Ah.  I forget that I tend to work on longer time spans than lot of people.  Also that I pay little attention to most technical stuff (support levels, heads-n-shoulders, etc.)  My mental picture is reflected here:

  http://finviz.com/futures_charts.ashx?t=DX&p=w1

but indeed as I look at things it is not quite the way I remembered...I'd forgotten that the recent legs down did not get to the 2008 lows of 72-ish, and that the highs were all the way into the high 80's.  Close enough for me to stand by my statement though.  I did sense that it causes great strain on the US when the USDX is to high and the fed will 'rectify' the situation by hook or by crook as needed (which in inevitably good for gold.)

It would be cool to see gold prices overlayed on this (but not cool enough to actually do it.)  I think it will graphically illustrate my point that as the USDX pumps up and down it tends to stair-step gold in a distinctly upward direction.

Huh?  81 on the USDX is quite high be recent standards.  IIRC, it's been down to the 72 level in fairly recent times before attention shifted the the ill-health in EU-land.  If/when attention shifts back (or when the US take the actions necessary to drop it) I anticipate significantly higher PM's.  Maybe approaching records in constant $$ terms for the next cycle.  Or maybe not.  Either way, I'm in neither a buying nor a selling mode for probably several years so the spot price only of academic interest to me.  Not unlike Bitcoin in fact (to me.)

The price action is making PMs look like Bitcoin!  Like I say, gold acts like a floor jack with the USDX operating the handle.  If/when the USDX gets back to the low to mid 70's I would expect gold to be well into the $2k's for this next cycle.

An example would be using my ID in order to buy alcohol and tobacco.

Another would be using NNTP.

Seems like a silly question.  For me, and I assume for a lot of people, such an action would be event driven.  In my case (barring system failure) it would be some combination of my no longer feeling that the project was sufficiently promising as a potential benefit to society, and no longer had any reasonable chance to make me rich.  I took a wild guess that that would occur in the 3-5 year range though it could be much sooner or just as easily, never.

You are welcome to think as you like and treat gold accordingly.  A lot of people including myself, and entities like central banks, consider gold to be a standard reserve and a currency insofar as it can be used perform settlements and balance accounts so you may or may not be in good company.  The one thing I don't do is wear a lot of gold on my body or have it kicking around the house as a luxury item.  Doing so makes one look like a jackass in my opinion.

@abelsfire:  My best guess as to the current price of gold is that it reflects confidence in other forms of wealth preservation.  Like many, I think it probable that the newly developed paper-gold market is distorting the price of physical downward...and have been capitalizing on this happy state of affairs starting a decade ago.  Of course when I saw on opportunity to mop up some BTC for a bargain that cut into my PM acquisition regime to some degree.

I'm a big fan of 'evolution' generally, but NOT in a currency system which I hope to rely on in even a modest way.  For that I value:

 - highly static and well documented rules and function.

 - stone simple specifications and implementation.

 - a high degree of attention to detail in development.

I am a big fan of modularity.  I'd prefer to see 'bitcoin' be a bare-bones reference implementation of the protocol and let other efforts fill in the gaps when it comes to GUI's and that sort of thing.

I doubt that that will happen absent either a failure of the system (including significant exploitation of the user-base and technical difficulties associated with load...which could actually go hand-in-hand) or changes/shifts in the core development team.

I don't see Bitcoin being totally replaced in most circumstances, and if it is, I theorize that BTC themselves would play a role in ushering in alternatives.  That is to say, I suspect they Bitcoin could continue to act as something of a reserve currency backing alternative crypto-currencies.  The (theorized) load issues and excessive transfer fees would disappear if BTC were used mostly for infrequent account re-balancing in significant per-transaction chunks.

Good points (not atypically.)

To me Bitcoin either has achieved or is well on it's way to achieving a goal which would be 'killer app' in my book.  That is, it is demonstrating the potential functionality and robustness of peer-to-peer crypto-currencies.  The reason I think that is important is because if some authoritative organization attempts to present a bio-metrics based centrally managed accounting system as the only way forward, it will be extremely valuable for John Q. Public to be able to say: "hey, wait a minute here..."  That could make Satoshi one of the central figures in world history.

I estimate that if Bitcoin continues to work, and work well, it could be a 'fringe' 'guerrilla' currency which solve some corner case problems and act almost exclusively as an exchange currency and still commands very high valuations (if that is what is important to a given person.)  For this reason and others, I'm perfectly content to have it not strive to take over the world.  I fear that attempts to have Bitcoin do so, or having it falling into that role by accidents of fate would likely lead to a plethora of problems which are better avoided.

I always wondered what your cost basis was just on an academic level, so thanks for that.  In my case I only started buying on the way down.  I got a few bad-ish purchases in maybe near $20 on that PayPal site before I figured things out and started sending wires to Tradehill which made me really start at $16.  At that point I was just shooting for 100 BTC.  As the prices dropped it was amazing to me how many BTC one could get given where I started.  As I had extra fiat to burn I choose BTC vs. phyzzz for a fair percentage of it until the price started up from $2-ish which lends support to the contention that I saw it as having the potential to outperform PM's by a wide margin.  I always did feel that those $2-$3/BTC times were a very welcome second chance to 'get in early'.

