I have no idea which exchange people are referring to when they're throwing around 840s, 798s and 766s like this. Is it just me?

Probably this is why I don't day trade. Setting the charts to hours (or less) would put me into constant Fry mode.

Of course, I have nothing against day traders. But we might have a problem with pseudo-hodlers reading this thread and picking up "sentiments" that have absolutely nothing to do with long-term hodling.

To be fair, I'd include the case where there are no exchanges left, nobody is mining anymore, and nobody will want to have anything to do with your bitcoins at any price. While I don't think that's exactly likely, it's probably more likely than MtGox trading at sub-dollar prices.

30-ish hours left to vote.

I'm thinking about what happens if Bitcoin should somehow fail in the long run, while the idea of cryptocurrency persists. What would replace it? I have a hard time seeing it replaced by something similar, like Litecoin – it would rather have to be something that solves a problem which Bitcoin does not solve. I'm not counting "can't be mined with ASICs" because of the huge implied "yet" at the end of that sentence.

So I thought I'd ask the community what you think. Will Bitcoin still dominate in 2025, or will we have another scene altogether, and if so, what will it look like?

I typically denote amounts in BTC, mBTC and µBTC, like so:

6.72 µBTC
67.20 µBTC
672 µBTC
6.72 mBTC
67.20 mBTC
672 mBTC
6.72 BTC
67.20 BTC
672 BTC
6.72 kBTC
67.20 kBTC
672 kBTC
6.72 MBTC

(Most of these are hypothetical! I have never had the opportunity to ask for 6.72 µBTC or 6.72 MBTC in payment for anything.)

How is this confusing? We already deal with different units in the grocery store, grams, hectograms, kilograms. Plus, we practically already do with currency as well: "50 bucks", "50 grand", "50 million" (crore, lakh, whatever). The only question, really, is what to call the units, in speech, in different languages. And that, hopefully, will be decided by actual usage. Plus there will seldom be any reason to call them anything at all. A factor of 1000 between units is quite enough for any misunderstandings in familiar situations to be impossible. Of course, during the volatility stage this will be quite another matter. At any rate, any ideas with more than two syllables are ridiculously implausible: thinking that people will go around saying "That'll be 12 millibitcoin" (or "millibit" or "millicoin") is like thinking they would go around saying "That'll be 12 pounds sterling".

And saying "use either full BTC or satoshis" is like saying "mark all household scales in either tonnes or milligrams, and only allow these units in recipes".

Wait… was it 0.00004 tonnes of butter for the pancakes, or was it 0.0004?

Edit: by the way, speaking of butter, it is sold today (at one store in one country) at around 11.60 BTC/t, or at around 11.60 mBTC/kg. When will a bitcoin buy you a full tonne of butter?

Or perhaps

I think this goes deeper than Windows Easy Transfer. Placing the wallet file in a folder (AppData on Windows, hidden folder on Linux) which a "non-power user" is never supposed to poke around in, does not exactly encourage or facilitate making any kind of backup of the file. Or is the reference implementation only intended for power users, not for mass adoption? (I realize that most mass adopters might not want to download the entire blockchain, but the more who do so, the better, right?)

It's interesting how four people think that we will hit $1200 this year so hard that we won't bounce below it—on any of the exchanges—in the beginning of next year. Even I am not that bullish.

Hodling, though.

I was under the impression that even most traders are hodling the major part of their hodlings.

Or is it possible that the Wall Observer gods timed a sell perfectly with their trading stash, only to take the rest out of cold storage and panic sell it at the bottom? (No, I don't actually believe that. But it would be funny!)

Me? Hodling.

Just for fun, because… who knows, really?

Poll closes on New Year's Eve. Answers can be changed until then.

The reward for being right is that you know when to buy in during 2014. (Unless someone wants to offer other rewards.)

You might have been advised to look into IPoAC. Typical response time ranges from 3000 to 6000 seconds, although packet loss is a greater concern than over regular mail.

It might be added that in most jurisdictions, it's only the cash form of the currency that is legal tender. Most debts, of course, will be settled by other means, such as bank transfers, if the creditor and the debtor agree to this, but if they can't agree on a transfer medium, the debtor always retains the right to pay in cash. As most fiat currency nowadays is electronic, it's quite reasonable to say that the money in our bank accounts became backed by banknotes in much the same way that banknotes were once backed by gold or silver. And it has led to exactly the same result: since the new, "backed" medium is easier to work with, there is seldom any reason to exchange it back to the old, "backing" medium—at least not in large amounts. Knowing that it theoretically could be turned into something that others must accept is enough. And as it turns out in the end, the "backing" is subtly lost along the way.

