This isn't a good comparison because BitCoin isn't a single business, it is a monetary platform that can be used by all businesses. If the United States government had to run on the market cap of Skype, it would grind to a halt. The order that these things operate in are the Trillions, not billions.

I don't think that $15,000 per bitcoin will happen within the year (barring the outside chance of some hyperinflationary event), but it is easily attainable in the long term.

It's bullion, you don't have to melt it to resell it. Unless you're making a copper pipe, why would you bother? Do you melt your gold before you sell it?

This much is a mathematical certainty because of the inflation on fiat. The question is will it get back to $31 in 2011 value (the silver parity proposal is interesting in that regard)? I do think so and agree it will be within the next 4 years.

It only acts like this if the value of BitCoin continues to stay up. If the value falls, it's like having someone inside every one of those vaults.

My work above is to show where this value comes from and how, during a period of monetary inflation, can BitCoin be experiencing deflation.

Part of it is the savings. There are a lot of people putting away their coin. Especially with a rise from $2 to $8 in a few months, it makes people think twice about spending. But an important aspect is the transactions and what the network will tolerate to give up to the miners. While the reward is close to fixed, the value is not and this value on average is reflected into the price of bitcoins.

Be careful of the listing that are no escrow no feedback. I wouldn't bid on these for even a 2 btc item, let alone an 80 btc item.

This doesn't seem to matter that much to me. First of all, GPU miners need to sell more in order to cover their electricity costs. This and the heat is the reason I stopped GPU mining (although with the price as high as it is, I am considering firing them up) for my FPGAs.

But at this point in time, it doesn't matter if miners sell every single coin they mint. Over the next year, the amount of bitcoin will only rise by 19%. I'm fairly confident that in that year we will have more than 19% growth in the economy (meaning the number of people using it and the amount of goods and services being sold). This will points to an increase in price over this time. And that assumes no hoarding, which is a pretty bad assumption.

I don't use last because the bid/ask will often move away from this without a trade happening. My preference is Mt Gox bid but midway is fine too. I can't think of a single trade I've done that has happened fast enough for the number to be exact anyway, so a few cents here and there don't matter.

Holy crap. All it takes is for the person bidding on the 25k btc at $8 to decide to buy now instead and we're in the $10s.

I haven't found much on TOR, but I2P is great for filesharing. TOR's best for anonymous browsing of the public web.

They said they would have runs of all 3 lines when they ship. I would expect a delay on the rigs.

I want to talk a little bit about what gives Bitcoin it's exchange rate. The simple answer is the meeting of the supply/demand curve, but it is important to look beyond this and figure out what exactly drives the demand for purchasing Bitcoins from a fiat currency, and where the supply of coins comes from as well.

First, I'd like to simplify in order to exaggerate some of the effects of different actors in the Bitcoin economy. Imagine a Bitcoin economy that has only one buyer, one seller, and one miner. The buyer wants something, the sellers produces something with some fixed costs (say $30) and sells it for another price (say $50), and the miner keeps the network running. The buyer regularly buys from the seller by putting his fiat in an exchange and the seller always sells his Bitcoin for fiat at the same exchange. Let's call each buy-sell a "cycle". The miner also uses his rewards to buy from the seller.

We can see here that if the miner is making more than $20 per cycle then the seller will go bankrupt, because only $20 of value is being injected into the economy every cycle. In fact, even at $20, the seller would close up shop and sell elsewhere because they would be making no profit. So this is the first complexity: how much of the sellers profit are they willing to turn over to the miners. Because of credit card fees, we know that sellers can be willing to turn over 3% gross, which can be up to 10% net to a processing company. This tolerance for sharing profit is part of where the value comes from. So let's say the seller will tolerate 3% of $50. This means that the miner should be earning only $1.50 per cycle.

Bringing it back to reality, there are many buyers and many sellers, and different people have different tolerances on their transactions, and people aren't even very aware of what is happening so it smooths out over time. But the overall thing that you need to look at is how much is being traded per block (hard to know but can be deduced from the blockchain), and how much people are willing to give up to the miners (impossible to know. but we can guess at 3% gross).

Finally, you have to factor in how much is being net saved (also impossible to know, but blockchain analysis might give an order of magnitude). If a miner makes 50 btc on a block but saves 25 of them, then this, over time, will factor into the price going up. Similarly, if someone decides to take 100 btc out of savings and buy something, the price will get a pushed down. Putting it all together, let

E = exchange rate of bitcoin
m = average amount in dollars being exchanged in a block
t = average tolerance of sellers to give to processing fees (percentage)
R = average block reward
S = average net saving per block

At equilibrium, we would expect this to be:
E = t * m / (R - S)

So for example, if t = .03, m = $5625/block, R = 50 btx/block, S = 25 btc/block, then we get E= $6.75/btc.

This highlights that the most important thing when considering price is the amount of money being truly exchanged in an average block.

Very simply, yes. The people who are willing to accept bitcoin for services or products are what is driving the value for the currency. This does include be blackmarket, which is reliant on bitcoin now, but every legitimate business adds to the value. The essential point of the value is that the desire to exchange to fiat must overpower the desire to exchange to bitcoin. Part of this comes in the trades that occur. When these trades occur, there is, on average, a small different between the buy and the sell of the bitcoins which results in value being injected into the trade. Overall, in the legitimate world, it is apparent that businesses are accepting of 2% of the trade going to the transfer system, but typically it is much less in a bitcoin transaction. Actually, the risks to the seller addressed by irreversibility make it such that many sellers tolerate up to a 5% discount on bitcoin transactions. This further adds to the value of the currency.

I would like to borrow 40 BTC for 2 weeks. At the end of the 2 weeks, I will repay 45 BTC. I may repay early, in which case I will still pay 45 BTC. I have good trading rep in the marketplace thread.

40 Bitcoin borrowed from [name withheld upon request].

In the future, I've had good trades using BTCrow http://btcrow.com/ as an escrow service. Their system works pretty well and has notifications at each step.

Did you withdraw bitcoin to okpay, or use a mt gox code? The people above were complaining about their bitcoin funding not going through. I understand the 5% fee, but there is some convenience in okpay that I like.

Yes, I thought it through. You only have to hash the hashed password once on your CPU to get the comparator. Then you run the 15 exohashes on the ASIC to find the match.

The point was that if the ASIC operates by hashing twice internally, then you simply hash the hashed password from the DB and then spin through the combinations looking for the twice hash. So, the basic answer here is that, yes, these devices can be used to crack SHA256 passwords that have been either hashed one or twice. And most 8 character passwords will be cracked in a reasonable time.

They are claiming that BitCoin processing is restored. Is this true?

https://www.okpay.com/en/company/news/bitcoin-payments.html

This isn't surprising. These addresses aren't BFL's addresses, they are bitpay's. They have a system where you are assigned an address to pay to and you have 15 minutes to pay. It seems that rather than making a brand new address for every single transaction, they have a pool of addresses that are guaranteed not to overlap in that 15 minutes. I see how are some privacy concerns, but there are aspects of this that are pretty cool.

I think our current target is $8. Remember that we were stable at $5 for a long time. The current price is part of a rise. I don't think it will double from here for a while, but there's no reason to think it won't keep going up a little more.