I think price will climb nicely even without a halving, then all the 'halvers' will attribute it to that and say 'see? told you so' (correlation != causality and all that).

If you look at any fairly popular exchange daily trade volume and compare that to a halving from 3600 to 1800 it makes it look like back page news.  There are some very powerful drivers to see BTC go up by a heck of a lot when the time is right, but halving is just dust in comparison.

We might see a pattern similar to last time (in the 'fractal similarity' sense), but first time around that could just as easily have been people waiting to see if something was broken in the protocol, then a party after it remained solid.  This time we might see a similar pattern, but nothing to do with halving, yet people will see a pattern there and perhaps get burnt in 4 years time depending on the state of the market in 2020.

There are several technologies under development such as 'Lightning & 'Thunder' which could group transactions together as one to send to the blockchain without the bloat that could make the blocksize debate moot, as well as improving speed, capacity, smart contracts etc that sit as a protocol layer on top of Bitcoin, not usurp it.  That would help the miners in that their income stream would shift from coin creation as the goal, to processing many transactions to still get healthy fees to make it worth their while.

I'd call that a fair valuation at this time, though hyper-bulls get their day sometimes as well.  I think we all need to filter what we see and make our own assessment and also learn from it.

I didn't vote because I have no idea.  It's possible that it could be way beyond that by then, if it is (as I believe) some way into the run up the slope of another major rally) or it may come back to baseline for a while, in which case I'd suggest a couple of months later where it 'should' (ha!) be the right time for that price.

If you're asking about it from a halving point of view, then I discount that event almost entirely.  There are two exceptions to that thought:

1.  The reduced output per block should cause 'some' minor increase, but not a lot.
2.  The widespread belief that halving is significant (even though there's not a BTC'er on the planet that doesn't already know about it, so will have no shock reaction) may itself people to buy 'just because...well guys there's less of it coming onto the market so it must be significant' - I don't buy into that.
3.  It is unknown how much of new BTC is available to the market.  Although a significant volume is traded every day, I suspect that most of it is HODL'd, and the same BTC are recycling around markets (15% perhaps?).

If price keeps growing as it has, on balance, since its inception, then that should more than accommodate the needs of miners fees, which would introduce a new variable to the hoard/dump patterns that we see.

I just hope that newcomers to the arena get in with dollar cost averaging rather than taking a huge hit at the top of some hyper bull, and mutter nasty words about it to everyone because they perhaps don't yet have any market experience.  There would be the counter population to that, who got in before a moon shot and encourage the former group to jump in, giving it a HYIP type badge.

True, although Gold is there because it is stable, not because it has much use case to make it increase outside of that except electronics and a handful of niche requirements.  If you look at Gold historically compared to the purchasing power of whatever Gov't paper or dinar is in vogue at the time, it's more of a stabiliser than anything - a very useful property.  One good thing about Gold is it has lots of historical data to project how it tracks the more wild swings of alternatives, and can be a measure (so far as we're able to determine) of where in a cycle a system is, which will make it look in fashion, or out of fashion when really it's going nowhere other than showing the success or failure of alternative systems.

If Gold is truly undervalued, then I'd just rephrase that and say it is the same as it ever was, and just pointing out that something like FIAT is out of control.  Gold bugs I would say are people that can see the writing on the wall, and are taking self preservation measures.

Err... but what about the size of debt of say USA alone, let alone the rest of the world.  Isn't that going to soak up .... what is it currently, $18.4 Trillion or something?  Sometimes I wonder if we actually create anything at all, or whether we're just converting sunlight to food to work to sustain the status quo, with 'wealth creators' gaining an edge on a trend for a few decades/generations before it goes back to the earth.

I find this hard to believe myself, but I just did an extrapolation based on whatever data I could pull together quickly, and it suggests that it should pass the USD$ 1 million/BTC around December 2022.  Just one year prior to that, it would suggest the paltry sum of $102,000.

That's no joke and no typo, but it does make a *lot* of assumptions such as:

*If previous history is any guide to future performance.

*Not discounting any unknowns about future events of cataclysmic scale.

*No game changers, such as what we saw about peak oil, where usage should have run out by now, but new ways of scraping the barrel, increased efficiency, scope for alternative tech to immediately (in the logarithmic sense) make it redundant.  Another one is human population on the planet - if the model worked on that then we'd all have about 1sqm of land each I guess, but nature has ways of culling non viable systems and maintaining requisite variety.

There will of course be peaks and troughs along the way, and I tried to model it ('model it' being a fancy word for 2 mins with a spreadsheet and a couple of data points for a starting point, nothing techie).  I just tried to find a baseline.  For example, if you'd joined us ATH you'd still as at time of writing, be down rather than up.  OTOH, if you got in when it was a couple of cents per coin then you'd see the market distorted in the opposite way before there was any volume to make meaningful measures of the numbers.

If FIAT doesn't collapse before the above date, and no hyperinflation experiences to mark the end of an empire, then that's a freakingly difficult value to conceive of.  If we're buying bread with wheel barrows of $100 notes then I'd suggest we start collecting parts that could be made into wheelbarrows and trade those for bread instead.

It could have a sudden halt, or a bell curve, or any number of other things that this extremely simple "time to double" projection suggests.  

So no, I don't believe the above numbers as I can't conceive of it compared to any real life experience.  Entertaining daydream though.

The volume doesn't underpin it, but don't be deceived.  I just happened to be watching as the daily bar rolled over and there was a big push in the last couple of minutes on the price making that daily price vs volume a poor representation for that period.

Looking at the weekly there is scope for a pull back, but this doesn't diminish my belief that longer term (a month or two) we can't resume a decent upward trend, even if it should unfold that it doesn't make it this time.

