Look yourself in the mirror: http://buttcoin.org/the-cargo-cult-of-bitcoin

This bubble is massive.

Thanks znort.  Minimum still coming down. Possibly some big holders did some of the recent selling.

I expect we'll be seeing record levels of fiat on the order book  in the next week.

Thank you for your concerns. I take the time to explain some of the motivations behind my actions, related to the quoted part of your post.

1. Yes, we bought up pretty much all we could find. The deciding moment was the resilience of Bitcoin community in the face of the fork last month. The issue was fixed with 10x more professionalism and determination than can be found in wall street. This gave me the confidence to go "all-in". I realize that every one of the current USD/BTC exchanges is unable to cope with the demand, but that will not affect the bitcoin protocol. I have no reason to panic if Mt.Gox closes down entirely. The people will find the way to buy bitcoins if they want them. The premier newspaper in Finland ran a 2-page article on Bitcoin today, without a single fundamental misunderstanding. I will roll-out a comprehensive newspaper ad campaign next week in all Finnish newspapers with 100k+ readership. I am selling bitcoins to people for a 10% fee. Bitcoin is so small at present, the value of the real estate in 1 kilometer radius from my house is more than an order of magnitude bigger. Give me 3 months to raise the awareness, so I can buy all the bitcoins anyone wants to sell for sub-$0.05 per mBTC, to sell them OTC for profit.

2. I don't believe the majority of bitcoins are in speculative hands. Speculators don't hold positions for long, and prefer to use leverage, options, etc. and not own the underlying. Even if there are many speculators out there in number, the number of physical bitcoins they hold at any given moment is negligible, by which I mean less than 500,000,000mBTC.

3. There is no way for bitcoin to return to any stable value less than $10/mBTC. What you don't seem to understand is the supply/demand dynamics. Ben Bernanke has said, "there is this technology called printing press". As he speaks the truth, and there actually is such a technology, everyone should be aware that he can cap dollar's appreciation at any time by just doling out $100,000 of physical or digital cash to every citizen of his country (note: currently USD is not created by printing press, rather than loaned out at interest, which is a diametric opposite of a printing press - but he nevertheless has the printing press also, and the means to use it).

With bitcoin, there is no printing press. Barring a flaw in the protocol, nobody can create bitcoins at will. This leaves bitcoin's fate (as regards to its purchasing power) to be decided in the open market between the current bitcoin holders and current fiat holders. A popular misunderstanding is that the price of something is somehow decided by popular vote. If 90% are bearish on bitcoin, its value should decrease, don't you think so? I am afraid you are wrong. The price is decided by the highest bidder, compared to the lowest seller. There are only so many bitcoins out there, and much more dollars (and real physical wealth, such as gold, silver, land, RE, shares of income-generating businesses, which can also be exchanged for bitcoins). Last week, Wikileaks divulged that there is $32 trillion parked in a certain tax haven. If 0.01% of this money wants to buy out all the bitcoins in existence, they would be valued at $0.29/mBTC. In reality, about 90% of bitcoins are not for sale at below that price, so basically a sudden influx of $3 billion to bitcoin, would raise its price far above $1.

In a free market, only the ones that trade, have a vote. If you don't have any bitcoins that you are willing to part with, you have pretty little business trying to force its price down. If you don't have fiat (or anything else valuable) that you are willing to part with, you have not much chance to raise the price of bitcoins. Currently only about 100,000 people in the world are influencing bitcoin's price in any way. When the rest join in, the only candidate they have in their ballot is "UP". Shorting bitcoins is not only hazardous due to the instability of the platforms, and stupid, because the price is in uptrend, it is also almost impossible, because the large buyers/holders of bitcoins will take delivery, abolishing the chance to naked short it, up to any meaningful degree.

4. I knew of Bitcoin when it was still a non-traded currency. I chose my entry point to be much later, when I could trade the fiat (that I am good at making in the meantime) for bitcoins with ease. Now I recently decided to go all-in, which means that I have invested everything that I can afford to lose. Believe me, I don't regret for a second if the technology blows up. I still have my emergency gold and silver, my other businesses, my family, and my Lord. In the event that nobody else is buying bitcoins, I will buy them all the way to the bottom, and we will continue to play poker with the 10+ billion millibitcoins with my friends, hosted by the sole functioning node in my engine room. I am having a serious fun with this, I am grateful to satoshi, early adopters, devteam and (even) the operators of Mt.Gox for allowing me this chance to influence history. I will not lose my weekly bottle of Riesling no matter what happens to the price. My aim is to develop a healthy bitcoin brokerage, and continue to run it until I move on to other things. At that time I will sell it to the big guys coming after me, for 10,000,000mBTC (+ the book value). The big boys will not buy anything for less than $500 million, so either we make it or break it.

