the banks would have to print more because an artificially low interest rate will cause the demand for loans to outstrip supply and the banks will eventually run out of money to loan unless they print more.
commercial banks can print money, 99% of the fiat money in existence was created by the commercial banks using fractional reserve lending.
Keynes was the first one to propagate these bullshit ideas about "stimulating" the economy using both fiscal and monetary policy, without him the Chicago school bullshit monetary expansions wouldn't exist either.

Keynes advocates artificially lowering interest rates, there is no way to do this without having the banks print more money.

instead of advocating the abolishment of the laws that give the union workers the power to violate their contract without being fired Keynes decided that redistributing wealth by printing money is a good idea, we are suffering from those ideas to this day.

just like Karl Marx is responsible for all the misery the Russian and Chinese had to endure for almost a 100 years the west is about to taste the same medicine of institutional malinvestments.
at least until the people demand free markets and honest money again, much like their forefathers did.

how will they do that if they have a million armed people marching on their jail.
there are millions of us and only a few thousand of them, its insane that people haven't gathered up and thrown those government thugs in a cage yet.

I'm reading a great book called "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman, which is all about our cognitive biases.  An important theme is WYSIATI (what you see is all there is), and there's copious volumes of research that prove how susceptible our brains are to this bias.  It's why last summer anyone who predicated $1200 a few months out was not taken seriously, and it's why people scoff at the idea that fiat money could lose its importance.  

The FT author sees a classic picture of the first portion of a bubble chart and, due to WYSIATI, her brain pattern-matches that to the classic "bubble chart" we've all seen a million times: her intuitive response is BUBBLE and this precludes her from even considering the many rational arguments against this being "the end" (the arguments simply don't exist to her because she is blinded by only what she does see).  

Rather than focussing on sentiment and on price, I think it's more useful to consider the infrastructure being built.  The most important of which are the fiat<-->bitcoin gateways.  There's now hundreds of bitcoin ATMS across the world with more rolling out each month, the Winklevoss Bitcoin ETF could soon be approved, and Circle should eventually allow people to instantly signup and purchase bitcoin with a credit card.  During the last growth spurt there was exactly 1 bitcoin ATM.  

This infrastructure won't precipitate another wave of bitcoin adoption, but it would certainly facilitate one should sentiment make a 180 deg turn.  And with the fiat gateways opened much wider than at any time in bitcoin's history, the next cycle could be epic.  

I always feel somewhat "dirty" talking about this because bitcoin has much nobler goals, but Bitcoin's killer app right now is that it appeals to people's lust for wealth.  Of course, the corollary to this is that it is also at the whim of people's fear of losing money (what we're seeing now).  But remember, the people most able to vote against bitcoin are those who are already participating (<0.1% of the world's population), yet the amount of people who could be seduced by the thought of easy money is a much larger percentage (some might argue 100%).

In conclusion, if every guy and girl at the gym, the pub, or the backyard BBQ can signup in minutes and purchase bitcoin instantly with his credit card, many will.  Once the infrastructure is in place, all that's required is ample media attention and a change in sentiment.

**Of course this doesn't mean we don't have a bumpy road ahead of us (or for that matter that we'll necessarily see another growth spurt).  We might still have to shatter the dreams of a few more recent speculators, and quell the ambition of a few more early whales.  

the wall only has 50% left, poor fella gave away 15K bitcoins as a charity.

Yep.

But he doesn't have the foresight of a 17 year old. 5 years ago he wasn't finding his first pubic hair on his ballsack.

You were.

In 5 more years, you'll be a 22 year old broke loser sitting on an online message board being bitter because you have no real life social skills.

/thread

Agree.

twiifm, when exactly did you convince your old man to not buy some bitcoins?

it is a convenient digital value transfer tool and amazing technology that will change the way we do finance in the future. it is an ok currency for digital goods. selling TVs for bitcoin is an artificial thing, it's like introducing youtube in 1990 - fun but not practical.

No, it wasn't. It was dollar pricetags translated to btc in real-time. You can't really have btc pricetags on anything but digital goods which have zero cost to start with.

No, SR never had their prices in bitcoin, as any other business selling goods purchased or produced with fiat never did. There's no such things as "bitcoin economy", if anything it's 10 years down the road *at least*. Everybody with a tiny bit of clue understands that, this is a protocol building stage, not world domination stage.

Your father could have been a millionaire if he just invested 10% of it in 2010

Who trusts the US Dollar anymore? I'm talking about fiat money in general. Trustless also means trustless as a store of value. You don't need to trust an insolvent bank to store your money digitally, you can do it yourself. This appeals to me. It may not appeal to you, fine, you don't have to own any bitcoins.

All these require trust in the issuer to limit the supply to maintain the value, and as the single holder of the ledger. Both of these require trust, which is often broken. Bitcoin is the first trustless, open source, public ledger system. It is not the same as things which have happened before.

It's a technical innovation which will have an effect on the economy and change the nature of financial exchanges. That sounds a lot like a financial innovation to me?
If there could only ever be 21 million email address there would be a price, and a high one
Second Market, GABI, Winklevoss: they are buying bitcoins. Not that too much speculation at this stage is good for the project, but it is happening.