There's really no reason for it to stabilise at this price or to be honest any other at the moment, since the majority of buys and sells are for speculative purposes and thus highly prone to snowballing, destabilising effects.

Unless you bought in for cents it would have hardly been overnight anyway. Take a look at the chart, months and years of volatile uncertainty. You'd probably have sold early like lots of people.

If you want bitcoin to stay in the hands of those who care about it, then probably the user number will never grow hugely beyond what we already have.

If you want people to 'see the light' and replace corrupt institutions, the bubbles are probably the most effective method to draw mass attention and convert new users. Some % of them will become hardcore supporters, but first you need something big to force them to seriously consider bitcoin. Yeah, it leverages greed but so what? Money doesn't work at all without a smidgen of greed.

Ask yourself why you want the userbase to grow anyway. I'm sure part of it is to do with your own personal desire to get rich 

It's totally possible. The question as you have pointed out is, what would be the purpose, and who would support such an idea? A big part of the advantage of crypto is that users can hold their own wallets and mimic online banking activity faster, cheaper and better. Presumably fed-coin would let you use your own wallet, so yes, banks would still be hurting just as much as in the case of worldwide bitcoin adoption.

Would people use it? I think yes, if it happened before people got used to using bitcoin or similar. The fed-coin could instantly capture a userbase of millions by swapping all dollars for fed-coins in one big publicity drive.

Will they actually do it? It seems to me the advantages for the powers-that-be are limited to killing bitcoin and its alts, with a side benefit of tracking currency, presumably with wallet software legally required to take personal information. Of course, this helps them to keep or increase their power, but my intuition is that this isn't yet a strong or obvious enough motivator for them to get organised and take such drastic action. It will take much more adoption of cryptocurrencies before they start to get worried enough to seriously consider it!

IIRC a few people have made surveys that indicated 30 is around the average age. So fairly young to be dabbling in financial 'products' but older compared to the typical demographic of popular sites/forums which tend to have a userbase focussed more in the teens to early 20s (i.e. before real life kicks in).

From the quote in the article, it seems his objections are relatively superficial i.e. volatility, irreversible transactions. The value will get more stable if the proportion of trade shifts more towards consumer use and less towards speculation, which is what will happen if we ever get out of this stage. Irreversibility is a bit of a stretch for consumers but it's more of a mindset thing: use escrow, and realise that just because you can't force a merchant to give up your funds doesn't mean you can't do it in a civilised manner.

Still, I see these objections raised all the time and even if they aren't showstoppers, I'll accept that having to think about these issues is a barrier to adoption 

Would have been more interested to hear some technical criticism about scalability. We're 'only' one order of magnitude from reaching the transaction rate limit now.

Good, was starting to have separation anxiety...

Media can be truly loathesome and biased, but this article isn't too bad. There are so many negative quotes they could have chosen to highlight (Buffet et al) but instead they merely point out that the fundamental properties of bitcoin seem to matter far less to the valuation than speculative haze, add that those who bought in two years ago are still impressively in the green, and praise the transactional ease of use.

Edit: yeah, the comments, same old crap. Quite mild compared to the trolling around here of late 

No matter what you say to journos, you can't win because they will chop up and present your words however they wish. They are in the business of presenting interesting narratives to please readers, not sticking to impartial reporting. If Gavin had harped on about how people should invest, quite possibly they would (relatively subtly, given this is FT) spin him as a crazy shill and print a big fat price chart to prove it.

Excellent post. Anyone who has had to deal with money men (particularly anyone who runs their own business) will have similar experiences to the above at some point. It seems to me that much of the consumer-side 'innovation' in traditional payment and banking systems involves disguising the enormous gorilla we all have on our backs from supporting this vast, inefficient and clumsy system. The benefits of Bitcoin are really very compelling if you ignore the meagre perks banks give us (and the BTC volatility..)

Indeed. And then, if those free coins started circulating and gaining value as the popularity of the network increased, you'd find that by the time the coins were worth something, the poor would already have spent their initial share buying stuff from the rich, who would have ended up with lots. Therefore wealth would probably be distributed roughly the same as before (but now further away from the banking industry, naturally).

I do enjoy the effort put into creative writing by the anti bulltard cohort here, it's all rather droll.

Everything is absurd if you think of it that way. It is perhaps a valid logical point, but it is not constructive. So what do you suggest, delegation of all (illusory) freedoms to other, bigger and stronger organisations because freedom is an illusion anyway, so better to just get rid of it altogether?

Oppressive systems can still cause suffering whether or not people have true 'free will', and even a deterministic mind can define it's own mistakes, and learning from those mistakes is still possible.

Nice article and good to see, but I wish people wouldn't use wording like this: "a truly trustworthy form of money, one whose value was constrained not by the laws and weaknesses of man, but by the universal laws of mathematics"

I'd rather see a word like 'integrity' used. To non bitcoiner readers, 'value' is going to imply something to do with exchange value or purchase power, and as bitcoin is famously very, very volatile and apparently not 'backed' by anything, the first thing they will do is disagree. This undermines the rest of the article. To be fair he does go on to expand on what he really meant, but it still gives doubters a little something to laugh at.

Also, this is a guest article by a guy involved in BTC, not some regular journo (who make their money being a reactionary and ignorant bunch, more often than not) - we're not quite that far along yet  

His EW labels are completely meaningless without any kind of broader context. Also I guess he was sleeping during the run-up to 450-475, plenty of 5-ups there...

Instant transmission of pay to freelancers all over the world is a very good use of bitcoin. I freelance, and I've often been frustrated by the impossibility of working across borders and getting paid the full amount.

IIRC he/she/it has been long previously. Possibly only to add credibility to the persona, but tbh they weren't bad calls.

Just to clear this up, this ep is from 2012, 2009 is just when the show started 

I wouldn't rule out bouncing around in a range.. That range would probably be measured in the hundreds of dollars wide, though.