I think the price is way overvalued as it stands (if judging by its current utility value), but at the same time I'm Long on the market - mostly a HODLer, a user where possible, and I 'play' at trading small amounts.

So why would someone who thinks the price is too high be Long?  Well, I can see the potential for it to become one of the world changing technologies, and if that should happen then it will likely be (imho) one of those things that go "slowly at first, then all at once".

If you cast your mind back to the days where it was worth pennies, the very idea that it could be worth more than 'real' (LOL) money like a USD or a GBP was preposterous.  Now you could say that in just a small number of years it's one of the most valuable currencies out there - way over silver, and snapping at the heels of gold, and that's just one use case, the other uses are possibly way larger markets than merely being a remittance facilitator.

So I'd say it's probably worth a lot less than its price if looking at today's market, but if looking at it as a long term bet then I wouldn't be all that surprised to see it add 1, 2, or even 3 more zeros on the end of current price a couple of decades from now.  So much so that I'm prepared to lose all to find out.  I know I'm not alone in that concept - probably a lot of cavemen died in learning what you can and can't eat for health or poison.  I'm just one of those Darwin dummies, expendable to nature in order to seek out optima.

Hi R0ach,

I respect your opinions, and you are one of only a handful of people on here whose name I look out for in a thread.  I was a little disappointed therefore when you told me to go learn how to chart and trade (I started in 1994 fwiw).

You made your opinion clear on direction (up), and I made my opinion clear not on direction, but *when*.  If you put the two together then I think we can chalk that one up as a success.

Shiver(Paul).

At the risk of making a greater fool of myself, I'm thinking of it testing $570 or $500, just for the weekend (that is, not later than Sunday evening in the Western world).

I think within 24 hours of posting this we'll see a move, 48 hours max.  When I say move, I'm talking about something >$10 usual, but direction I don't know...Just a significant move for those that like options or range bound trading.

That was enlightening and useful to almost nobody I know, but there will be traders out there that can take advantage of it.

For new users, they will be trying to set up an account and get money wired in, while existing traders and profit takers will have the weekend to themselves.  At the same time I would imagine that HODLers will be HODLers no matter what.

What that might imply is a mini drop over the earlier part of the week, then see price come back here before next weekend, so I wouldn't worry too much if we see $10-20 drop over the next couple of days.

As has been pointed out by others in the forum, the halving is only a halving of new coin creation, not a halving of all coins, so while notionally it should have a mildly positive effect overall, I suspect that people waiting to see a smooth transition of the event without technical glitches could be at least as much incentive as anything else.  It went smoothly the last time, so I see little reason to be that concerned about it personally if the software hasn't changed.

The idea to me is more like a Y2K gossip event, which will not be the reason for the real changes (though admittedly a lot of work went into that to make it that way - I was a techy at that time and involved in it) but still may turn out to be a marker in the historical charts.

Just looking at the charts (and I know a lot of people wouldn't give the time of day to TA of data), it looks to me at very first glance that the triangle has to blow within the next 3 weeks or less, and I'm inclined to think it will more likely be north.  It may be the move that people discuss about it climbing initially then dropping around halving time, then finally getting some traction to make a more substantial run (again, my feeling is that it more likely be a bull run).

Hash rate has resumed it's growing numbers, and Chinese seem to be leading again where for a while they were dropping back.  So for me it's a knuckle down and ride the waves into Q3-Q4 and see what hindsight tells us then.

I see remarks about merchants selling BTC.  I am only one merchant, and not a large one at that either, but I can assure you that every satang I ever earned via the company is still in BTC, and never sold any of it.

If I can afford to run the business and have to wait for BTC to do us all proud, then I'll do that.  It just means that on some sales I have to wear that risk (BTC being a minor payment method to compared to credit/debit cards at the moment), though I am of the mind that says accumulate any BTC that is over and above my need to keep my non BTC suppliers/manufacturers with bread on their respective tables.

Whilst I still see a $650 (and more later), I don't think it will be because of halving since that is already known and priced in and will be a non-event.  Some other news that we don't know about yet, could see us climb quite a lot (adoption by a significant player, collapse of markets - which could mean empty gains (and hopefully not because of some CIP/Swift event etc).  A clearing house might do it (low volume/high value type event.

Because of the nature of Bitcoin, microtransactions probably won't be it, but this separation of Btc and blockchain will have to be the financial joke of the century.

I also wish people would start thinking in mBits now that the price is more like buying a coffee with 1Kg of gold (not literally, but you get the idea).

$650 is what I'm looking for initially.

I hope that if BTC passes and sustains $1000/BTC then people will start talking in mBits as it is much more understandable to average Joe.  For example if I went to buy a pizza with 1Kg of gold, they would ask if I had anything smaller.  BTC doesn't have that issue of course, but psychologically, a mBit makes more sense.

I believe Liberland have declared it their official currency, although it is a new and tiny country (just a few square miles), with only about 300,000 people applying for residence there.  That's small for a country, but a nice addition of new users since it would require adoption by all.

I'm looking for $650 for 2016, based on wetting my finger and seeing which way the wind is blowing.  Nothing more substantial to back it up, it just feels like the right area to me.

If (if) it reaches the ATH then I would imagine there will be quite a few people that bought up at that price that will just be happy to unload and walk away from it altogether.

i think those in it for the long haul will not be bought any time soon so I wouldn't anticipate a disaster, just that we may fleetingly see those prices before tumbling down again to the 500-600 kind of range (should the ATH be challenged), then the next time it passes ATH it could actually stick and find a new base.