5. I would be sorry to see if you sell out too early. May I suggest you to use the method I deviced for myself, when I still had the mindset of "selling to the strength". After the initial investment, you just wait for the price to double. As it doubles, you sell 25% (or whatever you are comfortable with, as long as it is less than 50%). If it doubles again, you sell 25% of the rest. Repetitio ad infinitum. This way the dollar value of your remaining bitcoins can only ever grow (provided that bitcoin goes up, of course). Also your living standard increases all the time. If it crashes, you still win.

I bought in at $100 with some short term gains from $60 and will be holding for the long term. A problem with this would be if the bears are right about a slow downward slide, like after the last "bubble".

My favorite trading platform is that one cafe in my town that has wifi. It also has coffee, beer and at least two bitcoin enthusiasts.

Maybe I should open a cafe, accept bitcoin and morph it into a traditional trading floor. Back to the roots!

BTW wtf exactly is "Germany" and who exactly are "Americans of today"?  Your 19th century language confuses me.

Then along came the people like mr rich suit in this thread, who bought up all the BTC they could find, not to use as a futuristic currency, but to hold as a commodity so it could hopefully make them money.

The real problem is that bitcoin was designed as a currency, but is this year being used by the vast majority of its holders as a high risk high return high volatility speculative commodity.

1) BTC will return to something close to its stable value last year. In this case mr rich suit (remember he said "I only bought a meaningful number of bitcoins this year", and all his high finance type buddies will end up either with losses, or have sold out to a greater fool and made their money.  Either way they'll move on to something less stable and more speculative until the next bubble and bitcoin will get a lot of liquidity back. Meanwhile bitcoin is back on the road to more widespread adoption as a currency.
2) liquidity will stay low, and bitcoins will fluctuate from $100, to $500, to $50, then back to maybe $100 or $1000. Many will make a fortune. An identical number will lose a fortune. all the big companies like Silk Road (I use the term company loosely there) and Wordpress  will switch over to litecoin or a different crypto currency, and bitcoin will just be a bunch of bytes, used for nothing but a bunch of people selling coins back and forth to eachother while hoping to come out on top (i.e satoshi dice with lower transaction fees)

Well said, I like your friend's story, and that's why unfair early adopter advantage is a myth.

To give you some perspectives, there was a top calling thread on this subforum started in January, many people, maybe in hundreds, posted their guesses on the top, not even one in January had expected the price to go over $100, not even some fanatic permabulls.

By the way, how does the lobby of a 1960s Soviet hotel look like? I am curious.

Please do I'll be laughing all the harder if you actually were somebody reasonably wealthy and blown it all up on a delusional dream. 

MTGox determining monetary policy, essentially.

There's one problem with that: The miners don't HAVE to use the big exchanges. They don't HAVE to exchange their coins at all, in fact.

Surly they will go "all in" in the true Buttcoiner fashion, liquidate everything buy BTC and live from a diet of rice and beans for the next decade. 

Now you get it!

See, that's the problem I think I have a solution to! :-)
Better yet, it reenforces anonymity!

You've got to be kidding.  You can do that in bitcoin-qt and do not even have to be online with it.

So we are to believe you have hundreds of thousands of dollars tied up in Bitcoin but don't see the issue here?

Sign a message. Something like "I am rpietila from bitcointalk my wallet address is 12345ASDF"

It's not that hard, easier to wait for some random address to get activity.

So the point of my ramblings is...

1) Given that the exchanges can never operate on different chains. And
2) They can't allow invalidation of confirmed transactions to ever occur. So
3) If the exchanges decide that a particular chain is the only chain they'll all trade on. THEN
4) The mining pools MUST follow their direction. and
5) So MUST everyone else.

So how can "Accumulated Hashing" protect the chain, if the exchanges can throw it out willy nilly and everyone else must accept their decision?

QED.