I do, but I also have charts that show unprecedented bid depth created by a single person.  That was concretely an unusual and significant event, and the market did, in fact, suddenly change immediately thereafter.

Speculating on the motives and what will happen next is entirely my imagination, but hey, that's why they call it speculation, right?

No, I think it's partly an increased demand for a non-fiat value store (which can also increase the fundamental price of Bitcoins - it's part of my formula).  It's also an equal or larger dose of speculative bubble.

Nope.  On Nov 14, just before we hit bottom, I called it out as unusual behavior by a single trader.  This post and chart says it all:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=51784.msg617950#msg617950

Difficulty is an effect of price, not a cause.

I define the fundamental price as what is required to store sufficient value to support current commerce.  The price cannot be sustained lower since non-speculating Bitcoin users will bid it up to fill their needs.  Speculation can drive the price higher, but only as long as there is a constant influx of investment - the sum of (miners speculatively holding) + (net increase in fiat).

"Feeding the miners" (with either hope or fiat from people with hope) becomes more expensive with a rising price - at the current $5, we have to find over $1M per month of new hopes and dreams just to keep things afloat.  Getting up to $30 would require over $6M per month of influx.

So where's the floor?  Read this plus what I linked at the bottom.

tl;dr: The floor is a few cents, and a reasonable level of speculation would put us at 10x the floor - perhaps $0.50.  Any price above that requires either wild speculation (what we have now), or an increase in commerce.

Hype will get more of the former and thus a bigger, longer bubble; more people doing real commerce will cause the latter, and enable a sustainable long-term growth.  Unfortunately I see mostly the former and very little of the latter.  Until that changes, I'm keeping the bear hat on.

Actually, that's not a problem.  You just reroute the data through a relay that can see both endpoints.  The internet does this all the time.  I'm not sure if the inner planets go into a configuration where one can't see any of the others for an extended period, but if it's a serious problem you just park a relay satellite at Earth's L4 / L5 Lagrange points (about 60 degrees ahead/behind Earth's position), which will guarantee 100% coverage.

It doesn't matter as long as people are willing to keep putting money down to back their belief / speculation.  The miners have to be paid or the price goes down.  People have to not panic or the price goes down fast.

Mr. M had the capital to prop it up at $2, but probably not at $20.  Thus it falls back to fundamentals and speculation.  The fundamentals say we're overvalued by 1-2 orders.  Speculation gets harder the more expensive it gets.

All the things you cite are great reasons for the price to run up, but I don't see how it's going to find support once it gets up there unless the fundamentals change, specifically a sustained increase in real commerce.

You actually want the block rate to be slower than the max latency.  1h blocks with 1h latency wouldn't break completely, but it'd have a very high orphan rate, and worse, a very high "deep orphan" rate where you end up with abandoned chains several blocks high.  It's mitigated some because average latency will be lower than the max latency, but I'd still recommend keeping the block rate several times the max latency.

With a block rate of 4h the orphans would be tolerable.  6 confirms would be 1 day, which is acceptable for money being sent such long distances.  It's not like FedEx delivers next day to Jupiter.

6.28318531

I'm actually pretty bearish, but I don't think the current bubble will be over quite yet by then.

A centralized fiat currency can be traded by wave as well.  If you have a stable bank that can be trusted to manage the currency over long time periods, you just radio in your wire transfers.

Bitcoin eliminates the stable organization requirement, but creates a mining requirement.  Mining in its present form would operate poorly on a solar-system scale, but an altchain with a slower block rate would work OK.  Interstellar latencies would completely kill it, though.  Are you going to wait for 6 confirms at 100 years per block?

I would expect trade at such distances would be performed by barter.  The very slow execution and delivery times eliminate most of the advantages of abstracted currency.

Fundamentals bear here.  It's still overvalued based on current need and IMO the current rally is based on pure speculation...  IE, it's a speculative bubble.

I speculate that Bubble2 won't be as extreme or last as long as Bubble1.  I give it a few months before we hit $2.00 again.

It's very rare that I'll apply "artificial" to a free market, but in this case it was.  The way down was driven by a very diverse group of people, but the very bottom - the $2 that we bounced off off - was a single individual who threw down a lot of money to stop the fall, followed by spending quite a bit to pitch it back up again.  It was easily visible in the charts I posted at the time.

