Because there will be no "departure for the moon".  If the moon is reached, it will be slowly.


As far as I understand, the previous bubble was a scam from MtGox.  I won't think such a naive manipulation would be possible at such a scale, again.  People learn.


As I pointed out, that market adoption, which is a fundamental, will be obvious, slow, and through merchant adoption.  It won't happen overnight.  You don't wake up a sudden morning to realize that 1% of world economy has switched to bitcoin overnight.
You don't wake up a sudden morning to find out that 10% of the gold market switched to bitcoin the evening before.
This is for $30 000. - a coin.  A "rocket to the moon" to $30 000.- is hence not possible overnight. 
Which means that a surge to, say, $3000.- is not going to go much higher overnight.  You can really take your time to watch.  There's no FOMO.  If you are at $3000.- and you've not seen the gold market being taken over, you've not seen 1% of world economy taking on bitcoin, you know it won't rise a factor of 10.  So it is at the ceiling at $3000.- (hence no hurry) or it will go down (most probably).




The point is that the higher bubbles are, the more expensive they are.  And the money that is looking at bitcoin is also much less naive than before.
Bigger, smarter money won't get trapped so easily in a bot manipulation on an exchange.

It depends how $1000.- is reached.  If it is smoothly reached over a long period of steady rise, yes.  If it surges, no.

One already knows that a surge is not a departure for the moon, but will be followed by a prolonged period going down.
And now one can make profit with that , by shorting.  

If greed is the drive, then it would be based upon the "greater fool" hypothesis.  We all know how that ends.
Point is, the greater fool has already been tested last year.
The higher the price, the lower the expected remaining rise, so the less the greed motive works.

The point is that the initial booms of bitcoin were potentially of another kind.  There weren't the same trading possibilities, one was not involving so much money (I suppose), and, I pointed this out, except in 2011, there has never been a very prolongued decay that did hurt several people so much for so much money as the MtGox manipulation (which was the origin of the rise to $1200.- if I understand it: willy bot, no ?).
This is, in other words, the first time that somewhat serious money got lost.
The MtGox rise made people think the trip to the moon started and they had to get onto the train before.   Now, everybody informing himself about the bitcoin price knows that after a surge, you better wait for the price to come down again before buying.   Yes, price can be somewhat higher than the "stable" price before the peak.  But not too much.

I really would be surprised if there were a lot of people burning themselves again in a peak to a few $1000.- in the coming months.  And if nobody, or almost nobody's buying at such prices, price WILL of course come down. 

Bitcoin may eventually one day become a currency.  If there is generalized merchant adoption.

You are repeating the "good money drives bad money out of the market" theme.   Point is, it is the market that decides what good money is :-)  It will be determined by merchant (and customer) adoption.

I know it will take (A LOT OF) time !  I was just illustrating the logical consequences of any theoretical model that postulates:

- S-curve technology adoption in the "near" future
- good drives out bad (meaning: finite market share is not possible, it has to be 100%)

as has been put forward a few times to say 'with certainty' that bitcoin will "go to the moon" soon (in a few years).

Then you get plots of technology adoption of internet, mobile phones, TV and so on to illustrate the S-type adoption.

The only point is: if it is now clear that S-curve adoption in the near future to 100% is not a very viable model, and if it is, that it would be catastrophic given the still very high mining rewards, then what IS a viable model ?

Because how does something like a speculative asset do for, say, more than 20 years without "breakthrough" ?  How does confidence and trust behave if after 20 years, it is still a small thing ?

I'm trying to explore critically what are the possibilities of bitcoin.  I just showed the peculiarities of the model "to the moon soon", which make it hard to believe.  

Could it go stepwise ?  Every few years, a new conquest of a small niche market ?  To keep it slowly growing ?  To keep the flame burning ?  It started out in the black market.  It is taking on a few "geek" niches.
However, how long can this slow stepwise conquest without "the big S-curve hit" last ?

idk about you but at < 3000 a bitcoin i'll spend my fiat thank you very much.