This could happen with bitcoin as well (people having bank accounts denominated in BTC but not actually knowing that they will be able to withdraw to actual bitcoin), but bitcoin is different: first, it's easier for those who want to actually be their own bank, and second, it would be possible for a bank to prove that it holds the bitcoin to "back" the accounts. The real fear is that neither the government nor the customers would demand this of the banks.

Not trying to predict the price (I can't do that, so I don't trade). But for those who do: does it really matter at all that it's the weekend, this time? I mean, the point with the weekend is no fiat entering the exchanges, but this time there must have been a lot of fiat entering the exchanges during the last week, and most of it is still on the sidelines, along with the fiat from the selling daytraders. And all the traders know this, right?

Of course, people outside the Bitcoin world think 50% is huge (and tell us "feeling rather silly now, eh?"). What they're constantly missing is that generally, in a "crash", the price falls back to where it was maybe two weeks before. I don't think that would be called a crash in most markets. Thinking in terms of time this way feels somehow more reasonable and reassuring than thinking in percentage.

And of course, people who have been inside the Bitcoin world for a long time sometimes get blinded by the dollar figures they have been used to ("OMG the price dropped more than $500, that never happened back when the price was $450"). But that's another story.

This is of course a perfectly valid argument (and a common one), but what about:

1. Even if people hoard in order to further their wealth, they will still have to eventually buy something with their money, or the furthering of their wealth was all in vain (diving in a McDucky sea of physical bitcoin aside). So money will still be spent, except it can be spent when people want to spend it, with no outside pressure.

2. If the value should start to collapse due to low usefulness due to hoarding, then the hoarders would get an incentive to stop hoarding, which would make it more useful again (giving the hoarders a new reason to hoard, and thus a new reason not to hoard, etc.). This will bring a little volatility (much less than today's), but I certainly see a case for an equilibrium.

Disclaimer: I am not an economist. I'm making guesses here (if that separates me from the economists).

+1 from OP. Very interesting read.

Also thanks to DannyHamilton for pointing out the degree to which these magic numbers are co-dependent.

And by the way, I also think these numbers matter to an extent, if only psychologically. We're just now in the BTC-vs-mBTC stage, which would have come at another point in time (or not at all) if other numbers were chosen.

I've thought this too, and then I thought what tHash thought. Will people really go through the hassle of trying to double-spend transactions worth a couple of dollars, or even hundreds? I have no idea how feasible that is; I assume none of the standard clients will allow it. (My own service works on 0 confirmations, but will revert the subscription if it doesn't get the confirmations. Should be a viable route for many services, I guess – but of course not all.)

I know this is off topic, but there's not much on-topic to say at the moment, is there? Except perhaps… do you think any of the people who sold at 1000–1200 have cashed out any considerable portion? Or is pretty much all the money still in the exchanges? I'm assuming the latter, in which case things could go really fast after 1000 is broken, right?

Since I'm a newbie and this has probably been asked before, I thought I'd spam it to the Newbies section. Is there a good text, FAQ or similar on the reasoning behind the choice of the arbitrary numbers bitcoin is built on? Such as… why 21 million BTC rather than 1 or 5000 or 10 trillion? Why are they awarded in chunks of 50 rather than 0.1 or 1 or 210? Why is the smallest unit 10^-8 BTC rather than 10^-6, 10^-9 or 10^-10?

ToTheZeroth News is a relatively new light-weight cloud-hosted feed reader service (RSS and Atom). It operates on a freemium basis (a small subscription fee is mandatory only if you want to track more than four feeds). It's not designed to compete directly with services such as Feedly or NewsBlur, but rather cater to people who want short summaries in their Firefox sidebar (or in their smartphones). Until now, the service has only accepted USD, but now bitcoin has been added as a payment option. To encourage payment in bitcoin, great conversion rates are offered: currently 0.6 mBTC/$ (in normal units, that's well over 1600 USD/BTC).

Disclosure: As should be obvious from my user name, this is self-advertised. Still a relevant announcement, I think.