How soon before the Chinese authorities crack down?

It's a speculative pump. It started with something real (the banning of high denomination notes in India), and when the price on the Indian exchanges jumped, the speculators piled on in the Chinese and western exchanges.

At some point people will take profits and it will go a little lower, maybe back to $1000 or $900.

Monero is on quite a few exchanges - see the following:

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/monero/#markets

But yeah - it's worth spreading the trading around to make sure too much isn't concentrated on one exchange.

Well if India is anything to go by, then you are right - there wasn't much interest in bitcoin there at all till the withdrawal of the notes in circulation.

People have moved away from bitfinex since their hack though, haven't they? With luck some of the better exchanges will end up handling most of the volume and the weak exchanges will fade away.

Yup. Some of the terrorists were claiming benefits and using them to fund purchasing arms etc

The main goal of the useless folk in the European Parliament is to hinder FinTech to prop up their failing banks, the terrosim is just an excuse for the other stuff.

I would hope that all the major exchanges have learnt serious lessons from what has happened to other exchanges in the last few years, and have employed proper security measures plus some insurance.

Of course they may all be run by doofuses who are too dumb to learn from experience - lets see how this plays out.

You need to take account of the price you bought as well, plus capital gains taxes. Most countries will allow you to take a tax-exempt capital gain up to a certain threshold. So if you sell slowly and are under this threshold with sales each year, there is no tax to pay.

Bitcoiners have grown up a bit since then though, haven't they? DDOS attacks on the exchanges are no longer enough to make the price tank. There are a lot more exchanges and people are a lot more careful. There is still a risk that an exchange hack, where people lose their coins, will tank the price. But hopefully people are careful now not to store money in the exchanges anymore.

You still made a good profit. The only thing you can bank on are actual profits. Hypotheticals arn't worth anything. What if you hadn't sold and the price had tanked? You'd have been doing another "Damn, timing goes wrong for me" post.

At the end of the day just look at the actual profit made and forget what happens to the price after you have sold.

What is happening here is that middle men like Circle have found that there is no use for their services. If bitcoin takes off, people will be using bitcoin directly, so no need for an interface in the middle.

You know, it seems much shorter than eight years. I guess because the mainstream still hasn't got into it. Still adoption is faster than that of the internet when it was launched, so we are on schedule.

The BBC are now covering it:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-38495804

Though they made sure to point out the way it collapsed after 2013 and mentioned that analysts questioned whether bitcoin would last!

Nothing is as anonymous as cash in small bills. However if there are moves to ban cash, then watch as bitcoin jumps - what is happening in India is a small taster.

Other events to watch for this year:

1. Deutsche Bank is still in a very unstable condition, the German govt is actually lobbying Basel III to REDUCE capital requirements because they know Deutsche will fail the current proposals. If Deutsche blows up, we're looking at a Lehman style bust - though unlike in 2008, all the other banks are aware of the danger and are hurriedly reducing their exposure to DB.

2. The elections in the Netherlands, France and Germany this year. France in particular is key - if they vote for Le Pen, the euro and EU are over. Watch for a scramble into safe havens, the dollar, the pound, the swiss franc and of course bitcoin.

3. Italy and Greece making a unilateral exit from the euro. They won't announce this in advance, it will just happen one weekend. They'll announce it on a Friday night and close the banks in the following week, and euros will be swapped into lira or drachma and it will be done. The new currencies will likely be WEAKER than the euro, so the only way for people to protect themselves is to move money into bitcoin before the change. Afterwards is too late because their new money won't buy as much bitcoin.

True - but the attention bitcoin is attracting might make some people have a look at alts. That happened in 2013 too - new blood came into cryptocurrency and they started to look for undervalued alts just in case they were the next big thing, and all the alts soared on the back of it. Of course when mtgox collapsed and bitcoin collapsed as a result, the alts fell too and people panicked across the board.

2013 was powered by the eurozone crises. First the Greek problem, and then the Cyprus problem where they confiscated people's savings to bail out the banks.

At the moment there is a crisis in India (notes being withdrawn). Venezuela is also in a crisis, but it is too late for them, their money is already worthless so that can't actually buy any bitcoin with it.

I guess it depends on whether another crisis suddenly materialises.

You would think this, but the hacks have happened practically every six months since bitcoin launched.

The only exchange with insurance is coinbase. It would really stabalise the system if all the other exchanges got some insurance too - that way people would have confidence that they wouldn't lose money just because the exchange got sloppy with security.

Does anyone actually use Ripple? It's been around for so long, but there doesn't seem to be any community around it, not an eco-system of people using it.

Bitcoin isn't really anonymous though, it is pseudonymous. It only works as tax haven if the holder is super-discreet and doesn't trip various wires, like selling a lot in one go.

I think the Chinese miners are getting cheap/free electricity, so they're being subsidized by the Chinese state. If the electricity prices ever rose, I expect mining would move somewhere else.