Nothing, and proud of it.

Bitcoin is Gold 2.0. That is what's driving adoption now. Its future potential use as currency is part of the present valuation, but its current utility as a currency is very niche still, as you'd expect.

I'm not a believer in making things happen out of their due time. The marketing of Bitcoin as a digital currency has just ended up confusing a lot of people. They call it a bubble because they don't see how the price increases have followed any kind of commensurate increase in merchant adoption, and they're right about that. The price increase is due to people using Bitcoin as an investment, and there's nothing wrong with that. In fact there's everything right about it. The whole point of investing is to infuse value into things that will be useful later, before others have noticed. The price rise alerts them to the potential and the current utility, which again is mainly store of value, Gold 2.0.

As the BIT investor presentation shows, the store of value function is by far the greater driver of price and potential upside. Once a good chunk of the population has figured this out and bought in, it'll be time to promote it as a currency.

This is a landgrab. Bitcoin barons, lords of the manor, kings of their castles will not be selling off very much of their land for any price.

So top out between $800 and maybe $1600? Sounds reasonable, though probably toward the higher end. We haven't even seen any double-exponential growth yet. It'd be a pretty pathetic mania phase if it didn't involve at least one doubling ($1000, from here...but of course there's no accounting for bad news).

I think if we have a mania $266-500 will be support, the new $50 if you will.

Look how earily similar the the last 30 days are to March, even down to slope.



If we follow the same pattern we'll go to $1300 and down to $266-ish, leveling out around $600-700. But history never repeats exactly. Infrastructure is more robust this time, it seems. But to take that into account may be biasing the assumption that MtGox failure ended the April rally prematurely, when it may have just been the straw than broke the back of a severely overheated market.

Everyone has a price, but to many it is priced in BTC

As Erik Voorhees said, "I already cashed out." There's no reason to sell for dangerously confiscatable, freezable, capital controlable, untransportable, undeniable fiat or gold.

Buried treasure has territorial issues, isn't transportable, and is otherwise extremely impractical for many eventualities.

Brainwallets do it all: deniability, instant access, not capital controllable, not stealable...

Ditto. December 11th, 2013.

That's roughly where we'd be if the April crash never had happened and we had instead continued the Jan-March trend.

Yes, they may try to regulate Bitcoin, but all their efforts will only push the price way higher without delaying the train by more than a few weeks/months, if at all.

I'd think 2-3x is the maximum margin you'd ever want (or anyone would be able to provide, until Wall Street jumps in) for anything other than extremely short-term trading.

Off-exchange buys are even better. They create delayed, more steady price growth.

Clear sign that we have a ways to go. If people still have reservations, they haven't thrown caution to the wind yet. When they do, the final spurt will come in this run.

A question someone might ask is why this dynamic isn't present with other things besides Bitcoin. Well for example, a government official opposing the Nazis in Nazi Germany took on a lot of risk, and a government official opposing central banking also hampers their career quite severely if they do it through political means, but not if they do it by buying BTC.

Bitcoin allows everyone, even those in powerful positions, to oppose the current monetary system without cost (in fact with massive profit) because buying and holding bitcoins can be done entirely privately.

This rise is the same speed as early March.

Unskilled speculation is bad, but skilled speculation is GOOD.

Requird reading: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1mb27q/bitcoins_vast_overvaluation_appears_caused_by/cc7i6y8

Yes, exactly. Government is a bunch of individuals, and individuals who understand Bitcin enough to see it as a threat, understand it enough to see that they have to own some.

The funny thing about Bitcoin is that anyone in the ranks of the elite who understands it well enough to see it as a threat will automatically also want to own it. Now their interests are aligned with everyone's. They might be misguided, like Mellon, but they're Bitcoiners all the same.

Bitcoin is like the blob. Punch it and it just assimilates you.

If neutral response, price goes up.

If moving toward prohibition, price tanks.

If moving toward almost any kind of regulation (including CoinValidation), price goes up.

Price will likely go up.

The BIT is kicking ass, and bringing in millions each week:



Net assets under management already reached $21.8 million, which I guess means how much dollars they have taken in(?).

Absolutely. I know when Mellon came on that BIG MONEY was on the way, even if the scheme is bad for Bitcoin.

But you don't have a tipping address in your sig.

I know you what you mean about "in spite of" school. I learned more about essay writing by participating in Usenet debates about Playstation vs. Nintendo 64 for a few weeks than I ever learned in school. And of course that was only the beginning. I knew a guy who always seemed kind of slow until he dropped out of school and spent all his time playing online games and posting on forums. One year later he was suddenly shining with intelligence, quick-minded, discerning, and could write. It was like a miracle. I'm convinced school was keeping him down.

"Do not question authority" is the most harmful message.

It trains you to submit and never think outside the box. They'll encourage you to "think outside the box," but it's bastardized into an exercise in not being bound by logical consistency or definitional clarity. They never teach you to question assumptions or pin down definitions. Such things are outside the culture and antithetical to it. The only "outside the box" thinking allowed is absurdism, nothing actually productive.

Mathematics was what I thought was the last stand of true rigor and unquestionable correctness, but it's full of holes on the theoretical side, which weaken the applications side as well. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REeaT2mWj6Y