Who says Bitcoin is a currency? Bitcoin is maybe 10% currency, 10% anonymous global payment system, and 80% store of value. Those percentages will change as price rises, though.

The basis for a marketplace is price information. We need realtime statistics about actual fees paid by others to be displayed in the client when people go to send coins. Then a fee market would develop naturally, with miners never getting shortchanged, users never overpaying, and no one wondering how much to pay or whether their transactions will go through. Most users would probably just have the fees default to the market price, or a bit higher if they need to guarantee confirmation in a reasonable time.

More volatile, more prone to breaking things in the infrastructure, but not harder - if by harder you mean "slower." I think we could well be there by fall or even summer if the planets align correctly. But don't expect much in the Bitcoin world to escape disruption as that happens. This is radical change we are experiencing even now, and it will only accelerate.

Well that's a relief. This had a lot of people freaking out on reddit, what with the Instawallet hack and other perpetual issues we start to wonder if everything is just randomly exploding. 

She looks like some kind of cocky Princess Leia.

This got moved here from Discussion for some reason. Seems serious enough, so I posted it there.

That's his ladykiller face

We're gonna need a "Counseling for the Newly Wealthy" thread pretty soon

I'm guessing Coinbase will have its trial-by-fire soon (now?) or other mishap will happen in the next few days/weeks to cool things off. It's all about timing.

Of course there is also the possibility of more very good news...

I don't get this. If it's stable people worry, if it falls those same people presumably worry at least as much...so the only days you're not worried is when it's painting a big green candle?

Anyway, to answer your question, it's generally been stable right before it launches higher.

@shamntalk

How on earth is stabilization scary? I'm genuinely curious.

The reason we went down is because we went up very quickly. The Gox DDoS was just an excuse to cut the rally a bit shorter than it might have gone. The price zigs and zags, almost always. I can't see how this could be surprising. Spend some quality time with the historical charts, use log scale so that recent volatility isn't artificially magnified, and generally don't panic. This is Bitcoin.

Bitdimes

Yeah I meant quadruple digits.

It's well known that many bitcoiners are PM bugs (or former PM bugs), and probably the default thing to do for a new Bitcoin investor who has put as much of their assets as feasible into PMs is to sell some PMs and buy bitcoins.

So it's more a question of relative market caps. It still seems there isn't enough money in Bitcoin to take a significant bite out of gold prices.

I think people are just trying to cool the rally. It literally would harm Bitcoin for the price to rise at this speed (weekly doubling) for much longer, because by the time we hit $10,000 (next month!) all sorts of shit is going to start breaking and the ensuing chaos will break even more stuff, then giant crash. I don't think this will happen, but that's because I don't think we will go up at this insane pace for much longer without big pulbacks.

Coinbase is already toast, and Gox will likely be soon. The infrastructure needs a little time to adapt.

That said, a run to triple quadruple digits this month wouldn't alarm me much. But if the pace didn't slow after that I'd be worried.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1bq2p8/coinbase_publishes_your_name_and_email_publicly/

This looks bad.

Just to be clear, I do think people will spend their BTC as the price rises. The higher it goes the more digital millionaires appear who in fiat terms are only middle class, nervous as hell that any glitch or hack could dash their chances at financial freedom forever. They will progressively sell and also spend more and more as their wealth grows, even if that's only 10% off the top. The more spending options they have the less they will need to sell off directly.

So the more merchant adoptiont the better. I only mean to say that it may be a mistake to look for transactional value to increase in lockstep with the price. Store of value is HUGE right now. Any billionaire in the know (about Bitcoin) would be insane not to convert at least a small portion of their assets into bitcoins. Gold, Swiss bank accounts, property, offshore holdings - none are completely safe anymore, and neither are secrets held by others. With Bitcoin you can have your own secret stash that NO ONE will ever know about if you simply know what you're doing.

It's almost like we have an angel in the ranks of the elite...

I'm actually starting to doubt the importance of Bitcoin being used for a wide range of transactions at this point.

Look at gold! It's got just a few interesting non-store-of-value uses where no substitute is feasible, and the rest of the market price is all accounted for by its store-of-value functionality. Well, so does Bitcoin. Gold shows that only a tiny fraction of use value is needed to back the store-of-value value. Right now the world may need the latter far more than the former, and bitcoins have some huge advantages over gold as a store of value, especially in these times.

Looks like the old familiar battering ram pattern that happened below the former ATH, $50, and $100.

It's gotta knock a few times at the "door," which for some reason always seems to be at [psychologically significant price - about 6%], before busting through. Remember $47? Remember $94?

Basically the curling up from the standard exponential we're seeing now is either froth being introduced or a second exponential factor being introduced (the advent of double exponential growth - that is, exponentially higher and higher percentage increases). It could just be a outlying whale buying in in tracts, but that's outside the purview of this kind of trend analysis.

Merely the fact that the line is straight on a log chart of course does not mean there is no bubble, but as I mentioned we are seeing exponential growth in almost all other indicators as well. I don't think that was the case in 2011.

Note also: /r/Bitcoin is seeing increasingly high percentage growth in new subscribers right now. That might even be double exponential growth.

There are many things to take into account, though, and until I see sustained double-exponential growth for at least a month* and/or some reason to think that a second exponential factor has been introduced, I'm going to read this upward curling on the log chart as mild bubbling action entering the mix, albeit alongside much real growth.

One can abuse a log chart or any chart, but it remains the better tool for analyzing phenomena that - if they are to legitimately grow - will grow at exponential rates. For example, right now if there is an overreaction in response to some fairly moderate bad news, it won't be a mystery why. The log chart gives a ready explanation: anytime we float above the exponential trend line we are "cruising for a bruising" and any little problem can spook the market. That is a working hypothesis based on historical trends and the fact that other indicators appear to be "merely exponential" (not double exponential).

*This would of course be insane-level growth that would thwart all attempts at analysis, from weekly doubling to eventually daily doubling...either ending in mainstream adoption completely or release of one or both exponential factors as "shit starts to break."