You're quoting Spaceman_Spiff, not me. I said "just about everyone." And this has already happened before: Just about everyone in the US is wealthy by 1950 standards, and especially by pre-industrial, and most especially by feudal standards. One to two decades is a long time these days.

I think it's probably just the old Bitcoin battering ram chipping away at $1000 like it usually does at major psychological barriers. I recall from springtime that it used to hit a little below a psychological barrier (like 10% below), take a few steps back, ram it again, take a few steps back, then finally break through. Like a battering ram at a castle wall.

Anyway, it would have been very worrying if it hadn't corrected after the insane run earlier this week. We were hoping for some consolidation, and now we have it. So far so good. Launch pad prepped, ready for takeoff. Hopefully avoid thermal curtain failure.

I pretty much agree with this. For someone who hasn't bought in, I would say just buy, but if you already have a lot, now is perhaps not the ideal time to buy more.

No I'm saying even people who don't invest will be far better off. Not better off than the investors, but better off that they would have been if Bitcoin had never been invented.

Not instantly. I said financial freedom in a decade or two, and I mean by today's standards.

Bitcoin is more than just frictionless payments and finance. It's a complete restructuring of the world and the elimination of many inefficiencies that held people back. The removal of those inefficiencies isn't just going to make sending money cheaper and some online goods available at a discount. It will enable whole new industries like the Internet has, but it goes far beyond even that. It fundamentally, radically decentralizes power. It blows away most of the borders that kept people from participating in the international division of labor. It thwarts all kind of oppression, especially economic oppression.

It is "rat poison," as Charlie Munger inadvertently said, or as Chamath Palihapitiya called it, "schmuck insurance." Power to the people. Truly free markets, everywhere. Think China during Mao's reign versus now. That's the kind of change that's coming. Even for people who never invest in this bull market.

I agree with the general trendline you've laid out, but the flipside is that these deviations can be quite large within the trend, and they tend to go into overdrive before they calm down. I think your 2-3K then crash to 1K (or crash to $500 and then level out above 1K for a few months) scenario is more a little bit more likely than an exhaustion and consolidation in the mid-hundreds. But maybe that rhymes too closely with April 2013. China pulling a 2011 could bring the price to more like 5K before crashing down to 1K. There's just a lot going on right now, and it felt like a perfect storm a few weeks ago. Now it seems the storm just keeps happening and we're consolidating, returning to simple exponential growth within the short-term trend, rather than double-exponential as we had last week. So it could be the eye of this perfect storm.

On the other hand, just a little bad news and a few whale cash-outs could douse most of the bullish news sentiment such as the Richard Branson thing and newly favorable media. It would be seen in hindsight as "bubble indicators."

I'm thinking 65% chance of a moonshoot from here, 35% chance of a cooldown to low-to-mid-hundreds.

It's true I was kind of ambivalent about investing at one point because I thought, "If Bitcoin succeeds, just about everyone is eventually going to be rich by today's standards anyway, whether they bought in or not." It's more about how fast you want to get there. If you invest now, you get to experience financial freedom in a year or two, instead of a decade or two.

One almost universal mistake made in long-term price targets is the ceteris paribus fallacy. The idea is that Bitcoin will be used for everything that gold and fiat money is used for today, and everything else will stay the same. The reasoning goes, "If Bitcoin takes over the world, the price will reflect the value of what it took over: gold's functionality as a store of value, PayPal's transactional functionality, and the money supply of the world's currencies." Such estimates generally put the target price between $100,000 and several million dollars (in today's dollars).

That's a bit like arguing, in 1994, that email will be worth the value of the postal system.

Looking to a future year when the entire global economy is denominated in bitcoins, 1 BTC won't just be worth ~1/21,000,000 of today's global output. It won't just be worth ~1/21,000,000 of whatever the global output would have been in that year if Bitcoin had never arisen. It will be worth ~1/21,000,000 of the global output of a Bitcoin-enabled world.

A world with friction-free commerce, small and relatively much more efficient government (if any), absolutely booming business thanks to predictable "monetary policy" and market-defined interest rates and free stock markets, and a radically internationalized division of labor. Any one of those four should be enough to increase global output by an order of magnitude, if not more. But all four of them at once? Not to mention all the future applications like escrow, smart property, assurance contracts, distributed autonomous corporations (DACs) and autonomous agents, etc.

Given all that, and taking into account how all of this is included in the binary bet, I think the target price should be in the billions per coin. The timescale is less clear, but probably within a decade after mainstream adoption is reached.

