Considering Litecoin was created by the owner of BTCChina's brother, there's probably a good chance.

I'm stealing this quote.

The rise of Bitcoin isn't due to the collapse of fiat, but it is helped by it. And fiat is going to collapse sooner than inertia would predict. Too much is happening too fast in too many spheres, and the dollar is a key domino on the brink. When suddenly things are way different, people will turn to the Internet and find a huge built-up contingent of people talking about Austrian economics, the right to exit, decentralization, and the obvious superiority of Bitcoin. Change will come ever faster, as a precipitous slide of established power structures and deafening roar of creative destruction.

Most of those threads are either neutral, perennial, negative, or threads that always get bumped when the price starts to rise. Or were you talking about the content of the threads rather than the titles?

EDIT: Oh, you agree. I guess I'm confused what you're saying. To me the fact that the price is rising like this and sentiment is not bubbly at all is hugely bullish-seeming.

Realizing that forums and comments are taking over from mainstream journalism/analysis is yet another aspect of decentralization. The comments are more important than the article.

My thoughts exactly.

Nice. If not just a coincidence, this is very very nice. It even jives with the two-week theory, that it takes two weeks from the time the average person starts to research Bitcoin to the time they buy in. It means we are experiencing the calm before the storm, with today's rally even being part of the calm, compared to what's coming.

I don't really think so either, but more because of how recent the last bubble was.


That's the nature of exponential growth. The net bringing in new users is a lot bigger now than it was 9 months ago. As market cap grows to higher orders of magnitude, so does the leverage to bring in higher orders of magnitude of money.


It is always like this. The old ATH at $32 brought some profit-taking, but $32 was left in the dust pretty quickly, and that itch was a lot fiercer than $266. The consolidation below $32 was only about as long as the consolidation below the round figure of $50:




So I agree overall, but for different reasons. I think we may go to $1000+, but more likely this bubble will be smaller and take us to $600+ instead.

Yes, this is very suspicious. It's like it can't go up because "everyone" is expecting it to, but it could just be that "everyone" is mostly a bunch of people so unnaturally conditioned to watch Bitcoin developments because of the recent huge growth (6 months ago). The new people aren't here commenting, maybe partly because of new forum membership being disabled (I heard, haven't checked).

I still expect fireworks (upward) this week, or at the outside, next week. It just looks too obvious, too easy to make money...but then again that's how Bitcoin is in general.

Let's look back at the old exponential growth chart:




Note how with the recent consolidation the current run-up now looks almost exactly the same pace as the Jan-March boom, just more volatile. I moved the boom period over to the present run to compare the slopes:




Looks like it's targeting 500 by mid-December. With a dash of bubbly exuberance, we could reach $1000 just in time for Christmas

MtGox order book riding high:

China about to break its 6-month high:

What's happening here is I'm not really sure what I was saying there. Need to think about it a little more.

Whoah, cool thread - hadn't seen that before.

We are in innovators or maybe just starting to enter early adopters.

But to be more precise, we have to look at both the currency use of bitcoins and the investment use. In terms of currency use, we are still deep in the innovators phase. It's the part where there is pretty much no everyday use for the currency for the average person, just a very few niche uses - let's not kid ourselves here - but that doesn't mean these uses won't grow. But in terms of investment use, we are starting into the early adopters phase I think. We have forward-thinking non-technical people starting to buy in, whereas a year ago it was mostly extreme bleeding edge techies or radical libertarians (both types of innovators) buying in.

Since investment is always about anticipating other future uses (in this case currency, remittance, stock market, smart property, etc.), it will always be ahead on the adoption curve. They buy and hold in anticipation that Bitcoin will become the backbone of the financial internet. They are forward-looking in their vision but not innovators in that they don't necessarily want to deal with the currency aspect (they might once they get into it, but that's a side effect; the important thing is they bought for the investment, not in order to enable specific purchases).

See here for a better explanation of the early-adopting investor's role: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1mb27q/bitcoins_vast_overvaluation_appears_caused_by/cc7i6y8

Spread it far and wide! It already has more views that Mark Zuckerberg's talk.

The low volume could be people waiting for the wave of newbie money. It doesn't make sense to sell if a bunch of money is about to come in, but it also doesn't necessarily make sense to buy: you might do better to buy once you see the wave has started (since it could go down before that, since it just went up a whole lot very quickly). I would just buy now, but many don't see it that way.

On a more meta-level, consolidation was warranted and expected by many here.

Good! The rest of us are all now wayyyy better off (living instead of dead, for example!), since healthcare is automated. Sucks for them - in that unlikely scenario where they just get replaced all at once* - that they wasted 10-15 years learning something that wonderfully, thankfully, miraculously no longer needs doing. But it doesn't really suck for them, because the same thing is happening in almost every industry. Doctors also have to eat, have housing, clothes, massages, cars, leisure, etc. They may be out of a job (or more likely doing something much more efficient with their expertise), but the case where they are totally unable to use their expertise assumes radical advancement. You cannot posit so radical an advancement that many or all doctors face instant, total unemployment, and then turn around and claim that the other industries would just have stagnated.

No, if medical technology advances to Star Trek levels, then likely so do most other things. That means everything will be radically cheaper or even free, making it basically unnecessary for anyone to work, or to work very much. Doctors now make a lot of money, but they also have to spend a lot of money on the things they want. Automation fixes the latter, while not necessarily causing any problem for the former since they can often just switch jobs within the same field. They are freed up to do more important things that do need doing. Not always will they stay working, but very often; yet automation always brings down prices, and does so far more dramatically than the wage loss of any typical employment "downgrade."

You cannot on the one hand posit a situation where machines do everything for us to such an extent that hardly anyone (or no one) is even needed to oversee things, and on the other hand claim that people would be starving to death and not have good, incredibly cheap or free healthcare. If you had a bunch of machines that did EVERYTHING for you, including maintaining the machines, you wouldn't have a job, but you'd be living like a king, or a god. Not having to work is an unmitigated blessing, not a curse.

*Much more like they'd simply switch to more efficient work, like double-checking Watson and helping develop better ones. The fallacy here is that there is some limited number of things to achieve in healthcare that we are somewhere near finishing. No, there can always be better healthcare, and as the world grows more efficient - through automation! - we will be looking for more and more better things, like life extension, then radical life extension, etc. Doctors being totally replaced because medical expertise counts for nothing at all would take quite a long time, there would be early warning, and as mentioned above the rest of society would have advanced incredibly by this time so being out of a job by then would be no problem at all.

This is an age-old economic fallacy, and I'm really surprised to see it on a Bitcoin forum. Here's a more complete treatment if anyone has any illusions that this isn't a fallacy:

http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/the-curse-of-machinery#axzz2jPA98VQc

Yes, and automation causes that minimum to fall much faster. Eventually automation will make it so that working 1 hour a week at a really easy job will be enough to live well. And this is supposed to be a bad thing?