Hard to tell. I'd expect that a good bit of the high gold price is indeed a bubble, but the financial crisis might have superimposed a genuine rise. The problem is how to value gold if things go bad. Some countries hold gold reserves and might start spending them, and just fiat currencies inflating away does not mean that gold actually increased in value.

Given that the US might hold on for quite a bit longer despite their enormous debt, it's still possible for Gold/USD to crash.

Greece... I don't know if it still matters that much. If the ECB starts giving in further, expect currency instabilities; if it doesn't, expect more governments to collapse. This decision is what really matters. It determines what breaks down first.

If you ask in the speculation forum, naturally there should not be a consensus that the price is too low or too high. (Otherwise, all speculators would be all-in or all-out, which would be really bad.) In the end, hardly anyone can foresee short-term movements, and if someone can, he often finds a way to accelerate them for his own profit.

Just buy some and don't pay it much mind if you turn out lucky or unlucky. It should average out in the long run. No way to tell whether a single guy pops up with either 500k USD or 100k BTC tomorrow and renders any short-time forecast useless. Yep, those numbers could spike current Gox orderbook to 4.5 or 8 respectively! Bitcoin is still so small that single traders can shake up the market. Forecasting this should really not be possible.

Grml *rechne irgendwelches Zeug und bin nicht da*

Naja, gibt ja hoffentlich noch ein nächstes Mal. Erzählt mir dann, wieviele da waren. Und ob die Preis-Besucherzahl Korrelation echt so gut funzt.

I'd go a step further and say they ignite the demise of weak states.

Normally, there still remains some half-bad compromise way out. When capital controls start, the final curtain calls.

I Agree with Technomage.

You can't sustain an economy on pointless hype from people who buy BTC to get more Fiat. The crash was unavoidable, and there was no room for further growth of the type last year. Real growth needs time and action. Now that the market has re-arranged itself, and the chaos settled, we have use for more people joining. Back in the bubble, they would have just facepalmed at the chaos and left again quickly.

I think now is the time to try and spread the word. We're ready for further expansion, we just need more people to see the possibilities.

Why imply the problem is somehow specific to Europe?

Replace "Europe" with "any place with debt above 50% of annual GDP". That's especially, but not only public debt.

Wat. My dad has been speculating and using BTC pretty much since the moment I told him they existed. Being over 60 doesn't necessarily cause a lack of interest in tech or finance, right?

BTW. Hexadecibel. I watched that episode, and now I hear the "yay" every time I see that avatar...! Wah! (Yay~)

The EUR future is really up to speculation. I don't see a reason to call people "exceedingly stupid" based on speculations about it. I agree that Bitcoin was underrated after the main bubble, but that is simply because there was too little faith in Bitcoin at the time. The Euro situation was probably not too important then. This need not be the case right now.

The increasing debt pressure on the governments from bail-outs might be forwarded to the ECB, which might at some point give in and prop up inflation. If this, in turn, does feedback on bond yields, the EUR might be facing a serious decline.

The last months of decent-level stability in both price and user base are unprecedented in Bitcoin. Also, hardly anyone expected the Euro to crash right away last year, when there was still more room for action. Now, even more government money has been spent, but the situation is hardly under control. Bitcoin has improved, but Euro looks as bad as ever, if not worse. And we're not talking about small probability changes here. From my perspective, Bitcoin's chances have easily doubled, and the EUR is facing double-digit probabilities of a very serious crisis.



BTW: wow, we're really seeing quite the rally right now. I was bullish, yea, but this is quite a sight. Good to see Bitcoiners remain this bold after all the drawbacks. I thought they've become overly prudent by now, feels good to be proven wrong. Go Bitcoin!

A decent PSU shouldn't give in so easily. Better than a sudden power down IMO.

I use an uninterruptible power supply. But I'm not mining, and it wouldn't make sense for that. It's just to safely hibernate the system and flush all caches in case I lose power.

Works fine so far. Tested it a few times and indeed lost power once. The system auto-hibernated properly, and I could continue where I left off when power returned. I like this.

Bitcoin is intended for backing transactions that need the high security and provable validity.