Anyone with an mBTC will be set for life.

EDIT: To be clear, the price target for initial mainstream adoption probably is between $100,000 and $10,000,000 or so. I'm guessing $1 million as a conservative target. But once the dust settles we start into the economy-wide effects of a Bitcoin world and continue up a few more orders of magnitude in not very many years.

Some people want to die. But even if no one did, what you're talking about is universal value, not intrinsic value. There is no such thing as "intrinsic value."

Value is a verb; valuation requires a valuer. If everyone values the Sun, that just means everyone values it. It doesn't mean the Sun has intrinsic value, just universal or quasi-universal value.

The way the holders have the balls to hold is that they understand what is happening. The world is switching over to secure digital asset ledgers. They are simply unquestionably superior. Since they've already cashed out enough fiat currency to meet their daily needs, the only thing they care about is increasing their share in that asset register.

If you want be able to hold on to your coins, deeper research and thought about the system in the grand sweep of things is essential. Here are some links for deep Bitcoin scholarship:

Money as Memory

http://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/sr/sr218.pdf
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1fw3m5/bitcoin_is_memory/
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=232137.0
http://libertyhq.freeforums.org/fed-economist-predicts-bitcoin-will-end-the-fed-t938-20.html
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=230416.msg2450191#msg2450191
http://archive.freecapitalists.org/forums/t/31743.aspx

Natural Order

I, Pencil video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYO3tOqDISE
I, Pencil essay: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/I,_Pencil
http://mises.org/journals/scholar/hasnas.pdf
http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebsite/TIL.PDF
http://archive.freecapitalists.org/forums/t/8889.aspx
http://archive.freecapitalists.org//forums/t/18619.aspx
Google "FA Hayek, The Fatal Conceit" (book, available in PDF)


Panarchy

Balaji Srinivasan, Silicon Valley's Ultimate Exit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOubCHLXT6A&t=1m0s
http://athousandnations.com/2009/10/20/towards-youtopia-are-all-public-good-providers-earthbound/
http://www.panarchy.org/knott/bitcoin.html
Nullification: A Libertarian Gallop through American History

Economics

Google "Economics in One Lesson" (book, available in PDF)
http://mises.org/Books/humanaction.pdf (PDF)
Applying Economics to American History: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-LJ3wZjD4I
Trade is Made of Win
Trade is Made of Win, Part 2


Also look into the revolutionary nature of:

- P2P

- Open Source

- Cryptography

(^ need links here, anyone feel free to add to this list and distribute)


Summaries

http://evoorhees.blogspot.ch/2013/05/bitcoin-2013-role-of-bitcoin-as-money.html
http://konradsgraf.squarespace.com/storage/On%20the%20Origins%20of%20Bitcoin%20Graf%2023.10.13.pdf
http://archive.freecapitalists.org/forums/p/32931/512864.aspx
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=230416.msg2450191#msg2450191


Future Applications

Mike Hearn's 2012 talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mD4L7xDNCmA

Barry Silbert: 2013 was the year of venture capital. 2014 will be the year of Wall Street.

Buckle up.

It's just rhetorical. I wouldn't expect him to actually sell it all.

What someone who is nervous at these tiny fluctuations should do is either self-bind like you suggested, or simply sell enough that they no longer feel so nervous.

Indeed. Too bad so many (the majority right now) don't get this.

Max Keiser interviews Second Market's Barry Silbert:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5azCsoadoc&t=13m5s


He says he bought in years ago. I wonder if he's another of the Bitcoin rich.

+1

Not bad, except 13:00-16:00 where Maloney perpetuates the "can't pay off the interest" myth.

http://www.freedomforceinternational.org/freedomcontent.cfm?fuseaction=money_as_debt

Still good for getting people riled up and thinking. Bitcoin is happening far faster than this education process anyway, though.

Bitcoin is an extraordinary store of value, a frictionless remittance system, and a niche currency, maybe someday a mainstream currency. There's no reason to try to make it something it's not just because many people have the misconception that Bitcoin is supposed to be a currency; one BTC will soon be worth millions of dollars for its store-of-value function alone.

There are systems that can be built on top of Bitcoin that could enable it to function as a mainstream currency, but who cares? Thinking Fretting about this now is premature, other than for niche uses. There's an entire world of wealth yet to be transferred into Bitcoin. Give it at least a few years.

White as the driven snow my friend, rest easy

Is that a whale messaging Satoshi? Or is that public note added by someone else?