Vladimir club here we come! 

Only the ones that have BTC or are willing to buy it, have a vote.

Ergo, 99% of the world's population do not, as they have never owned a BTC nor are willing to consider buying it in 2013, most often for the reason of not yet knowing about it. No matter how much some of them hope and believe that the price will go down, it will not do it because of their actions, (since they never acted).

If early adopters and disheartened speculators want to sell it down to $20 and buyers are greedy enough to collectively wait, well, it will go to $20. That is within the realm of possibility. Then we would be sitting on a mere 100% YTD gain. Single digits, no way. At that point I can buy the new supply daily, which kind of stabilizes the freefall  

Addressed to late speculators: Nobody forces you to sell your coins at $50. Why would you do it now, as you were not willing to sell them on our way up to $500. There was less supply to $500 that there is to $100 now. (Most of the "supply" now btw is fake walls - aha! on topic!! - of the people who are accumulating more)

You can buy yourself a donator tag, but everyone will still notice if you're an idiot.

Of all the bitcoins I have ever bought, I have perhaps been "short" maximum 10% of the previous high coincount. So at least in my case, 90% is in cold storage.

Currently bitcoin's value is volatile as the market is trying to figure out whether Bitcoin should replace gold or not. If the answer turns out affirmative, bitcoin's value will roughly stabilize after more and more of the economical activity will be financed through self-liquidating bitcoin-denominated credit, as outlined in Fekete's paper.

(I wonder if Fekete himself realizes that his work will be applied to make Bitcoin the new gold  )

For anyone interested, I think the upper bound for bitcoin's value is therefore the current Gold market cap, about $7,000 billion. So one bitcoin will not be worth more than $300k. Actually the utility of holding bitcoins when that is reached, is about the same as holding gold right now ( = most people think you are a little stupid, no matter how rich you are).

But to get there, the value must increase. Actually we were (in log scale) half there barely a few days ago. With the bitcoin's long term value appreciation of 25%, we can be there sooner than most of us think. Anything over $300k should be regarded as a bubble, even if we are in a "new paradigm", it does not mean everyone will be able to get rich just holding bitcoins, only the early adopters (i.e. every one who buys bitcoins for significantly less than its fair value of $300k).

Do you think it will go up from there?

Thank you, this is the intention. Bitcoin is so very small at present. I get labeled a bitcoin mogul, although in reality I own 3 coinshops in tiny European countries and my staff number about 5

Never invest more than you can afford to lose. If your intention is to life an easy life, sell to the strength. If you want to be a bitcoin mogul, buy bitcoins with all your spare cash. If enough businessmen do this, bitcoin will be quite valuable.

Last time I checked, the bitcoin network was doing all fine.

Please by all means sell if you want to take fiat profits off the table. Maybe we are heading towards a 2011-style months long bear market in the face of the 10,000s of new accounts and 100,000,000s of dollars pouring to bitcoin daily (in addition to all the money currently in the exchanges, which cannot be repatriated without buying bitcoins with it, plus the burgeoning OTC market).

There is time for all activity under the Sun, and if your time to panic is now, go ahead. Even I finished my buying for today (BTC500), so there is nothing to keep the price from dropping.

The chart is (machinated to be) unbelievably bearish, I hope you understand you better sell all your coins at 50+ if you can't wait till autumn!

Nah, this is bulls grasping at straws. It will not go to $150 this week, even $50 is more likely at this point.

I am not complaining, I am working 18/6 to increase my holdings. I got a serious headache getting fiat-rich a week ago, much better to be bitcoin-rich.

Compared to world's physical gold storage,
- The actual traded stock of bitcoins is larger
- The bitcoins traded change hands much more often
- Number of bitcoins is increasing at a larger annual rate.

So if you feel velocity is somehow a desirable characteristic for a backbone of a monetary system, at least with bitcoin you get much more of it compared to the current one.

