Nobody knows and the reddit threads that are created en masse smell of FUD and fake.

Or so I suspect, at least.

We've just seen large investments in US-based bitcoin companies by savvy VC firms. Circle and Coinbase are both saying that they're going to make bitcoin easier for people to acquire and use. I'm sure they'll be successful in that, but they're also probably targeting next-gen uses of the blockchain (see Naval Ravikant, Co-founder/CEO of Angellist's "The Internet of Money": http://startupboy.com/2013/11/07/bitcoin-the-internet-of-money/ ). Seeing some real apps along those lines will drive another wave of excitement, and convince yet another slice of the populace that bitcoin has merit and is here to stay.

Along the way, someone is going to solve the money-transmission licensing problem. The reason we don't have any solid US-based exchanges is due to state-by-state MTL requirements, and specifically, the surety-bond coverage requirements for businesses to obtain such licenses. Either Coinbase, Circle, or some new well-funded entity will go through the expensive work of getting the licenses, or start a fund/company that's knowledgeable about bitcoin and willing to underwrite the bond coverage. Solving this problem will lead to much better liquidity in the US, and allow for some of the next-gen services outlined above, as well as advanced trading and hedging.

That leads to the beginning of real integration with Wall St. It seems like they're *starting* to shift from completely mocking bitcoin to dipping their toes in the water. They need *much* better liquidity to do anything significant, but unleashing real US exchange platforms will make that possible. Additionally, vehicles like SecondMarket's Bitcoin Investment Trust are already proving popular, and that trend will continue. The potential issue of near/medium term regulatory uncertainty was removed with last month's senate hearings, and further financial integration and products will come as a result, in due time.

In any event, these things are all inter-related and tend to snowball. The hard parts of getting the ball rolling and reducing regulatory uncertainty have already happened.

China can do what they want; I think it's far more likely that the US ends up housing the most robust and sophisticated bitcoin ecosystem.

it feels like the market at an impasse

we can see much higher prices in the future

but in the short term we are overbought.

in the past the short term speculation has won out over the long term potential value

but this time its really not so clear what the market will do.

Serious money is going to be flowing in to bitcoin all through 2014. Sell now if you think you can acquire a few more before chew chew chrain resumes. I'd say it's unnecessary greed. And it's annoying listening to all the "pmg itz g0 dw0n !1"

This is turning into a fucking troll box like on btc-e.

Actually a slow slide downwards often turns into an avalanche at some point. People holding bitcoins hate seeing its value slowly sliding down and down and at some point the twig just breaks. So far not seeing that here because we're still sitting at the same price level where we were yesterday for a long time but if we slide below 840-850 on Gox (830 Bitstamp) a real sell-off is very easily triggered.

So far it seems like the states haven't been panicking too much. Fingers crossed for simply a huge correction?

if BTC crashes to sub $500 any time soon, it'll be 50 cents per mBTC. it might be a bit premature to switch to mBTC at this point, since we don't know exactly what the bottom is.