So Keynes believs Gessell is Marx 2.0 Now, how cool is that  Beautiful English though...

muyoso, I would add to your scenario a few scary posts on this forum about how BTC price will crash, etc.
also, maybe a few friends can trade in the same manner, and post in the same manner 

killer2021 you are correct. "fear discount" is a neat term and very true.
small emotional markets (like bitcoin) are very easy to manipulate.
big markets (like FOREX)... not so easy. Soros made a billion in a day betting it's not practically possible, not even when the Bank of England was the manipulator 

And maybe because we don't have a better alternative?

+1

I guess those who ask for regulation actually mean safety and security rather than price control.

yep, some universal standard interface would be cool. would make arbitrage so much easier 

well, let's see what happens to the energy-as-absolute-value idea when they will come up with some contraption that makes next-to-free energy 
these scientists, they can make a lot of cool things...

Fees will be lower for a couple of week (less than half of what they used to be) which will encourage lots of speculation. However, at the end of the reduced-fees period, the speculator will be better-off if BTC is $30 not $10...

TiagoTiago, what do you mean by "necessary"?

It used to be 0.65 buyer + 0.65 seller = 1.3 per trade.
Now it appears to be 0.3 buyer + 0.3 seller = 0.6 per trade (for a couple weeks).
Nice  it will certainly encourage heavy speculation!

I apologize for bringing this up on an obviously Austrian school forum  but what about Keynes and Friedman? Not bad reads either...

That was the day when the big players were in vacation, or busy with other things 

Less than 7 million bitcoins have been mined. There's still a lot of coins left  but it gets harder and harder to get them (difficulty goes up as more and more people get into the mining business).

At this time, the success of Bitcoin is driven by speculation not its use for payments. Speculation is most profitable when the markets fluctuate a lot, and less profitable when the markets are stable. In a (rather small) economy like Bitcoin, it is still possible for a few players with lots of liquidity to move the market at will, so please do expect a lot of fluctuation when MtGox comes back. It will take a while until MtGox will regain trust, but once that happen, the bubble will return. Ride it wisely!

A few days after MtGox comes back online, if there are no other security issues 

If one can construct a concept for economic value that is universally-applicable and with a clear definition (expressed mathematically), one is warranted to get a Nobel prize and change the world forever  Unfortunately, many great minds have tried and failed. Primarily because (it appears) "beauty is in the eye of the beholder"  and the same holds true for economic value in general...

Are there any other non-reversible payment methods out there? Dwolla is nice, but it seems to be a bit slow...

Interesting point. Did anyone look for such a transfer(s) in the block chain?

Why won't you guys save the time, electricity and cracking/spamming effort, and send me all your bitcoins now? Oops, forgot I don't have an address in my signature...