Well my main point isn't that BTC volatility can never end, just that it's extremely serious now.  

I was pointing out that a change of thousands of dollars in Berkshire Hathaway stock is not as serious as thousands of dollars in BTC price because of how significantly lower BTC's price is.

There's also the fact that Berkshire Hathaway is backed by actual activity, and the price's speculation is just over what that activity is worth.

In Bitcoin's case, it's much harder to keep the price pegged down like that.  Similarly, gold has huge swings over many years.

So there's a large number of people intending to buy BTC for investment purposes, and very little else.  That's extremely speculative and it's pretty much exactly what happens in a bubble.

There is simply no capacity for mainstream adoption.  There might be capacity for mainstream speculation about mainstream adoption, but nothing much further than that.

I actually hope that fewer people send BTC for buying and selling so I can actually use it for most purposes instead.

But those customers are dramatically wealthier, so they're arguably the ones that need the most privacy of anyone.

I suppose that it's somewhat more important for the wealthier traders to pay taxes than the "little guy", but from the IRS' perspective it's still a very significant victory.

It's also possible that this small victory could lead the IRS to push further over time.

You already gained (or lost) money based on how much you held.  That's how all assets and stocks work, of course.

With the forks - I don't think it matters because the value of the fork is determined by people who are usually involved in BTC in some way.  There's no way to guarantee that an increase in price for a fork is anything like "free money" for Bitcoin holders.

Of course, PoW and PoS are to do with miners, not users, so I don't see your point there.

We should be judging his algorithm based on its merit, not is past performance.

It's inevitable that when you have many thousands of people all making different predictions based on different criteria, one of them is going to end up being close to correct.  You can't use an event like that to predict the future.

Ideally, a prediction like this should be based on a collection of a lot of different data, not just one figure.

Six figures is quite a large amount for this, but you could certainly try doing bank transfers on LocalBitcoins. 

There's a good market for Hawaii on there because of the lack of other exchanges that are available.

I think you can get international wire transfers to Hawaii from Bitstamp as well.

First of all, their disclaimer at the bottom clarified that the author's opinion does "not necessarily reflect the view of CoinDesk".  CoinDesk bring a variety of opinions to the table.

Secondly, they were simply using that a metaphor (admittedly not an ideal one) to refer to the fear that new users may experience in the event of a price fall. 

Sure, their BTC is safe, but the value of it is not constant.  Similarly, in a run on the bank, their digital fiat money is safe, but it won't mean a lot to them when they find out that the digital fiat isn't worth as much as they thought it was. 

A price fall could cause a similar domino effect to what happens during an actual run on the bank, and cause quite a hefty best market.

I can see how it can be used for pump and dump schemes and other shady or illegal antics which are banned more thoroughly in regular markets.  He would certainly be reasonable to suggest that.

However, I don't think that is an inherent feature of BTC, nor will it necessarily last forever.  He should ideally be presenting reasonable solutions when he's in such a significant position of influence.

I suppose it's still important to distinguish between this and BTC just being a fraud, which is simply false information.  He took his time, and it's least not 100% wrong.

In the past month, the lowest that it's reached (according to Google) has been $271,410 and the highest price that it's reached is currently $290,000.

That's a percentage difference of approximately 6.85% in a month.

In the past month, the lowest that Bitcoin has reached (according to CoinMarketCap) has been about $5625, while the highest that it's reached has been about $11,350.

That's a percentage difference of approximately 101.78% in a month, which is about 14.86 times the change in Berkshire Hathaway stock.

It's working fine for me, so it's most likely on your side.

You'll have to contact TREZOR support, assuming that it's something do with your device.  You can do that here or on their subreddit.  You might also want to check your USB ports.

Several wallets are TREZOR compatible, so if your device works fine you can always use it with Electrum or something.

Alright, I used the most dramatic figures, but it wasn't "plain wrong".  I counted the ones that haven't been mined because most of them will exist in the future (in a long time, which is when we're talking about the price being so high).

Regardless, you could just move a bit further back (to a lower price) and multiply it by that much.  Sooner or later, crazy growth has to stop.
There's no reason to assume that people would necessarily keep their coins to themselves if more users get involved.

