And the fact the Bitcoin is accepted regardless of its effect on TPTB in free nations is a pretty good commentary on WHY these nations lead in technology and therefore standard of living. 

Someone good a those meme pictures should come up with something like: 

Free Nations:  Bitcoin Accepted Here

One thing he does not mention which is very important is that an exponential is self-similar.  What that means is at ANY point on the graph, plotting just the prior values (at a visible scale) looks like a bubble.  For example, over the course of a year when 2 rats become 100, the last 50 rats were born within a few weeks.

It is only when the curve starts to flatten out that you can tell where the vertical portion was...  So Dec might have been the vertical adoption, but if BTC ends up at 100billion valuation,  this "vertical" will look like an anthill like 2011 does today.

I've heard a saying about when someone starts believing his company's marketing.  "Smoking your own exhaust"

people are asking for both BTC AND USD at very high interest rates on bitfinex right now.  The consensus seems to be we are going to go SOMEWHERE fast, but opinion differs on where! 

not so ridiculous... note the "return to normal" reference.  This rise was played out.  If it hadn't been the China news it would have been something else.

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity"  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

In terms of the timing, we were clearly several slopes above the baseline exponential.  The market tapping out twice around 1100 was a key indicator.  And there were multiple anecdotal indicators -- holiday spending, news coverage reaching saturation, etc.  Understanding the China role in this rally and understanding the perception of China's role.

Any significant negative news was going to trigger a correction.  Nothing has really changed in bitcoin-land.  We just got ahead of ourselves (again!)

But look, don't ever expect to "call" the top or bottom.  Be selling single digit percentages of your holdings every few days when super-exponential and the prior bubble looks like an anthill on the chart.  Be buying the same small chunks on the way down, starting from a 25 to 50% retracement.

This is not investment advice.  I am not your investment advisor.

Yeah, I was wondering if someone was going to call me out for that.  Let's just say that the above comment is a bit of a shorthand way to say that if you believe in the fundamental long term exponential trendline is intact then to me a price of 300 to 500 looks pretty good as the bottom.  Kind of like how DJIA tracks SP500 even though it is composed of few stocks.

WRT the China speculators finishing the unwinding of their positions, I like how volume in BTCChina is now significantly lower than gox and stamp.  Of course the imposition of a trading fee also has a lot to do with it.

 ▼ CNY    BTC China btcnCNY    2732.45 0 min ago       5387.09 -2654.64 -49.28%    2,297,610.62 12,377,445,390.52 CNY    2011 2011 (24h)    7588.88 3949 (24h)    2732    2733    2825.99 -93.54 -3.31%    79,523.17 224,731,849.70 CNY
▲ USD    Mt. Gox mtgoxUSD    588 0 min ago       833.65 -245.65 -29.47%    1,237,078.69 1,031,291,433.76 USD    453.29 455 (24h)    1242 750.3614 (24h)    591.005    596.97498    570.27 17.73 3.11%    93,803.33 53,493,621.87 USD
▲ USD    BitStamp bitstampUSD    545.5 7 min ago       777.52 -232.02 -29.84%    1,109,592.04 862,725,006.62 USD    378 382.21 (24h)    1163 718 (24h)    556.01    559.66    534.21 11.29 2.11%    116,399.55 62,182,381.82 USD

Yes, that is a point.  But I don't know what sentiment is like in China.  This global currency might behave a bit differently WRT despair.  At the same time, for those who sold 800+ it makes sense to take some profits (in BTC) now.

Trend is definitely down.  But this is an interesting double bottom with the flash crash last week.  Also, bottom of April was around 2x the 2011 peak.  $500 is near that WRT the April peak.  We are approaching bubble fully popped.  No-one can expect to call the bottom exactly.  So it might make sense to acquire some coins here and keep some in fiat just in case.

  Who says I didn't?  Of course I'm trading it.  Otherwise why would I be wasting my time here...

I think he exited into CNY early... at about 4.100 per mBtC.  But that still equates to awesome returns at the current price of 2.500.

In other news, USA East coast woke up and said "We'll take those coins!!!"

Now, I'll just toot my horn a little...

Same thing this time around.  China news did not get us from 60 to 160, and there was certainly evidence that other buyers drove much of the rise to 1200

the thing you new guys need to understand is that when btc was single digits we actually had to convince ppl that conning someone out of btc was illegal and immoral. that is, it was NOT the same as doing so on eve online or some other video game currency. and there were few legal ways to spend.  no gyft no bitpay with 10k merchants.  with that perspective you may start to understand why early adopters were not investing 10k usd and early miners were happy to get 2 to 10 bucks per coin.

The answer is the last few years of it WORKING.  It is visible in the 10x increase in spending reported by bitpay as compared to last year.  In the increasing adoption by people in countries all over the world.  

