... utility, expectation and speculation all ratchet up price at different times.

stamp's showed up with some attitude

ha, nice pics elwar ... I didn't want to post too soon and jinx it ... especially if bitcoin is going to be bigger than Panama.

... therein lies the magic, difficulty ratchets up cost and price ratchets up difficulty ... it's a virtuous circle from which the counterfeiters cannot escape.

http://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/bitcointalk/65/

... does that spell it out clearly enough for you?

... all empirical evidence to the contrary.

Just keep telling yourself whatever myth you like to keep yourself inside your comfort zone. Regardless, money is what does and if you aren't well enough informed with the money markets you'll most likely lose 'money' speculating on bitcoin.

Start here http://szabo.best.vwh.net/shell.html for some insight to get rid of all that bullshit confusion you just spread everywhere

... all the best pumps have started on huobi in the current run.

... the spurious, infantile, excessive trollery is definitely different this time around. It has some real, ugly menace and venom behind it, like a kind of sickness or cancerous evil protesting it's right to continued existence in the glare of the truth, you might say.

Cost of production is doubling in less than a month ... that will set the new floor for bitcoin price to the $840-960 range (at the minimum without difficulty increases) in the medium term.

Cost of production for a monetary good is the economic defence against counterfeiting.  While gold is money, and sometimes attracts a monetary premium substantially above it's cost of production, for someone to produce gold "from nothing" they need to expend an equivalent amount of resources to the cost of production.  Over long terms the price of the monetary good may be attracted to its cost of production but ultimately that is as cheap as you can acquire it for, as long as it is still desirable as a monetary good.  For the same reason the lowest value of fiat paper money is the cost of the paper it is printed on and the ink, i.e. it's cost of production (about a few cents for a $100 bill).

While bitcoin is still valued as a monetary good, that can be transported in minutes across the internet as a final settlement for bearer instruments exchanged on a censorship-resistant network, it still needs to defend against counterfeiting.  The cost of production defends against counterfeiting since this is as cheap as you can produce bitcoin.  If bitcoin becomes more desirable for other reasons of its utility, such as store of value, medium of exchange (network effect increasing), etc., then it may easily attract a monetary good premium on top of the cost of production, but the cost of production has invariably set the floor for the lower bound on bitcoin prices, as long as it has remained a monetary good.

Bitcoin is still monetising.

... it is becoming clear now he meant dragons not dinosaurs.

it looks like they are just hanging in there ... they let these bull runs happen at the weekends to relieve some pressure when new fiat cannot get into the exchanges to send it rocketing, then save up their dumpage for a monday-tuesday dumpathon ... but it's all looking quite desperate, at some point they will run out of idiots to borrow coins from and then the market can find the monetary premium instead of bouncing along on the cost-of-production floor (which is ever-increasing and soon to be doubling anyway)

At $8.6 bill bitcoin has surpassed
Sudan


and

Uzbekistan

... looking very dangerous for the shorts here, they need to have nerves of steel or they'll totally lose their shit and run screaming from their troll caves.

so it is in essence acting like 1 year call option on bitcoin price and that makes more sense for its current premium than the IRA tax advantage explanation (which may contribute to the premium but not that much imo).