Milady, we are upon the deep and venerable question, whether 1 bitcoin now equals 1 bitcoin tomorrow. The western legal tradition says it does. Perhaps I do understand what you are saying, but find it humiliating to even consider lowering the price of our Most Prestigious titles, namely the Donator tag. If anything, its price should be increased to reflect the increasing readership, and heap honor upon honor of the early Donators.

1 million coins traded over the weekend. How many do you think is enough?! Everybody has their chance to buy, unlike the week before, where every $million invested raised the market cap by more than $10 million. We are in a very healthy consolidation period now, and I see my bids being fulfilled all the way to 82!!

We have had at least 7 flashcrashes taking the price down by 20% or more during the last 7 weeks, sorry I don't have the data it may be last week alone that many. There are lots of opportunities to buy coins, although I am afraid that the rich will get richer, like me, buying coins all the time.

Since the long-term viability of Bitcoin rests in the delicate balance between value appreciation and usage growth, I currently feel that my greatest priority is to distribute coins to new strong hands. If I buy them up, it is not good. I try to net distribute 10x more coins than I buy for me, and that is achieved by having a 10% margin after expenses. I would help with the bitcoin services economy if I could.

Wow. Nobody cared to "inform" me about the WoT... it seems that it does not work really, in the way it's intended.

The dealer network is the way.

Yeah. Good question. Why don't you all attend your own business. Selling precious metals is a pain, even just this week I got 2 international insured gold orders returned from post office, with no reason  Being busy is not a scam, and you can always buy from me (EU ONLY) or Amagi Metals that seems legit.

After some further thinking, why don't you all sell your coins to me..

Good. I have +BTC50 buys in at every 2 over 78... I don't mind if they all get sold into

Since this is a diary, and not a rant or a collection of my theoretical thinking, I might perhaps post what I did today.

We had agreed to meet in the office at 9:00, and Lauri would come one hour later. Lauri worked for me as an operations manager in my mobile scrap gold business last summer. He is expert in newspaper advertising, as the scrap gold business was at that time all about newspaper advertising. It cost in excess of $20,000 per month to keep one mobile gold buying desk open. The rent per 24 days was more than $5000, and the advertising cost also $5000+. The rest was personnel and overhead. People ridiculed our humble plastic equipment, asking, whether we would soon be rich enough to actually rent a permanent shop. I had one all the time, with the montly expense running at about $2000 excluding my salary. They did not know that I could rent 2-3 prime permanent locations for the price of one mobile buying desk.

Oh sorry, I need to stay in topic. Lauri is an expert in the field that I was about to start a skirmish in - newspaper ads. The reason why I needed such, was simple. I want to sell bitcoins OTC for a nice margin, and I figured out there was an opportunity in the market for the following reasons:

- The current operations in Finland - other than me - are designed for nerds, by nerds. And that market is more or less tapped.

- There was this 2-page featured article in Helsingin Sanomat on Sunday. In addition, the morning TV today was also heavy on Bitcoin. There were three experts on the subject doing the talking, and the reporter was appreciative. Even the recent crash was not an issue, rather it was presented as a buying opportunity. (Seriously - this is a state-owned TV!) The general populace is primed for Bitcoin, but the supply is not there.

- It cost a mere $5000 to put a postcard-sized ad in the newspaper, and our profit margin is 15%. Our break-even point is therefore about $35,000 in cumulative sales, which I estimate will be achieved in 48 hours. Everything above that is pure profit. (OK, Roni's estimation of the payback time is 4 days, and there is no guarantee about it ever paying back and blahblah, but I am positive. You will see if I am wrong, since most of the time I am)

- Organising such a(n ad)venture is fun and easy for me, and easy enough for someone else to do after me. I believe we got a headstart of at least a day, maybe more. While there are many organizations capable of doing the frontend part, the backend (exchanges, etc.) is sorely lacking, and realistically I don't expect any competition from anyone. It's like the 7 days' war. Either you got the coins, but you are not a businessman, or you are a businessman, but you ain't got the coins, and won't get any to sell in at least a week if you start now. The only one who can quickly sell you such a number of coins is me, and I will not be selling them to anyone for any less than 10% over spot, which makes a profitable resale difficult. Checkmate. No competition

First at about 11, I bought 10 one-kilo silver coins from a gentleman for 68,000mBTC. In dismay I had realized that silver price had dropped 10% since Friday. Even 30 days before it would have meant a busy week for me, writing articles about silver, but now I didn't have time to think about it. I sent Lauri to realize some of our gold reserves and he netted about 21,000 € for 19 ounces. Much less than planned.

