Hmmm...Silver at $160,000/oz and 'soon', eh?  Or do you mean gold at $0.28/oz?

Thanks for reminding me how useless it is to pay attention to 'financial professionals'.

I think it would be interesting to see what happens when the block reward gets halved. I think the $ you get for BTC with rise, but only by a small percentage and th difficulty might get slightly lower (due to people quiting the mining business), but it would no where compensate for the 50% coins received.

Min-Max Ranges:

• 40-80% gold
• 10-40% silver
• 10-30% bitcoin

Why? First, gold is the metal that will be revalued and remonetised into the global financial system (Bitcoin hasn't made enough inroads yet). Second, gold is less expensive to store than silver. Third, although silver will rise with gold, there is no certainty as to when & how revaluation will occur, or whether silver will keep up during latter stages of revalutation (financial utility may boost gold for a some time, even though the natural ratio is below 20:1).

Maybe I should sign up for a spread betting company offering facebook so I can short it.  Except I wont.

It will possibly just take some time.

I can tell you that very exciting things will happen within 2-6 months.  And probably every month thereafter

Bitcoin has proven itself last year. Many people thought the whole thing was a joke, and when the price bubble popped they argued Bitcoin would fall to zero and go away. Yet, it still ended 2011 up over 1,400%, making it the best performing asset class in the world.

This year, it's shown remarkable stability which is another thing critics have said could not happen. Slowly but surely, people are discovering how useful and revolutionary this technology is. The change takes a while, but it's happening bit by bit. Must be the most exciting project in the world to be involved in, considering the potential ramifications of success.

I'm not disagreeing with you.  It's likely just a long term investor who doesn't give a shit what happens this weekend.  In a year they should be sitting on a nice profit.  It's just the timing was ironic.  It was within minutes of your post.

this doesn't explain much, but you got me interested.

The interwebs tell me:


I don't see the price jump around (vary) more than usual in recent times (since may 6th).

Can you explain how you measure volatility? Is there an indicator on bitcoincharts that shows volatility?

hmm. still hasn't kicked in, has it?

Heh. Are you a clown, or just a joker?

I've never been as bullish as I've been in the recent months. I don't mean the price development but Bitcoin in general. The market can do whatever it wants, I worry less and less of what is happening in the speculative circles. Bitcoin growth is much slower than many have hoped but it is growing and eventually that growth will pick up again. The real revolution hasn't even started yet, Bitcoin is still fairly scarcely accepted, but it is coming. I've never been more sure about that, than I am now.

So I look forward to the years to come when Bitcoin starts to get used more in one niche after another and I can personally start using it more and more. I have been using Bitcoin more but my usage is still not even close to what I'd want it to be. At some point there will be an explosion in growth and it's very difficult to know when, it requires known businesses of the medium to large size to start accepting Bitcoin, at least a few of them. My estimate is that we're still years away from this.

All that Bitcoin basically needs is time. I'm seeing more and more people that have heard of Bitcoin once, eventually we'll reach the stage (hopefully) when almost everyone has heard of Bitcoin at least 10 times and Bitcoin is still functioning. That will be the time when it explodes, at the latest. Time in itself is simply so important, for example most gold enthusiasts don't really take Bitcoin seriously because it's just ones and zeros in computer networks. For this to change we might need more than a couple of years, probably a few decades. Doesn't really matter for me because I'm in this for the long haul.

Even though tvbcof is not into the popular Bitcoin niches, many seem to be. I'm not into drugs but that seems to work for more and more people. Gambling is something I like to do, I used to be a professional poker player so that fits. I've actually used many different types of Bitcoin gambling sites recently and I have to say that they have been getting much better and their usage is growing. This is one niche that will keep on growing. Another niche that might not just grow but actually explode is the web stripping market. Bitcoin is simply so convenient in webcam stripping, you can interactively and anonymously ask girls to do stuff and tip them with bitcoins, that is simply BRILLIANT. I'm expecting this particular niche to possibly be the fastest growing Bitcoin usage of them all.

Then there are of course other types of usage. Bitcoin as a store of value will become more serious only with time, there is not much we can do about that. Bitcoin in virtual gaming markets seems to be stalling a little but I expect this market to pick up speed at some point. Bitcoin in remittance might pick up massive speed with the latest issues in remittance between the US and Somalia etc. Same goes for Africa in general because the banking system is so weak there. I expect this particular market to take time though, so don't "bank on it" just yet. Also the deepening euro crisis is good for Bitcoin, I expect more people to learn about it because of that and even though there might be no explosion coming, it's still good old growth.

We also shouldn't forget regular payments. As Bitcoin usage in various niches increase it will increase the amount of people using Bitcoin in general. I see this market growing, starting from small shops of course because of the low starting costs. It's actually almost impossible for a small shop owner, online or brick-and-mortar to not benefit from adding Bitcoin payments at this point. The entry costs for a small merchant are small and the positive marketing value of accepting the future of money and also the actual extra revenue etc.

For example, my company is running a Finnish Bitcoin portal, which opens in a few days. We haven't even opened yet and we got asked to demo Bitpay to a small pizza/kebab joint in Tampere, a large Finnish city. My company is an official integration partner for Bitpay with exclusive rights in Finland. The first of its kind. I don't actually know if we'll be able to sell it to them but it makes sense for them to take it. They would be the first brick-and-mortar restaurant to accept Bitcoin in Finland and the entry costs are very low, there are basically two sales employees in total or something like that. I know a lot of Bitcoin-enthusiasts in Finland that would go to this particular restaurant every time they visit Tampere, so the expected value simply can't be negative.

Obviously that only applies to small shop owners, just like I said before. Bitcoin is something that grows not top-down but bottom-up. It's important to understand this. It will start from the small, grow with the small, until some day the big guys get really interested as well. We're not there yet but who cares? Bitcoin IS growing, not at an explosive rate but at a very good rate in my opinion. Price seems to support this as well, we have a stable price even though monetary inflation is still massive.

I haven't seen any good evidence to suggest that economic events outside of bitcoins' little world move this market one way or another.