It's easy to make an international high-speed transaction payment processor that uses BTC as a backing currency. there have been several proposed schemes for this, and the good thing is: Bitcoin makes them all compatible. Moving from one micropayment system to another is nothing more than a Bitcoin transaction.

I'm working on a project to automate this, but for the supermarket there's no real reason not to print BTC-backed bills or make cash cards. Since these are about small amounts of money, they do not need the expensive security mechanism of the block chain. But should too much money pile up in them, they allow to withdraw directly in Bitcoin for storage in a safer place or international transactions.



Remember that Bitcoin is about the option to move funds globally or own them yourself. There's no need to do things that way all the time. It's just good to know that you can do it when it becomes necessary.

This time, I'm not on the "too hot" side. In fact, I feel somewhat bullish.

Bitcoin has been stable and resilient on many fronts lately, maybe with the exception of the block chain scaling nuisance, but that's not a show-stopper so far. Everything else, though, is a horrible mess! Currency chaos Bitcoin seeks to replace has not done a good job of staying in place lately, and politics around the globe are as erratic as ever. If anything, the need for Bitcoin has increased.

So we have a working system that is stabilizing and returning to growth after its violent birth... that might face increasing demand!

In the end, it depends on whether more people finally "get it," but I think it's reasonable to be bullish just because of the current low absolute BTC value when comparing to its potential.

Looks to me like a destructive kid burning money in a hacked account.

This serves no purpose. You can't identify a trend with it, since bots or bored day-traders will compensate. At best, it produces pointless trading volume.

I don't think immediate usability is why people get into Bitcoin. It is not yet better than established payment processors in just paying an invoice. Even if it were so, that is not the main reason why people are so excited about it. If you want to get people into Bitcoin, explain to them what it is really about!

Bitcoin is the first truly fair and international currency. It does not prefer one location, government, or institution. No "superior" can stop you from using your coins on the other side of the planet, no "minister of finance" can just inflate their value into oblivion, no "officer" can just declare that they are no longer yours. To a Bitcoin, every trading entity is equal.

For a newcomer, it is important to understand that he is dealing with the most real currency the world has ever seen, one compared to which the Dollar and Euro look like a dull fake. That's when an enthusiast is born, not with "this works better than PayPal".

As for immediate uses: a store of value that may be useful if the local currency blows up and Bitcoin doesn't. It doesn't hurt to hold a few coins just in case.

Bitcoin is a backing currency. I know this is not commonly known and accepted yet, but it's what it is.

There is nothing that stops people from doing classical banking with Bitcoins. In fact, it is probably necessary, since the block chain is a slow high-maintenance system not really suitable for small transactions.

There's nothing wrong with printing Bitcoin bills. "100 mBTC, to be redeemed at the Malaysian Bitcoin Bank" -- good enough for use in the supermarket. But any larger savings can be stored on your own USB stick, enabling the security and stability of Bitcoin where it's needed. If Malaysia goes haywire, people only lose their shopping cash, and transferring savings out of the country is trivial.

That's the main point why Bitcoin is so great. It works when it matters, but doesn't stop anyone from using cheap, classical methods otherwise. In effect, this will move monetary control away from local governments and institutions, toward international companies and organizations anyone can use from anywhere.

In effect, this means there will be an abundance of choices for banking, and people are not forced to use the local ones. As long as some of them are suitable for non-techies, things will work out. Well, with the exception that uninformed people making stupid decisions are still at risk. But I don't think there's a way to change that.

I agree that there is no reason to assume there would be more shorts than longs at this point, which makes the argument of a price rise due to missing shorts moot.

Using price as an indicator for price is no good idea though. If everybody does that, price change depends on price... whee, the teachers' favorite differential equation, and exponential price movements! We tried that last year around this time.

Well, that aside, I'm also a bit bullish at the moment. Just because Bitcoin is fundamentally good, and enough people are on the boat to make 5 USD per coin look a tad cheap.

Die Spekulanten wissen das bereits. Daher ist davon auszugehen, dass sie diese Tatsache bereits in ihre Preisabschätzungen einbezogen haben.