D00d going by Flashman:  Unless you have more than your snark to contribute to the conversation, learn to STFU.
ty

Sure, the next reward halving would cut it in half.  Also cutting the security of the network in half by causing miners to shut down (remember--the cost of mining should approach the price of coins mined according to satoshi).  Unless Bitcoin prices happen to double on that happy day.

Yes.  Working great.  Unlike the Bitcoin fiasco--a "store of value" that loses half of its value in a year
Props for getting me to answer your faggotry. 

Yes, faggot, I do.  And the whole world is already using it.
It's called money, or "fiat" as you retards have taken to calling it.
You may now return to being a spergy little faggot.

Yah, two sets of books, one set kept in pencil.

If you make your own altcoin, and you mine it exclusively yourself, and you hoard it 100%, and you replace bitcoin by the name of your altcoin in the above argument, what changes ?

According to satoshi and common sense, the cost of mining should approach the price of the coins mined.
This year, approximately 10% of the total Bitcoin in existence has been mined.  In other words, if satoshi is correct, the total cost of maintaining Bitcoin network at the present level of security is 10% of the total market cap.
Few will argue that the lion's share of that cost is electricity.  There are online mining calculators which will give you a relatively accurate number, the only guesswork on your part would need to be the the breakdown (by brand and model, and, thus, efficiency) of the gear being used.  

Right now, Bitcoin's market cap is small enough for this to be almost inconsequential.  But if Bitcoin does succeed as the new world currency, this implies that 10% of the world's wealth will be consumed each year.  Most of it in electrical costs.  That's staggering, and supplying that much energy is likely unfeasible.  Certainly not too eco friendly


But that's all irrelevant.  We're starting off with the assumption that running a Bitcoin network is the right way to do money.  It's not.
Presupposing that blockchain must be maintained is as justified as specifying mice as the prime mover in the next space shuttle design.  Sure, it could be done by introducing some truly Goldbergian complications, but ... see where I'm going with this?

Interesting point re. all the graphic cards sold.
It would be a great point if those graphic cards were running at maximum energy consumption 24/7 during their lifetime, and if that energy consumption was anywhere close to today's ASICSs.

And if those graphic cards were used to fill giant aircraft hangers, like so:

And yes, energy is never wasted, only transformed.  Because first law of thermodynamics.  Good one

Haha! don't believe everything you read on the internet

Economists err if they believe something is wrong when money is not in constant, active “circulation.” Money is only useful for exchange value, true, but it is not only useful at the actual moment of exchange. This truth has been often overlooked. Money is just as useful when lying “idle” in somebody’s cash balance, even in a miser’s “hoard.” (At what point does a man’s cash balance become a faintly disreputable “hoard,” or the prudent man a miser? It is impossible to fix any definite criterion: generally, the charge of “hoarding” means that A is keeping more cash than B thinks is appropriate for A.) For that money is being held now in wait for possible future exchange—it supplies to its owner, right now, the usefulness of permitting exchanges at any time—present or future—the owner might desire.

It should be remembered that all gold must be owned by someone, and therefore that all gold must be held in people’s cash balances. If there are 3,000 tons of gold in the society, all 3,000 tons must be owned and held, at any one time, in the cash balances of individual people. The total sum of cash balances is always identical with the total supply of money in the society. Thus, ironically, if it were not for the uncertainty of the real world, there could be no monetary system at all! In a certain world, no one would be willing to hold cash, so the demand for money in society would fall infinitely, prices would skyrocket without end, and any monetary system would break down. Instead of the existence of cash balances being an annoying and troublesome factor, interfering with monetary exchange, it is absolutely necessary to any monetary economy.

It is misleading, furthermore, to say that money “circulates.” Like all metaphors taken from the physical sciences, it connotes some sort of mechanical process, independent of human will, which moves at a certain speed of flow, or “velocity.” Actually, money does not “circulate”; it is, from time, to time, transferred from one person’s cash balance to another’s. The existence of money, once again, depends upon people’s willingness to hold cash balances.

The question was: what makes them "see value in it" ?