I don't know what specific objections you are referring to.  But I constantly hear lots of economic objections that the objectors think are axiomatic but are in fact simply derivations of how the current fiat debt-based system works.  A good example is the idea that money must be backed by something or have marginal utility or intrinsic value.  When you really think about it, marginal utility is simply a neat solution to the "bootstrapping" problem.  It is irrelevant to the price today.  Nobody buys gold at $1200 because it has an intrinsic value of $100.  There can be other mechanisms to bootstrap a currency as we have seen with Bitcoin.  In particular, it was given a price in 2010 based on expectations of future utility/value.

And it is not the first zero-intrinsic-value currency.  There are other currencies that exist that have no marginal utility, like Rei Stones.  I would imagine that these stones are not valued on expectation of future utility, but based on the effort it took to make one.  They say, I am so powerful I can waste my money on this...

PS: This is not to say we won't go down a lot.  We are very high right now...  a bubble pop will not kill bitcoin.  In fact, it will let a lot more people enter the market.

First of all, many people have signed up for many exchanges all over the world.  And many exchanges use USD even though they are not located in the USA.  So correlation between the physical location of the owners of the accounts and the exchange location and currency unit is dubious at best.

Secondly, someone can CNY with BTC (fiatleak triggers), and then turn around and sell it tomorrow (fiatleak triggers, because someone ELSE bought your BTC with CNY).  So what fiatleak shows is just the volume of currency trades.  It cannot actually show BTC being bought for a particular currency and then removed from exchanges which is what the term "fiatleak" implies.

The website is just another way to show volume with a name that is a catchy-meme but is actually complete bullsh*t.

In fact, since every buy is matched to a sell (neither currency is "consumed"), the entire premise that fiat currency "leaks" away and is lost is silly.  Really the measure of societies' adoption and valuation of a currency is quite simply that currency's price, or more accurately its total buying power (market cap). 

A million individual decisions that BTC is worth more than X dollars to an individual, then X+1 to someone else, X+2, X+500 dollars is what causes the value of a currency to change relative to another.  And at all times those who have already bought BTC make the decision that the BTC they bought for X dollars is in fact now worth more than the X+500 dollars the currencies are currently trading at.  The only way to track this is to see that the price has risen to Y and in fact is not going back down...

Its totally fascinating to see these 3 essentially completely abstract entities (fiat currencies, gold, BTC) pitted against each other in the currency war we call "price discovery".  Gold, USD, and BTC are all arguably FAR detached from their "intrinsic value".  Gold's use in electronics, etc is minimal, in fact by "intrinsic value" silver should be worth more.  All use as a shiny metal in jewelery, etc is referential to its worth as a currency.  Otherwise plating or paint would be fine.  USD and other fiat currencies are backed by the "full faith and credit" of nations deeply in debt and controlled by a group that feels that printing a lot more is a good idea.  Given this context, you can see that BTC just wipes away these fictions, proves that the concept of intrinsic value is useless (by its very existence) and simply excels at being a currency.

Absolutely, paypal will essentially become the internet's escrow agent (but they won't call it that because that word is scary to most).  CC's protect the consumer at the merchant's expense, BTC protects the merchant at the consumer's expense.  In both cases escrow and some kind of trust or rating system is needed.

Price abruptly flatlining (I'm talking about the stability around 1100-1200) is classic bubble behavior, scaled to where April is the "first sell off".  Now we are either in "back to normal" OR this time it REALLY is different!  And it could be you know because Bitcoin and the global economic and political environment in which it finds itself really is different.  

The gradually increasing Google trends is bullish http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=bitcoin&date=today%203-m&cmpt=q.  But there are other bearish forces which I'm sure you all know.

I'm seeing busting through $1300 as the trigger for a resumption in the mania.  This value will almost simultaneously crack the ATH, gold, and the recent BofA guidance.

I think that the BofA number is important, even though this number was created by pulling numbers out of BofA analyst asses and then adding them together.   But any veneer of math adds legitimacy in the minds of the collective investing public.  If Bitcoin breaks this guidance quickly, it embarrasses the traditional analysts and says that Bitcoin defies them.  And there is reason to think their analysis is flawed.  It is unknown if you can use prior historical charts of centrally managed growth (a company) with decentralized growth.  And if the rise takes longer than a week+, the "top" of the bubble starts to look too long for the rise as compared to classic flat-top bubbles.  In that case, this could be just the "1/3 to half-way there" hiccup that is often seen on bubble graphs.  

In general, you want to be IN an exponentially increasing commodity, and out for very short periods.  But if there was ANY time to take some profits (or sell now to buy back much lower), I think now is probably that time.  But having said that let me make it clear that I am < 10% fiat so some might say I am not following my own prescription.  BTW, this is not investment advice, I am not your investment advisor, do your own thinking.

My estimation is that this is the big one.  There may be a quick "return to normal" rise, but the Chinese companies dropping BTC acceptance is the interpretation of the Central bank ruling that we all didn't want.  It is going to be hard for BTC to take a significant amount of the international B2B trade if this major export country won't accept it.

Still, I haven't cracked my cold wallet so will be happy no matter what happens...

See you back at the L1 exponential line -- its still an AMAZING rate of growth!

Absolutely...you should keep your money in USD.  Never mind the fact that they've printed $14000 for every household in America during QE.  Move right along please.