population is based their.
what i have found which may be more important. concerns the legal regulations side of the FIAT exchanging sites.

litecoin dev team is in majority European.
feathercoin dev team is majority british
Bitcoin dev team is majority american
ozcoin dev team is majority australian.

when it comes to these dev teams registering their "foundations" exchanges and businesses this will become the deciding factor of which law the coin mainly follows. i personally wished the bitcoin 'foundation' was called a 'consortium' thus not needing to make a charity/corporate listing which the U.S law demands by being called a 'foundation'.

the bitcoin crew could have still set their own rules about forming a board, setting goals, agenda's. but not having to do it by U.S law requirements. but more so by moral and democratic choice of the team to want it set up in such a way.

i know what i just said may not be of importance to you, but knowing the residence of the businesses linked to the coin far outweight the residences of the investors

bitpay faucets were initially used to entice people to start using bitcoins. by giving noobs their first free coin. not intended for people to go visiting 100 pages a day as part of their daily ritual to make income.

if anything a database would be made that once a IP address got some dust, that IP would be blocked forever. with the database pre-filled with known proxy and Tor nodes this would ensure more random users got coins, instead of a group of active faucet raiders

i know, but richard branson also only accepts bitcoins for limited amount of virgin galactic flights. all this news means that bitcoin is going to grow. the only thing that is happening is the standard first week of the month sell off. which has happened every month since april. and may become especially apparent in december as people prepare to buy FIAT paid christmas presents. do not think this is a crash that will cause long term suffering. its just a 'blip' in the grand scheme of things

in other china news. baidu. the chinese search engine accepting bitcoin. has now reported the CEO is now worlds richest man. exceeding google and other company values too.

so if china was to block bitcoin. it will upset their richest citizen, so i do not believe they would want this.

http://www.bloomberg.com/video/meet-china-s-new-richest-man-0SlX524KSa~jqmYkejBlZw.html

if he buys more bitcoins. he will become even more richer in the long term, as will we all.

so dont panic

as mylon said. the winkle ponzi has nothing to do with investors getting into bitcoin. it is simply about buying shares of a winkle company that is supposedly valued at an X amount of bitcoins.

the winkles are just using the bitcoin 'fame' to make personal profit for themselves. investors buying into the winkle EFT will not help the bitcoin market cap compared to buying bitcoins direct.

it is better to promote people to buy bitcoins direct, that way they wont be manipulated by the winkles false accounting of their business value

ask your great great grandkids to use their wealth to make a time machine to come back and tell ya.. as its not like you'll be around then to spend it. i personally would have sold out within 40 years, or much sooner depending on retirement plans i choose. so talks about the price or transaction fee's for miners and profitability at the end of the 21st million coin are truly irrelevant

because its on everyones computer. i guess you missed the first lesson of bitcoin...... its decentralised, hacking one location wouldn't/shouldnt harm the entire network

due to the near instant 'faster payment' system that the UK already have with banks, along with the silkroad propaganda, the uptake of bitcoin is rather sluggish.

in ammerica it is the norm for americans to experiment with drugs durng college and try things out when at parties. but in england, in relation to business especially. but mostly to those that are atleast 40yo. having anything related to drugs touching their business is a big fat no no in their eyes.

and to anyone about to reply that bank notes are tainted. dont even bother using that reply.

bitcoin positive media coverage is growing, and slowly getting there. but i would say that bitcoin UK is at the era of winter 2011 bitcoin US.

just like TV shows use to be, you yanks used to get to see movies and TV shows months before UK release. technology released months earlier in the US too.

UK is catching up now though

pfft
edison created bitcoin, as much as charlie chapman made "occupy"/"anonymous" groups
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RYlAPjyNm8

enough said.

though i do like the style of both videos to advertise and inspire, compared to bitcoins own cartoony feel

about the same as pick pocketers, handbag thieves, card cloners and identity thieves affect fiat users.

people have a high understanding that no matter where you have money, there is also someone that want to get it illegally.

as long as people that are attempting to get new people into bitcoin are also teaching them about back-ups, paperwallets first. and then phishing and other obvious scam things to spot EG "hellos stranger, blah...sob story.. blah..emergency..blah.. need cash now" as well as telling them to never download unofficial software onto a holding huge wealth. then it should at least prepare people..

now from another point of view.
scammers and thieves don't affect "bitcoin" but it does affect bitcoin users.

as long as the thieves at some point spend their coin thus keeping the coin in circulation then "bitcoin" will continue. what does harm "bitcoin" are when developers alter sourcecode of mining pools and client for greedy purposes and not the benefit of community.

OP

everyone in the UK uses the pound coin there are people that wear suits, there are people that are homeless. there are intellectuals, there are idiots.
there are logical thinkers, there are tinfoil conspiracy theorists. this is what i call a community.

i am sorry if you prefer to only hang around with oxford scholars. but that is your failings. welcome to the real world of an expanding currency.. everyone is welcome. whether we like it or not.

i personally was in your boat too but i learned to embrase the openness of bitcoin, and not think of it as 'for snobby members only club'. after all snobs usually have bank accounts and offshore accounts in europe. with 'faster payment' services so what bitcoin would bring to the UK is not fast funds transfer, but access to banking for the unbankable and ways for the unemployed to find work outside of establishment.

if you know the private key (because its only on paperwallet format) and not already in a client. or if funds are in a client then send all funds to a paperwallet (created using strong random phrase). of course double check all funds, including the 'change' funds have moved to the paper wallet. and triple check the spelling of paper wallet privkey.

then wipe your computer back to factory settings or use a linux based OS then install the legit bitcoin client.

never downloading torents or other programs from people/sources you dont know.

i personally have a Raspberry Pi that is my wallet. i only plug it in to send funds to another address. far cheaper then buying a whole new PC to use purely for fund storage.

tulip bulbs can be grown, and regrown. so theres no fixed quantity.

the whole tulip mania started because the first introduction of tulips into europe was rare, with only a small number of bulbs at first. everyone wanted them, then as years passed the supplies increased. so of course there became a point where it became common for everyone to have tulips thus devaluing it because everyone could grow their own.

bitcoin is fixed meaning there wont be anymore beyond that amount (21m). and with such high difficulty and such a large population base. not everyone can successfully mine sufficient amounts personally to sell for a nice lifestyle, so buying them is still and will continue to exceed natural supply growth while we reach the 21million.

bitcoins can in no way be compared to tulips and if a economist thinks they can then he has miss spelled his profession. and should be a ecologist, and go back to gardening.

that being said..
generic tulip bulbs can be bought 400 years later for £5 in the uk ($7.50) which is more expensive then feather coin or terracoin, and rare tulips bulbs can exceed the price of litecoin.

so i wouldnt call the tulip mania a complete disaster. the only failing is that there was no limited and finite supply to ensure value continued to rise, along with demand

of course drug users will get scammed. what are they going to do, call the cops and explain they lost money in a drugs deal.

+1 for a scam that makes bitcoin more legitimate