Ich denke, Bitcoin hängt ganz massiv an der Größe seines Marktes. Bald sind die Hälfte aller Coins da, und das Mining passiert in exponentiell abnehmender Geschwindigkeit -- der wesentliche Faktor für die vorhandenen Coins sind die Spekulanten, die auf ihnen sitzen. Da tut sich nicht viel.

Die Marktgröße hingegen kann um Größenordnungen Schwanken! Je nachdem, was die Zukunft bringt, könnten 90% der aktuellen Enthusiasten abspringen, oder umgekehrt zehnmal mehr Leute anfangen, Bitcoin zu benutzen. Die möglichen Schwankungen dadurch sind so gewaltig, dass die Ändeurngen im "Angebot" an Bitcoins dagegen verblassen, zumal diese eben bereits hinlänglich bekannt und deshalb bei der Preisfindung berücksichtigt sind.

Die wichtigen Fragen sind also:

• Wer könnte Bitcoin in großem Maße benutzen, und mit welcher Wahrscheinlichkeit tritt so ein Szenario ein?
• Wie wahrscheinlich ist es, dass etwas schief läuft oder die Leute das Interesse verlieren, und Bitcoin sich deshalb nicht etablieren kann?

Naja... der Preis wird immer noch hauptsächlich von Spekulation hochgehalten. Es werden nicht wirklich 9M BTC (also um die 40M EUR) ständig umhergehandelt, sondern der Großteil liegt bei Spekulanten, die auf einen wachsenden Markt setzen.

Der Anstieg wird durch Spekulanten ausgeführt, aber deshalb muss er nicht "falsch" sein. Im Gegenteil, das sollte der Normalzustand sein; durch die Spekulanten ist der Markt stabiler gegen plötzliche Erschütterungen. Ich persönlich habe letzte Woche ein paar mehr BTC gekauft, weil ich die bleibende Aktivität auf den verschiedenen Bitcoin-Seiten ohne neuen Medienhype positiv bewerte. Dazu kommt, dass gleich drei große Währungen durch marode Staaten gefährdet sind: EUR, JPY und mittlerweile auch USD kränkeln an Überschuldung ihrer Staaten, kriegen aber trotz zunehmend massiven Warnsignalen nicht die Kurve. Das vergrößert die Zielgruppe für Bitcoin. Könnte sein, dass andere Spekulanten ähnlich denken.

Die Aktion vor einem Jahr war eine klassische Spekulationsblase, in der massenhaft Menschen mit Spekulation schnell reich werden wollten. Diese Preisblasen wiederholen sich, wenn auf einem illiquiden Markt Leute spekulieren, die eigentlich nicht über das nötige mathematische und wirtschaftliche Wissen verfügen. Da es Bitcoins an Liquidität mangelte, konnten erfahrene Spekulanten nicht korrigierend eingreifen. Short-Selling oder Optionen gab es zu diesem Zeitpunkt praktisch nicht. Man konnte also nicht einfach auf fallende Kurse spekulieren, und diese Tatsache war mit schuld an dem zähen und quälenden Crash, bis Bitcoinica's Short Selling dann verspätet aufkam und einen Irrsinn in die Gegenrichtung erzeugte, der im Spike unter 2 USD im Dezember endete.

Solche Schwankungen stabilisieren übrigens den Markt auf längere Sicht, von daher war das Chaos gar nicht so schlecht. Klar wird es weitere Schwankungen geben, aber das irre Tempo von 2011 sehen wir wahrscheinlich nicht wieder.

Coole Sache!

Ich werd' erst spontan wissen, ob ich Zeit habe.

Wasn't Falkvinge the dude who tried to use his influence to profit from his followers?

Anyway. There was a post above, and I read it up to the word "manipulator". Would everyone finally give him a rest? The omnipotent manipulator explanation is so old, you can wrap a whale into its beard. And still, I don't remember any sensible explanation of market movement that came from it.

Well. Apart form the aforementioned Falkvinge case. That was proper manipulation.

Heh. A Diablo 3 gold per BTC chart would be amusing.

My forecast: Diablo gold will drop further vs BTC. Blizzard hasn't stopped the bots and farmers in any of their other games, I expect this one to be no different. Though they might give it some extra thought when they sell stuff themselves? We'll see.