It should've been at $125+ long ago so hopefully it is about to adjust. What was $125 long ago is $150+ or so now so lets get up to $150+ please thanks.

Basically it ought never have dropped from top spot in the plots found at

http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html

So ought now to go back to top spot where it belongs.

-MarkM-

I think many people (newbies) think the value of Bitcoins can only go up is because they know there will never be more than 21 Millions Bitcoins on this planet. Bitcoins are scarce compared to the 7 billion humans on this planet or the trillions and trillions of USD and EURO in the financial markets.

What they forget is that you can, almost indefinitely, divide a Bitcoin. In milli-Bitcoins (mBTC), micro-Bitcoins (µBTC) - or Satoshis (0.00000001 BTC). So there’s plenty of Bitcoins left for everyone on this planet. Or Satoshis (300,000 Satoshi for every human to be exact).

As long as Bitcoins are not used in "real life" (e.g. I can buy stuff from Amazon or pay a pizza with them) they have zero value. OK one could say they have at least the value of the electricity that has been used to create them.

But on the other hand no one measures the value of a 100 Dollar note with the paper and the ink that it's composed of. A 100 Dollar note has it's "value" because it's accepted everywhere and I can get "stuff" for it.

Bitcoins are accepted almost nowhere – hence their "value" is pure from speculation. It can be 50cent today, 50 USD in a month and 10cent in two month. No one should complain if he has lost money. We have all seen this before. In the 17th century in the Netherlands: The Tulip Mania.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania



This was a period in the Dutch Golden Age during which contract prices for bulbs of the recently introduced tulip reached extraordinarily high levels and then suddenly collapsed. The price of tulips skyrocketed because of speculation in tulip futures among people who never saw the bulbs. At the peak of tulip mania, in February 1637, some single tulip bulbs sold for more than 10 times the annual income of a skilled craftsman.

A number of factors can affect the bitcoin supply/demand equation.  Here are a few examples:

• What happens if the US government announces new regulations that outlaw (or effectively outlaw) the use of bitcoins by US businesses/citizens?
• What happens if Mt. Gox is hacked again?
• What happens if someone holding 250,000 bitcoins decides that the market has reached a top and dumps them all at once on Mt. Gox?

Any of the above scenarios, while hopefully unlikely, could cause a dramatic selloff not unlike what happened in 2011.  Bitcoin was designed to weather such storms, but it could take a long time for the price to recover, as it took over 1.5 years to recover from the last time this happened.

Not to be too pessimistic. But there is an alternative scenario that is likely to happen eventually. Satoshi may quite literally be dead.

In the long run, we all are. My family will be able to get to my fiat accounts but will have a hard time even comprehending my Bitcoin investments/stash/mining-equipment/etc. Something to consider.

How are you viewing it?

You take something that's normally nearly indistinguishable (e.g. 1 USD bills) and arbitratrily declare some of that "special", "tainted" or "colored".

For example I have a 1 USD bill with the serial number 1234567890 and I declare that I will give anyone who hands me this exact bill in the future 100 USD, then I spend it/auction it/otherwise get rid of it. Everyone who does NOT know about the new value I gave to that bill still thinks it's an ordinary 1 USD bill, not worth 100 USD and might carelessly spend it. Also if there were no way to know it's exactly THIS bill (no tracking/serial number) it also wouldn't work, as I  wouldn't be able to tell if I have to give out 100 USD back if someone hands me an unmarked bill.

Colored coins work similarly, you declare that some coins are "special" to you and represent shares or whatever. This special value or contract does not show up anywhere in a block chain (other than transactions with these coins) but they can be traced due to the public nature of the block chain. So if I then publish "I started giving some special value to THIS coin, then used it in this transaction etc." people can track which address holds these coins and see if they own any. Since the coins are potentially worth more than other coins of the same denomination (in the example: the 1 USD bill would be worth 100 USD minus the risk that I might not honor my contract) one could for example trade in the same chain for these special coins (in the example: someone buys the special 1 USD bill from someone else for 50 USD).

As these transactions take place in a block chain and not for example on a stock trading platform (e.g. A transfers to B 1 special coin and gets from B 1000 "normal" coins in return) you can cut out the middle man. Also you can create more arbitrary contracts. Issues mainly include mixing "normal" and "special" coins and making sure you don't accidentially spend your special coins like normal ones (in the example: buy an ice cream with the 1234567890 1 USD bill). This is why the ArmoryX software is being written, to take care of this and some other issues.

As long as mtgox (or any other xchange for that matter) do not breach laws, they cannot shut down them. DOJ is not almighty either. When they shut down fulltilt and almost did the same with pokerstars, these companies were explicitly vilotating the law. if a certain site allows us players to gamble with btc, it is mtgox that must ban the site. btc cannot just be declared ilegal and banned. the bottomline is that if there are lot of btc users, lot of xchanges, it will become almost impossible to stop btc. so ppl, just promote btc, do everything to help bitconomy. it is our right to have bitcoin.

It's funny that similar statements about "central" computers disappearing with the success of the
PC were being made back in the 70's and 80's yet now we have almost come full circle (the only
difference being that the technology has changed from central "mainframes" to central "datacenters").

Although you could be quite right I tend to think that the move to and from centralisation is one
that is likely to repeat. I have envisioned for many years the concept of the "home server" which
securely holds your private data in the security of your own home allowing secure access from
anywhere you are travelling without having to trust untrustworthy 3rd parties (and this makes
even more sense if you are also storing wealth in the form of digital currency on your server).

The more that companies like Google and Facebook use/invade every users privacy for their own
gain the more likely that the "home server" concept will take off.

One of the many amazing things about Bitcoin is watching a religion that would once have taken centuries to get established form itself in a couple of years.

First the adherents decide they want to abide by all the restrictions in their Holy Book, even when they're obviously no longer relevant, like applying dietary restrictions designed to deal with parasites in the absence of refrigeration technology.

Then as if that's not enough, they take little implementation quirks, traditions and short-term quick-fix bodges that build up over time and start imagining that they're in their Holy Book.

I don't suppose saying this will help as once a bit of dogma gets into a religious person's head it's a hell of a job getting it out, but there's nothing in the Holy Prophet's white paper about limiting block sizes. He specifically discussed the network scaling as big as Visa. (Letters to the Cryptographians, Chapter 2, Verse 2). Obviously nobody intended to grow a network just to the point where it was about to become really useful for actual, non-speculative commerce, then cripple it to stop it doing more than 10 transactions per second.

Nothing. Wait until Gox is in the clutches of the US jurisdiction when Coinlab moves operations to US mainland.

It's my impression that some of the principals involved in moving Gox are naive about political processes and implications as well as basic history.

OK. Here is the future I envision...
Bitcoins gain in popularity over the course of the next X years and begin to cut into the US government's tax revenues and as a result their ability to fund entitlements, the military industrial complex, and make interest payments to bondholders. Democrats and Republicans alike see this as being a threat to the republic and declare that bitcoins are to blame. The politicians turn up the rhetoric and "wrap themselves in the flag". Only a few libertarian leaning congressman/woman are in favor of this competing currency and are quickly dismissed by their collegues and MSM as being kooks. A "war against this unpatriotic medium of exchange" is declared "threatening to destroy America as we know it" and its ability to act as a "defender of worldwide democracy and freedom". Bitcoins are found to be unconstitutional. Any person or company/entity discovered to be trading, holding, or accepting bitcoin within the US is prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Websites are monitored for those which accept bitcoins and are shut down. The bitcoin economy is stifled within the US and is driven overseas and underground. I leave the country.