Litecoins have risen at a dramatic rate over the past few months.  However, at some point they will be held back due to a lack of people and merchants who actually transact using them.  When do people think the big crash will happen?

Is there any accepted method of securing a payment without waiting for confirmations?  Is there a certain amount of time one could weight before crediting someone's account with Bitcoins (received through the network without confirmations) that would lower the risk of a double spend?

Buying through Coinbase just went down for me, anyone else?

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So the way Bitcoin worked in the early days is you would download your Bitcoin-qt client, download the entire blockchain, and then start mining coins/processing transactions while running the software.  This was extremely sensible because anyone who was using Bitcoin was also strengthening the transactions and creating additional nodes with which to verify the blockchain.  When computers increased in power, and more users started using Bitcoin, the difficulty would increase and everyone would get less coins.

However, as we know this is very different from the situation we have today.  Luckily many Bitcoin sites operate an up-to-date Bitcoin-qt client with the full blockchain, and some users do as well, but for the majority of Bitcoin users, storing the entire blockchain is not convenient.  Even further, mining has now become so specialized that a home computer can only capture a negligible amount of hash power.  Think of this: not only is it inconvenient to mine independently (nearly everyone mining is part of a pool), but even further most individuals cannot mine nearly at all.

So my question is... do we like this, or were things intended to work a bit differently?

I understand that the market reaches this consensus through buyers and sellers placing their bids and asks on the exchanges, but WHY is a Bitcoin worth that price?

If Bitcoins were at $50 right now we would all probably think that was completely reasonable.  If they were trading at $1000 a Bitcoin we would accept that too.  Do buyers just pick arbitrary sell prices in their head, and then sellers pick arbitrary buy prices, and then the market reaches a consensus?  Does anyone actually have a good understand of this or is there no "good answer".  Thanks.

I have been following Bitcoin for a while and understand a lot of it pretty well, but I was explaining it to my friend in detail, and I really wasn't sure how or where transactions are put into blocks?  Where is on the network is this organized and where does it happen?

Today I went to my blockchain.info wallet and my chrome javascript verifier alerted me that the javascript had changed.  I waited a minute and then accessed the site again and it worked but maybe this was just an accidental bug?  Has anyone else experienced this?

So I'd say most all of us assume the Bitcoin price will keep rising overall, if so, why hasn't the market equalized and become more stable.  It rises pretty much a dollar every few days and keeps doing this until a crash.  Why does it keep repeating this trend and how long do you think it will operate like this?