I can hardly contain my excitement.

Well, I want to order more units from BFL but feel committing money now when any delivery at all is still not certain doesn't seem prudent.  I will only consider further orders once I receive my existing orders from September.

The price of bitcoin is anything but stable.  We've seen the price double in two months.  We have several daily swings of 5% or more per week. 

For Chinese citizens going to Macau to gamble, bringing enough money with them presents a problem.

http://emergingmoney.com/china/macau-casino-pawn-shop-lvs-mpel/

"Because of capital controls imposed by the Chinese government, Mainland citizens coming to the Macao Special Administrative Region are only allowed to bring in 20,000 RMB, or a little over $3,000. "

"Pawn shops in Macau allow Chinese residents to use debit cards to purchase high-end merchandise such as rolexes, then immediately re-sell the good back to the pawn shop for cash. The pawn shop takes a nominal fee and the gambler has managed to acquire the cash necessary for gambling."

I placed my order in early September and after the way things have gone so far I have resigned myself to maybe receiving my order by late March.  Add another week for international mail too.

I, like many others, am getting a little tired of the optimistic timelines frequently published by BFL employees.  In January we were told BFL would be descending upon UPS/FedEx/EMS/etc like a swarm of angry locusts or whatever this week with their finished units.  Yet we know the chips are still being prepared, let alone actually assembled in any finished units.

Please, just keep posting updates (none here for a long time: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=post;topic=145544.20;num_replies=21) and stop making very optimistic projections time and time again.

The last time I saw someone post '$100 this year' was right before the last $32 peak in 2011, and we finished the year barely above $2.  I hope it won't be the same this time around.

It truly is a great day.  Bitcoin has reached parity in a few short years with something that's been considered money for hundreds, if not thousands of years.

Common contrarian advice is to sell up when others are shouting how rich they're becoming and how the market is only going to rocket further up from here.  Think back to famous past bubbles, whether it be dotcoms, housing, or bitcoin's bubble in 2011. 

Where is the peak in the current bubble?  Who knows.  Almost no one can predict it in the future and everyone always predicts it when looking back after it has burst.

Someone was so keen to sell that they've left MtGox Live battered, bruised and broken.  I need my pretty chart of the carnage :-)

Once governments agree to collect taxes in bitcoin then I can see the need for fiat dying.

The stellar drop from $26 to $23 (and still going) is quite something to watch.  We've had a fantastic rise from mid teens to mid twenties in just a few weeks.  A normal healthy correction to $20 or so is nothing to worry about.

The real test for bitcoin's enthusiastic investors and speculators is the previous highest mark, which briefly touched $32 before plummeting down to barely more than $2. 

It's just someone playing with the market.  It's not a whole bunch of people suddenly all deciding that $21 is exactly where they want to be.  Keep the market below $21, buy small lots.  Remove 'wall' when the time comes and watch people bid higher.  Dump bitcoins into the strength and repeat.  It's beautiful to watch.

People do not panic buy in a bubble (unless they're shorting, which isn't the case with bitcoin).  Never have, never will.  They only panic sell.  The buying part involves hubris and arrogance, the looking at exponential growth in charts and thinking it can only go up from here.  There's no panic involved, just greed.

The 'panic buy' meme comes from those who are already invested and want others to push the price higher.

In mid 2011 I remember reading comments on this forum about how some people would be amazed if bitcoin was worth less than US$100 by the end of that year.  It finished at around $2.  It's easy to think the price will keep going up after a sudden burst in the price.  All that's needed is a few people with lots of bitcoins to think 'hmm, yep, I reckon this is as good as it's going to get for a while' and dump.  Instant correction as others follow.

Those convenient 'walls' at $20 right after a dump are not created by a mass of people all thinking the same.  It's someone extracting maximum value from the market and doing a great job of it.

Bitcoin has been around for 4 years, less than that in a usable software form.  It would be interesting to load up a wallet with bitcoins and store it for maybe, 5 years, before retrieval.  It's long enough to be a really long time in terms of bitcoin, but also short enough that you'll avoid media degredation worries or simply forgetting about the whole thing.

In addition to my previous post, if you were serious about storing bitcoins for children or grand children it would be well worth storing a couple of DVD drives with the discs.  In a decade or two you may have difficulty finding a working drive even if your media is all fine.  A USB DVD drive isn't a bad idea as USB has been around for a very long time.  I had a USB enabled PC in 1997, so it's fairly likely USB will be known and maybe even used in some form in a decade or two from now.  Heck, it's still possible to buy new motherboards with serial and parallel ports, technology that dates back to the 1970s.

I would store the wallet with instructions on how to use it on a variety of media.  Paper, CDR, and DVDR.  Anything using flash memory is guaranteed to lose data within about 10 years.  The smaller the cells and higher density of data, the faster the data loss.

Hexadecimal format on acid free paper printed with a laser printer.  Store in multiple locations.  Same with CDR/DVDR.  Buy several different brands and types of discs (organic dye medium).  Beware of OEMs making many different brands.  You may buy 5 brands thinking they're different when really they're identical.  A couple of discs may fail but the chances of all failing, across all types in all locations is very slim.  My first CDRs burned on Kodak gold discs are still readable more than 15 years later.

Finding a place to store the wallet securely and making sure that the recipients find it will be your greater problems.

The greatest problems: people losing interest in bitcoin because something better comes along.  In the 20 year period money is transfered to the new system.  The left over bitcoins are worthless as there's no one left to trade them with.  A change in hashing protocol rendering your bitcoins worthless is also a big risk.  Hashing algorithms come and go as vulnerabilities are found.  MD5 was once considered very good for example.

Play with the idea and maybe set aside some bitcoins as a fun experiment, but I wouldn't invest serious amounts of money.

Yes!

I am filling my pants

Knock, knock, knocking on $20's door.  $19.98998. 

Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

Gold's value is backed by around 4000 years of history.  I like bitcoin and its potential, but let's not let hubris get out of hand.