I like this a lot. I also tell people it's like having a Swiss bank account without the counter-party risk of the Swiss bank.

I hear this a lot. What if it's not the pioneer, and it's actually the most brilliant in a line of digital currencies?

What are these "significant drawbacks?" I can't think of any that are significant.

  If Bitcoins were worth 20 cents a piece, I could buy them all for a couple million dollars.

A nice house is a couple million dollars. Bitcoin - the technology alone - is worth far higher than that.

To answer the OP - sell if you think the prospects for Bitcoin are poor. Buy if you think the prospects for Bitcoin are good. Nobody should buy something to get rich within a year, but if you truly believe in this technology, then set the coins aside for 2-5 years and see what happens.

My personal opinion is that the current "use value" (?) justifies a price in the $1-$10/coin range, and the NPV value justifies something far higher. I'd buy coins at $1, at $5, at $10, at $100. It's all going to be seen as cheap in the future. This is the most revolutionary technology I've ever seen, and I'm happy to risk quite a bit of money on it.

Just whatever you do, ALWAYS realize this whole thing is highly speculative and volatile. Never put "important savings" into Bitcoin, that would be foolish.

Perhaps there should be a law that all literature must be written using only 2nd grade English, so that it's accessible to everyone.

Antitrust law is so absurd. Nobody is forced to use Facebook, not the users nor the developers. Anyone who complains about Facebook Credits on the basis of "monopoly" is a sniveling whiny bitch imo

Facebook should do whatever the heck they want with their own money. And the same freedom that protects their right to do so is the same freedom which protects our right to do whatever we want with Bitcoin.

Right?!? Who knew it'd take so much work to replace the global financial system  

Good stuff.

We're in a depression. One should expect to be able to purchase more with real money during a depression, as prices fall. Again, don't measure prices with USD. Measure prices with gold. Hard to do when everything on the shelf says USD, but it's a good habit to form.

And I never said the gold price was "all natural" and "not at all speculative." Who knows? I just know that the gold price can go up forever (and will) if money is printed forever, so one should not assume that the rise over the past 10 years is just a temporary gold bubble. For the most part, the rise of the gold price over the past hundred years is just an inversion of the decline in the value of the US dollar and it's important that people understand that.

Actually, gasoline costs just as much as it did 30 years ago. Price energy in real money, like gold, and you'll come to different conclusions.

In the 70's, a silver dime bought a gallon of gas. Today, a silver dime still buys a gallon of gas. Ponder on that

Gold is not going up. It's the dollar that's losing value.

If anything in the marketplace should be the yardstick of value, it is gold, not USD. So you should price USD in terms of gold and you will see a very different picture. Don't let the "upward run" of gold deceive you. Gold isn't changing, the dollars are.

Much nicer! Well done!

Of course buying 100,000 coins from anywhere will impact the price on Gox. You will be removing that much supply which otherwise would've been purchased by someone else, meaning when those others come looking for coins, they'll have to bid up the prices on an exchange to get them.

Price stability is not a myth, it's an inevitability. Of course, the price could be "stable" and slowly rising over time as dollars are printed. But large, double digit percentage moves in a week (or a day!) are a temporary affliction of a small and new market.

All prices achieve relative stability in the long run. The question is, "how long" and "at what price stable?"

Yes it does Matthew, and yes it's totally awesome

Bitcoin is not deflationary. It's inflationary on an asymptotic pattern. The system never reduces the money supply, thus it's not deflationary (silly fools who lose their keys notwithstanding).

Long term, it'd be correct to say Bitcoin is neither deflationary nor inflationary... it's simply constant in supply. This concept would make a central banker's head explode.

Yeah by far in the US the easiest/fastest way to get coins is via BitInstant:

1) create the order at bitinstant.com - 3 minutes
2) drive to a local bank branch of chase/citi/wells fargo/bank of america  (you don't need an account with them) - 15 minutes
3) deposit cash and drive home - 20 minutes

Often, before you even get home, your funds are sitting in Gox or Crypto X Change.

Everyone should try it with $20 and see how damn awesome it actually is.

+1

Rule number one of your first email to someone in business (who you don't know) is that it can't be more than 4 or 5 sentences. This means, you should basically just say something like, "Hey are you guys planning to accept Bitcoin as a payment option soon? "

Then if they respond with the question "WTF is that?" then you can write a couple short paragraphs of what it is, and why they as a merchant might like it.

Then if there is a second response from them, it means they're clearly interested and you can provide some links, more comprehensive info.

But yeah the way the OP is written now, it's very spammy and is highly unlikely to have any positive effect (and likely a negative one).

Great idea, definitely worthy of a party! Perhaps I'll organize one here in New England.

It can play videos!?!

I don't think it's banal. Many people probably assume that a difficulty twice as high equals a network twice as difficult to attack, and this is not true. Hardware is always variant, so it's important for people to realize this dynamic.