Because if the answer is "because they think it might significantly increase in price", then that's a Ponzi kind of motivation.  I already outlined that.  If the reason for people to buy bitcoin is essentially that they expect a significant increase in its price, then this cannot be the motivation for the "last ones".  As they will realize this, they will not buy, or they will sell after a while.  If they do, the second-last entries will realize that they will not find sellers at much higher prices than they bought.  So they will sell too.  Etc...
If the main or sole reason to buy something is the "greater fool" hypothesis (it will rise in price) then we are definitely in a Ponzi.

So if the motivation is NOT "it will rise in price", but rather "it will keep its value long-term" what will make these people think that and prefer bitcoin over other stores of value ?

A few of the criticisms mentioned earlier are correct, yet they are complete non sequiturs. Bitcoin will not be eagerly adopted by the mainstream, it will be forced upon them. Forced, as in "compelled by economic reality". People will be forced to pay with bitcoins, not because of 'the technology', but because no one will accept their worthless fiat for payments. Contrary to popular belief, good money drives out bad. This "driving out" has started as a small fiat bleed. It will rapidly escalate into Class IV hemorrhaging due to speculative attacks on weak fiat currencies. The end result will be hyperbitcoinization, i.e. "your money is no good here".

I set out to delineate the difference between Bitcoin and the stock market, not the value of Bitcoin.  But I'll follow your tangent.

"Proof of work" is not proof of useful work.  It's proof that an amazing amounts of electricity was wasted on what amounts to little more than digital thumb twiddling.  Useful to ASIC manufacturers?  Sure.  Useful to mining contract resellers?  Yeah.  But useful to society as a whole?  Not really.

How useful is a currency that consumes 10% of its market cap, each year, to secure?  Well, if Satoshi is right, and price of mining does approach the price of mined coins, then Bitcoin is costing just that:  ~10% of all the coins in existence were mined this year

If real mass adoption ever takes hold, which i think is still extremely speculative right now, we will see surges in one day in the thousands of dollars. The term Gap-up will seem completely inadequate.

There simply are not enough coins to deal with the number of people that will potentially be seeking them out.

We will go to sleep one day with the price at $3,500 and when you wake up it will be $15,000. Nothing will be able to stop the gaps up when the world's fiat begins to crumble.

In this future time, Bitcoin will be useful for payments for most of what you buy, Miners and all holders will not switch to Fiat for anything and everyone will be buying Bitcoin for their financial salvation.

1 Bitcoin will be like one share of Berkshire Hathaway, if you own one, you are basically a filthy rich bastard.

I disagree.

Bitcoin is literally a proof-of-work in conjunction with a point on an adoption curve.

The proof-of-work part is what makes it tangible IRL, the point in the adoption curve is what makes it relevant to society. Yes, the same thing in a vacuum wouldn't be of much value, but value is a social construct and Bitcoin has that.

A means of exchange is exactly that: a store of value, but with the aim of using it as a means of exchange.  The store of value comes from the fact that there is a time lapse between the obtaining of your means of exchange (for instance, as a salary) and the moment of spending it (say, 2 weeks later).  
During these 2 weeks, the value of your delayed exchange is stored in the currency.   It is what gives the currency a market cap.  It comes about because it makes the velocity finite (inverse of the holding time).

What I wanted to say is that it needs less trust to store your wage in a currency for 2 or 3 weeks, rather than to store your retirement in a store of value for 20 years.  Moreover, the currency has on top of that the advantage of being able to be exchanged directly for stuff, while your store of value, if it is not a currency, first needs to be converted into a currency and then into goods and services.

Stores of value which have no other fundamental than "trust that it is a good store of value", need, well, a lot of trust.  Gold has that trust, because of its 5000 year history.  Famous paintings have that trust too, if they are old and famous enough.  New paintings don't.  They can be speculative assets.

The stocks in the stock market have discounted cash flows for them.  

A store of value is the function of an asset that can be saved, retrieved and exchanged at a later time, and be predictably useful when retrieved.

To be widely acceptable, a medium of exchange should have a relatively stable purchasing power (real value)