An increase from $2 to $10,000 (approximately the price now) is an increase by a multiple of 5,000.

If the price multiplied by 5,000 again, the price would be 50 million dollars.  Since 50,000,000 x 21,000,000 is dramatically more than the amount of money which exists in the world, it's impossible for the price to rise by that much again.

So it is very much about whether you had known about it earlier.  Exponential growth forever is impossible, and past prices can't accurately be used to predict future ones.

Obviously this is just in hindsight, and in reality it wasn't necessarily a good investment decision to buy BTC at every point in its history.

This is like saying "cash is so insecure, if you leave your wallet out on the street then anyone could take it", and ignoring that if you put your cash in a hidden safe, it's almost 100% certain that it will never be stolen.

Private keys don't have to be stored on the Internet.  You can create a paper wallet entirely offline and never connect to the Internet until you need to sweep the coins.  So it is actually very comparable to cash.
That's not the purpose of hardware wallets.  The purpose of hardware wallets is to have a separate device to sign transactions which doesn't potentially expose your private keys to the Internet and leave the possibility of a keylogger stealing your coins.

It'll most likely become more volatile in the short term, since traders (especially large traders) will abuse their ability to manipulate the smaller and newer investors into buying and selling BTC based on emotion.

It's possible that this would eventually weed out the less secure investors, which would be helpful in the long term as it would leave people who are willing to go all in and buy futures being more relevant to BTC's price.

However, it might be a problem if more BTC users start being forced to comply to regulation, which is fairly likely if properly regulated exchanges like NASDAQ are freely available.

I suppose it's easier for BTC to be used for pyramid schemes - after all, a large number of transactions to a PayPal account will lead them to suspend the account, and similarly with other online transactions.

Still, that's just a side effect of BTC's existence.  There's not any decentralised way of solving the problem.

Net neutrality hopefully won't break down either, so people will need to take responsibility and be aware of these schemes themselves.

Not true.  If you count the entire 24 hour period, it certainly didn't drop by $2000 in a day.  It had a very wild swing upwards before the swing downwards.

Considering how quickly it rose beforehand, a correction was inevitable.  Without it, the correction might have amplified into a full-on crash as people hop on.

These corrections are by smaller percentages than they were a few months ago. In the event of a bigger correction, I think they'd be terrified.  Especially since they're very new to BTC and some of them are expecting exponential growth for some reason.

It couldn't have been in 2008 because Bitcoin's genesis block was mined on January 3rd 2009 (in other words, the BTC blockchain didn't exist yet).

The only 2009 exchange that I'm aware of is the New Liberty Standard, which set exchange rates based on the cost of electricity, but this no longer exists.

If your friend does not have access to a wallet containing his private keys (most likely a wallet.dat file in an old Bitcoin QT wallet), he most likely will never have access to these coins.

It's experienced growth in price, but not growth in much else.  It's really annoying when you have two sides and neither of them has an actual point to make.
Because bad things can have high prices.

Some dotcom companies ended up with absolutely insanely high prices based on almost nothing except for their vague association with the Internet.  If you were an early investor in these things, you could say "the price is really dumb" and still not sell all of your stock.  The same applies here.

You need to separate the market from the users.  The market isn't 100% representative of users' beliefs about the merits of each crypto, it's representative of users' beliefs about what other users believe about the merits of each crypto.

Have a look at the theory that USD Tether and Bitfinex are manipulating the market.  It's not certain, but some decent reasoning about it is outlined here, and it's possible that they would have more power over the market than it appears on the surface.
There's a lot of discussion about the possibility of Bitcoin futures trading from major groups.  If it happens, that could certainly open the gates for some pretty crazy manipulation.

Currently, it's also quite hard to get very significant margin on BTC (understandably).
Don't you think the existing statistics on volume (like on coinmarketcap) would be enough for them to analyse the market before orchestrating something like that?

Futures would make the Bitcoin price much easier to manipulate.  One major banking institution or other wealthy group could manipulate BTC users in pretty much any way that they want.

Since BTC has less of a clear value than most other stocks and assets, it means that investors could be manipulated to push the price as high (or as low) as they want.

However, I suppose that introduction to a more mainstream and regulated audience could be helpful, as it could theoretically free us from the emotionally unstable investors we have now.