I'm hoping for a rally.  Got Asks in place ready to be filled.  Also need the price to be $9+ at current difficulty to make mining profitable (inc. all costs, not just power).

The more you trade the lower MtGox's fees become.  Even going for a 2 cent profit is worth it for some people trading a large volume.  I don't think the past few hours have been that unusual.

It's not.  I never said it was.  Somebody else claimed it might

Technically true, but practically not so simple.  Large corporations are controlled by just a few people or person equivalent entities regardless of the number of shareholders.  Have a look at the registry of any large business: it's dominated by managed funds and investment houses.  They essentially vote as a single person owning 5, 10, 15% or whatever of the business.

I own quite a few shares and sometimes vote down extremely generous pay rises for the CEO and board.  The votes are never successful as institutional investors own well over half the stock and always vote Yes.  On the one occasion where a pay rise vote was 51%+ No, the board exercised its right to ignore the vote!

I have a keen interest in bitcoins but remain skeptical of the immense value people attribute to them and the real world usefulness of bitcoins, but even I don't agree with some of the points the OP has written.

I do agree that bitcoins are a trader's dream.  The trade and value can be manipulated at will.  The market is apparently free of the usual laws regarding trading as no government takes bitcoins seriously.  This is both a positive and a negative.  There's nothing stopping well executed fraud.  Just try explaining to your local police department that someone took your bitcoins and see how far that gets you.

We are seeing a race between bots on MtGox.  While the frequent volatility excites traders and allows easy profits to be picked off by the savvy, it makes bitcoins completely unsuitable for serious trade.  Imagine a merchant changing their price by 10% almost every day.

Single point of failure?  Sure.  It's MtGox.  By volume it's ten times larger than the next larger exchange.  Hack or close down MtGox and converting bitcoins to currencies becomes very difficult.  MtGox is in a position to be the market maker.  While it was dead in June some other exchanges closed down as there were no price signals available.  Could other exchanges open or take over?  Sure.  But again you're back to one or a few points of failure.  Does closing down exchanges close down bitcoin?  Of course not.  But it makes bitcoins simply not very useful.

Will bitcoin be dead in 3 months?  I have a hard time believing that.

I'm willing to bet the guy who thinks they're worth $10k each is sitting on a pile of bitcoins and wants to cash out into the derided fiat currencies that many bitcoin boosters hate so much.

Your views are dangerously logical and rational, and have no place in the Speculation forum 

The people who have won big are the early miners (assuming they didn't sell early).  By definition it's a very small number of people, as the number of miners didn't boom until the price started to rise exponentially.

Someone (or group of someones) was keen to bid the price up today.  $4.80 to $5.60 spike was quite impressive.  Didn't have any support however, as we're already half way back to $4.80 after only 5 hours.  Still, not all bad.  Quite a few of my Asks were executed 

It makes me wonder whether we're looking at the actions of a few individuals trying to boost the price so they can sell high, or whether it's an organic movement of a few buyers and everyone else piling in because the price is going up.

When should we start the biggest rally bitcoin has ever seen?  Well, it would be pretty hard to beat going from a few cents to $30 within a year.

As to who should start the rally?  Well, there's a simple answer to that.  You first 

Cost price: "High-End board achieves 3,000 MH/s @ 60W for $1,050"

That's about 1.5 bitcoins per day, or $7.20 minus the cost of electricity.  How much could such a board be sold for while ensuring a decent return for investors?  Maybe $2000.  That requires 9 months of hashing to pay back the purchase price, not including power and the PC the board would be connected to.  9 months before a single cent of profit is made.  Not too bad, but I can see why investors may be reluctant to put serious money into the project even if they believe the optimistic numbers.

The calculation of course is only based on current prices.  Some might say mine today and sell for a lot more than $4.80/btc next month or next year, but really no one knows how much a BTC may be worth.

Well this weekend has been boring.  Bitcoin's price has barely budged over the last 48 hours.  Need more hackers playing with other people's bitcoins to spice things up like last weekend 

This thread just proves bitcoiners are eternal optimists.  We need people like that in the world.

The volatility was fun while it lasted.  I managed to sell into the hacked rally and get someone to pay almost $7 for bitcoins.  The move back below $5 was pretty obvious.  No positive news, no new products, not even new media hype.  There was no reason to pay more for bitcoins, therefore we're back below $5 again.  I don't expect the price to move higher a week from now. 

But if anyone is feeling generous with other people's money, I have staggered Asks all the way up to $9 

I have no doubt that some people are keen to talk the price of bitcoins down because they're jealous of missing out on bitcoins at 50c each.  But many other people are trying to talk the price up for their own gain.  For example, Jixtreme claimed to have bought bitcoins at $9.80 in late August.  It's not pleasant to have an investment fall 50% in less than a month, but that's the risk one takes.  Any comments along the lines of 'get in now or miss out!' or similar have to be seen in light of how much money the poster has lost on the falling price so far.

It's like everything else in investing: people won't buy if the price is too high.  You could ask the same about US housing, and why people won't pay $200k for a house anymore.  They won't pay it because that house will be $150k next year, so why buy today?

I like a lot of other people have low bids to take advantage of the market becoming irrational, and automatically place asks at profit when those bids are fulfilled.  Only problem is, if a lot of other people are doing exactly the same thing then we all lose in the long term.  We need new money to come into the market.  There are 7200 bitcoins made each and every single day.  If only half of those are sold on average that means we need over $17k of new money every day just to keep the price stable.  Not much in the grand scheme of things, but finding people willing to dump $17k into bitcoins on a daily basis is no easy task.

Looks like I'm not the only one that does this   

It does raise the question of just how much new money is flowing into MtGox to buy bitcoins, and how much is recycled into future buys and sells.  In the long term that's a negative return game for the market.

Just out of interest, your profile pic depicts the $30 bitcoin bubble earlier this year.  Any chance of upgrading it to show the subsequent price activity? 

I guess we have our answer as to 'what happens to bitcoin breaking $8'.  It's pretty much nothing.  The miners are still there and the hashing rate has surprisingly hardly decreased.  Maybe they're holding on again until they can sell closer to $10, but that creates a huge overhang of bitcoins to sell into a struggling market.  For the foreseeable future it appears that anything $10+ is long gone.

Bitcoins have now twice slumped below $5 and only trading activity due to hacked accounts lifted that briefly. 

I would say bitcoin's value is based on pure speculation at the moment.  Some people point to the number of transactions and cite that as people "using" bitcoins for something useful, but the vast majority of those are group mining payouts.  When I was mining I would get half a dozen payouts a day, yet I have never purchased anything.

Whether bitcoins are valued at 10c or $10 doesn't impact on their usefulness.  The price should be determined by the value of goods that need to be paid for.  Obviously if people want to trade $1M of goods every day then bitcoins valued at 10c aren't going to suffice as there just wouldn't be enough non hoarded bitcoins around to facilitate the payments.

Some people are betting that bitcoins will be incredibly useful in the future, therefore the price per bitcoin will rise.  However that's pure speculation based on predictions rather than fundamentals.  I hope not too many people are in denial about this.