Most of the time went to practical details with the newspaper ad. Our staple graphic designer was busy with other orders, so we needed to quickly get a new one. Partly because of the risk associated with this (we had about 3 hours from the decision to put a large ad, to the materials deadline), we decided to use a very plain ad. It is similar to the one appearing soon in the central part our website, but larger. 

Somebody dropped by to pick up her paper wallet of coins I had sold the previous week. I had a lunch, river crab cocktail feta salad, with coffee, since there was no wine left. Tomorrow we have our private club upper layer meeting, which will feature wine and champagne. Exactly two weeks before, our reason for celebration was breaching $0.1 from the downside. Now we can celebrate the same number again. I hope for the next 12 meetings we could celebrate $0.1, since that would be an excellent round number breather, during which we can gear up our engine and gobble up lots of coins for reasonable prices. Due to my intuition that I am not the only one hoping, I won't count on it, though..

For that reason I extended our trading capital to buy Goxmoney for $50k. It is 500,000+ millibitcoins, man! Our trading position is over 100% right now, since I have accounts payable in excess of the fiat-denominated cash equivalent. Either I get to sell 1,000,000mBTC to the public during the rest of the week, or I need to sell it in the exchange. The latter option would be a wash or maximum a 5% profit (the discount I apply to buying Goxmoney). If USD/BTC tanks hard, it will be an "ouch".

My silver dealing is nearing an inflection point. The paper silver price is dropping like a stone, and physical premiums are skyrocketing. Today's fixing in Silvervault was 16.05 EUR/AGD, which evaluates the entire content of our vault at a measly EUR 2 million. When the Bitcoin millionaires start to cash out, there'll be a whiplash of 20% immediate increase in the silver price, followed by a 30-day busy importing period, during which any additional demand can only further push up the price. This is in absence of external shocks, which will no doubt be many... such as our main supplier in the U.S. being almost constantly out of stock for 2 months now.

We did not actually do more than 8 hours in the office. The closing of the day was about rolling out our newspaper ad campaign to 4 other newspapers the next day, counting money and hunting receipts for bookkeeping. When dealing with physical cash you need to do this every once in a while - we even have the term "kymppi" (literally: a ten (grand)) which represents a stack of physical euros with an approximate total value of 10k. Sometimes you go wrong, though.. today one kymppi only contained about EUR 3,000 since there were 20 € notes in the middle. We seldom see anything except 50, 100 and 500 € notes in quantity.

After taking care of my daughter during the evening, the family went to bed. I finished some buy orders, will set some sells to the $.12 range in no hope that they'll be fulfilled but just in case, finish this post, and start polishing our website for the new visitors tomorrow morning.

I will be in London Th-Su this weekend.

As of that writing, he was already 81! A little respect If I would need to pick one person, who has opened my eyes as regards to monetary economics, it would be Fekete. For anyone with a 130+ IQ, I would suggest to read all of his articles. It only takes a weekend to digest them and at least I have benefitted tremendously from the information.

Madam, you don't seem to make any sense at all.

Yes, we need a silver to bitcoin's gold. But that one will not be litecoin, sorry 

Another complement to the hard currency (blockchain bitcoin) economy, would be to reinstall real bills. <- It's a technical but fascinating read about the almost-forgotten aspect of the gold standard, without which the gold standard (of the post-WWI world) had no means to operate, and needed to be replaced with fiat standard in the 1930s.