Useless?  I hope they do follow Gox's price.  Buy bitcoins on another exchange and then feed them into the ATM that uses Gox's price.  Instant profit.

$10 by mid 2014 sure sounds sexy as a headline and it's effective click bait for ad revenue, but does the article's author actually believe this scenario is likely or even plausible?  I consider myself a realist and think there are many things wrong with bitcoin and the way it's used just as much as I think there are other areas where it's brilliant.  But $10 in a few months time?  Come on...

This whole 'no FCC approval' thing has been rolling along for over seven months now.  Surely, if it was actually a big deal someone would have emailed the FCC with some photos of BFL's equipment and left it at that?  If the FCC cared they should have acted by now. 

I understand that customers are frustrated by the BS they have received, and continue to receive from BFL (remember, Monarchs were supposed to ship in November/December 2013.  How many were shipped?).  However I find receiving equipment from BFL, using it, and then finding some (any?) reason to extract money out of them out of spite to be quite low behaviour.  For those people who keep bringing up the no FCC approval theme, you're not using your illegal hardware to mine, right?

Bank IT systems are usually legacy systems, built over existing legacy systems with hundreds of patches applied.  When it takes years to develop a new piece of software you're hardly going to throw it away when Shiny New (tm) comes along in the IT world.  My local branch still runs Windows XP on all branch computers.  It also means the layers and layers of patches and hacks break down.  Often.  That's why IT systems keep failing.

Bitcoin isn't the answer either.  You're either looking to store your bitcoins on someone else's computer (hacks, theft, government confiscation risk, etc) or if bitcoin becomes useful in daily life we'd quickly be looking at a petabyte blockchain.  Whoever creates bitcoin v2 without the exponential growth of the blockchain will create real value.  Dogecoin can die in a fire.

Smart Turks would be piling their savings into bitcoins right now.  They know what's going to happen next.

I'm not sure how people can continue to use an exchange that takes months to process withdraws.  Logically, one would think that everyone who is aware of MtGox's situation has already lined up to get their money out.  Near 100% of MtGox's money should be heading towards the exit.  If everyone can't withdraw in a timely manner (a few days) MtGox clearly doesn't have the money and should immediately stop trading as it's insolvent.  It's not a fractional reserve bank and shouldn't act like one.

If the US government is smart they'll wait until those seized bitcoins are enough to pay down the debt to China.  Give it a couple of years and the USA can trade all the many billions in goods and services sourced from China for a bunch of data.

Did BFL customers get shafted?  Depends on how you look at it.  In dollar terms, perhaps they didn't.  The first customers to receive their BFL Monarchs in March or April 2014 (let's face it, everyone knew Nov/Dec 2013 was another BFL '2 weeks' promise) are likely to be making many times more dollars per day than someone ordering today, who is likely to see their investment make $5 per day by the time it's delivered in maybe August or September 2014.

I'm buying back into bitcoin when the price is an irrational number. 

I'm not sure hoping that speculators lose everything is a particularly kind world view.  It's rather destructive to the soul.

We've seen bubbles come and bubbles go, with each one inflating to a much higher price than before.  Maybe this one will reinflate too, but I'm thinking we're running out of suckers to tap.  We've had a go at the Chinese and they said 'mei you' pretty quickly.  If anything the Chinese have done us a favour and proven the long held theory that an effective way to destroy the value of bitcoin is not to attack the commodity directly, but to cut off the money supply to exchanges that trade in it.  Other governments have surely taken note.

People using bitcoins for commerce don't care how much they cost to mine.  They could be using bitcoins that were mined for $1 each.  Transactions will continue to be processed even if bitcoin plummets, as people who invested in ASIC miners are unlikely to ever switch them off as long as there is a faint hope of ROI.  If ASIC owners refuse to sell their bitcoins into the current market then... will anyone care?  Not really.

Counterfeit coins such as litecoin have suffered a greater crash.  Down 75% from their very recent peak.  I wouldn't like to be the bag holder there.

But it will be fun to watch


The beautiful thing about bitcoin is while the address identities are mostly anonymous, everyone can see if those bitcoins start to move.  If they do I would expect bitcoin to return to somewhere in the $5 range, if not lower.  The creators of bitcoin are filthy rich, problem is they can't cash in their chips.  An odd sort of poker game.

This is bitcoin's Christmas present to speculators.  Bitcoins going for almost 50% off. 

I think it's safe to say most of bitcoin's value is based on two fundamentals:

1)  This is the commodity/currency of the future, and I'm buying in now as more people will use it in the future

2)  Someone will pay more for my bitcoins tomorrow than I'm paying today, therefore it's an easy buy

When people talk about fundamentals it really boils down to the two above.  Current uses for bitcoin do not justify exponential growth in price to over US$1k.

Why no harder crash?  We still have a ready supply of speculators willing to buy back in because they think bitcoins are now cheap.  Buy at US$700, sell at US$800 a day or two later.  Rinse, repeat.  Massive profit over a very short time period.  We in the bitcoin world are so disconnected from reality sometimes that we fail to notice that such swings are extremely rare in the real world of investing.

China is trying to corner the bitcoin and litecoin markets by dumping the value and buying up cheap coins from panicking speculators.  We need to buy all the bitcoins and litecoins before they get them. 

Looking at the price rise over the last few months it's pretty obvious a crash is coming sooner or later.  When does it arrive?  When we run out of greater fools who think buying in at $1k/btc is a bargain because it'll be $4k/btc within a month or two.  The Chinese have a large gambling population so we've found another group to sell to.  Their interest however doesn't seem to have lasted very long so we're on a search for another.  There is a certain irony in China going bananas for bitcoin, a commodity released under a Japanese pseudonym.

On this forum, who would be willing to pump a few thousand US dollars into bitcoin at the current price?

I wouldn't worry about buying in at $1130.  I read elsewhere on this forum that by conservative analysis we should see a price of $10k sometime in 2015 and a million US dollars per bitcoin in 2018.  I look forward to discharging my entire mortgage by 2018 through running my BFL ASICs for a few weeks.  Sure beats working.

Maybe bitcoins will finally return to the value of their actual utility instead of speculative betting on possible future uses.  Did people expect bitcoin to continue doubling in price every week?

I remember my biology lecturer showing a graph on how quickly bacteria divide and grow.  He said after a few weeks the entire planet would be covered in a metres thick layer of bacteria.  Except it's not.  There isn't enough food and other resources to support that sort of growth in numbers.

Bitcoin is no different.  New speculators and current speculators who think the price will go even higher are the 'food' for bitcoin.  Once we run out of enough to sustain growth the price will taper off and fall.

But hey, I would love to believe I can pay off my entire mortgage with one bitcoin sometime in 2016.