The price is back in the hands of the larger market now, but the bottom was not the action of a fairly diverse set of humans.

After all what that's happened?  How have the fundamentals changed?

It's for the same reason that it started falling: sentiment changed.  IMO there hasn't been a change in fundamentals.  It's all psychological.

Someone with a good bit of money drew a line in the sand at $2.00, and successfully fought off all attempts to push lower.  Having achieved that, the wider market seems to have taken that as a sign that we've reached bottom.  The bottom was artificial, but hey, he convinced them, so now everyone's buying again.

I believe it's the Bitcoin network that makes transactions legitimate.  If Alice transfers coins to Gox and it gets into the blockchain, that money was paid, and Gox has an obligation to uphold their side of the implicit contract, specifically to increase her account balance.

If we are going to start treating coins as tainted, that needs to happen with network consensus.

Since Western Union is transferring money both ways (USD > PHP and PHP > USD), they'll accept your USD, deliver PHP on the receiving end.  They then wait for someone with PHP to send money to the US.  They accept new PHP and deliver what used to be your USD to the new recipient.  Of course it's much more liquid than this simple example, involving many currencies, but you get the idea.

If there's an imbalance, for example lots of people depositing USD and withdrawing PHP but not many performing the reverse, WU will go to the forex markets to trade their excess USD for needed PHP.  Aside from their normal charges, WU will charge extra if they convert currency since making those forex trades isn't free (and they will mark it up since you're willing to pay for the convenience).

The same thing will happen with Bitcoins if there's a large imbalance.  For example:  Lots of people trade USD to BTC, send the BTC to someone in China, who then trades BTC to CNY.  If this happens too much, the exchange rate for CNYBTC will start to fall.  When it falls too much, someone will notice an arbitrage opportunity - they'll trade BTC to USD (on GOX), trade USD to CNY (at any currency desk or forex market), then trade CNY to BTC.  Because the CNYBTC was cheap they end up with more BTC than when they started, despite all the trading fees.  They will continue doing so as long as they can find a profitable way to do so.  If it's a huge imbalance people will do the USDCNY trades as fast as they can (eg, international wires), because it's profitable even with the high cost of a wire.  Smaller imbalances are handled by slower, cheaper methods.  Eventually the arbitrage will push the USDBTC down and CNYBTC up until things are back in balance.

I was wondering when we'd see some of the first cases of this.

Long term I expect it'll be the same as it is with fiat: if you deposit some bills at a bank with serial numbers associated with a robbery or ransom, you'll probably get some extra attention and questions, but ultimately the value remains yours.

IMO:

Short-term (weeks): momentum looks good, much to my annoyance.  I've been preaching about fundamentals and bears for a while, and Bubble2 indicates you all aren't listening.  

Mid-term (months): fundamentals will catch up when people get tired of feeding the miners their fiat.  Bubble2 won't be nearly as fun as Bubble1 was.  Still, it'll take a few months to hit 2.00.  Let's say: April 15, high noon.

Long-term (years): Everything depends on how well fundamentals develop.  If adoption doesn't pick up, we're looking at trading for nickels and dimes this year.  If we see some real commerce start to happen with established businesses instead of just community-focused ones, I'll take off the bear suit and get on the rocket.

Like with software, I don't think people will care much about the Open Source aspect, but I do like the Free part in the sense that the free software guys use it (libre): that it's YOURS, unencumbered, and you are free to do what you want with it.

"Free Money" might even work better than it does for the free software guys.  Here it won't be mistaken for free-as-in-beer.

Do you have an account set up with a mining pool?  If not, that's the first thing you need to do.  Then put the "worker" (usually different form the pool web login) user/password into guiminer.

Yes, I understand the birthday paradox.  It doesn't apply to someone duplicating YOUR key, only their ability to generate the same key twice by accident, which doesn't give them anything useful.

Regardless, we have a 160-bit keyspace.  It's enormous, and birthday paradox collisions won't happen even with unlimited resources.  By comparison, brute forcing someone's key is much easier - about 2**80 operations.