I believe I can honestly say that all of my blathering in all of my posts have been done with a certain level of honesty and I never tried to convince anyone else of something I didn't believe myself.  I toyed with a thought of trying to invest in efforts to suck in Joe Sixpack since it would enrich me personally, but never got around to actually doing much along these lines and never really was comfortable that it was really the right thing to do...yet, with so many people getting burnt.

I honestly believe that there is a real chance that we may be approaching a time when for 99.99% of people, investment decisions will not just be for shits-n-giggles but will be extremely important and possibly life-n-death issues for some.  I continue to believe that actual physical PM's are something that everyone should have under their mattress and Bitcoin is something for knowlegable and careful people to dip their feet in since it is so neat and so potentially world changing.  And since it could make them extremely wealthy.  Bitcoin does not need to maximize the user-base to succeed at this point...and in fact doing so at this point could be a factor in causing it to fail in my opinion.

Nice job Roger!  You really got a nice solid hit with your first point about things being backed up by what is possible and impossible with mathematics I thought.  I think that that is one of the most crucial aspects of Bitcoin and well worth using as a starting point.  To me it nullifies some of the most annoying (and ignorant) logic/knowledge failures that a lot of 'experts' throw down.

+1.

I, for one, actually feel that at this point most people are not really ready for Bitcoin and Bitcoin is not really ready for them in some ways either.  I've said that in another recent post, but I forgot which one it was.

Probably the people who power through the negative posts that are (supposed to be) ubiquitous on these forums are slightly more ready to navigate the Bitcoin world than those who would be turned away by them.  No harm done IMHO...but I'm not trying to run either a legitimate business or a scam off Bitcoin, nor do I need my speculative investment in BTC to bear fruit...well...ever, so other people may feel differently.

Thx for the recognition.  It is true that I felt Bitcoin had much room to grow at that time as evidenced by my plowing much fiat into it back then.  And by my regular gum-flapping about my actions and rationals at the time.

A solution such as Bitcoin is hugely valuable, and even partial exchange-centric utilization would, by my estimates, make each BTC worth thousands current USD per.

Today we are approaching a year from those dark $2/BTC days and there has been:

 - no core system exploits.
 - no change in the high quality of the core development team.
 - exciting run-ups (and downs) and a touch near halve the $32/BTC peak.

These things together make me much more confident in Bitcoin's potential than I was back in.  It is important to note (or I feel it so, at least) that I still consider Bitcoin more likely to fail than to succeed in the end.  ~labestiol mentions the sleep factor, and I think that's quite important.  I'm not ready to get even close to 20% of my savings in BTC at this point.  As I've mentioned before, success of Bitcoin means (to me) such astronomical numbers that one really does not need a huge footprint in Bitcoin to realize the potential upside in a big way.

(Of course it won't hurt my speculative investment in BTC if everyone goes all in, so, patient reader, go for it if you want...but I don't think it is a wise or necessary move.)

Au@$1650 w/ USDX@81.8 is as promising as my BTC@$10-$11.  Both adventures are on the trajectory which I have hoped for at this moment.  And neither is immune to steps in both directions.

Just for the record, I closed my PayPal account...or will when they allow me to after my balance has been transferred.  This because they wanted proof of SSN, proof of address, and a photo ID.

I've got no big issue with the former two, but I'm not giving them my photo ID.  I'll not be using Mt. Gox if they want my photo ID either.  I guess from here forward I'll be using Craigslist and cash for odds-n-ends rather than E-Bay and PayPal.  And will re-visit developments in Bitcoin-land to see if anyone has overcome some of the lack-of-claw-back issue needed to protect buyers.

I'm guessing that if the guy says much of anything it will be that things didn't go quite as planned and payouts will occur as conditions allow.

You've been waiting a year for gold to collapse.  I've been waiting a year for it to start it's next leg up.  No joy for either of us yet.  I can wait another year (or actually many) and I suppose you can also since unless you continue to hold a lot of short possitions, it's just a matter of the satisfaction of having a correct prediction and decent analytics abilities.  Actually, if people have paid you for your advice, I suppose that it's also a matter of giving your clients their moneys-worth in your case as well.

I personally don't see much of a problem.  The community, as a microcosm of the internet generally, is full of dick-heads.  So what?  I value the fairly unobstructed view into the community psychology and I think that a whole lot of rules and regulations and P's and Q's to watch would make that more foggy.  Maybe the more dick-head-ish tend to be more vocal and obnoxious, but most internet user's will have figured that out by now.

I'm actually more offended by a signature block full of advertising spam than someone calling someone else a naughty word.  But that's just me.

The horsey image itself makes this a near certainty.

I doubt it you could teach most SA folks very much...they don't really seem to learn very readily.