That's very kind, but I can't take the credit. The song was created by orymh. At the time, he didn't yet have a BitcoinTalk account. I'm just the messenger 

</bow> 

I think it's time for another rally.  A bump can never hurt.

nn ch nn ch nn ch nn ch
RALLY BUMP 

The missing qualifier to this train of thought is - in today's money.

My hand-calculations got me close enough to accept/use the infamous $300,000 rpietila estimate as a long term value. But that estimate relies on two unknowns:
-The future growth in the number of accepted and used cryptocurrencies.
-The inflation relative to today's value of fiat dollars.

Net global worth is relatively fixed, so we're really discussing what percentage of global net worth will ultimately end up in Bitcoin.
Things get fuzzy when the question-asker(s) don't specify/don't know whether they mean Bitcoin or all cryptocurrencies, or today-money or future-value-money.

I am anticipating financial fireworks after the elections.
To borrow a popular thread subject phrasing:

Bitcoin, Gold, Silver, Mining Shares, Interest Rates, Crude Oil UP. The rest of the financial world DOWN.

I always thought it would be a neat statement to set my ask a few bucks above the spot price of gold.  If enough people got behind such a movement, there'd be this bizarre, giant wall waaaaay out there.

People couldn't help but think about that future price.  "How long til it gets there?"  Planting those psychological seeds, for a more appropriate price point!

I don't care what your grandma says
I wish that $300k bitcoin was heeeeeeeeeeeere 

Just $0.64 more to crack $110...I guess I've got another two or three listens in me 

http://orymh.bandcamp.com/track/the-bitcoin-rally-song

You know, we're months overdue for a damn rally.  Let's get this mother started.

When I got in, they were at $5, so the net risk didn't really justify diversifying.
As value went up, I adjusted a little.
As Mt. Gox's reliability (subjectively speaking of course) decreased, I adjusted a lot.

Eyes wide open, money in an exchange is at increased risk of loss. That risk is part of the equation one accepts when trading.

I'm still long Bitcoin, just not MtGox.

So I've shifted from 100% MtGox to about 50% physical, 45% wallet, 5% gox.

Not sure what percentage of gox-withdrawers are like me, but this could account for decreased volume without depressed prices.

I'd be interested.

Johnnie,

with sellers potentially having the means to discover the inner code, one could:
-Extract and record that information
-Sell the coin with the bits intact
-Redeem the coin's Bitcoins, after having sold the coin

Buyers will not purchase a coin just to instantly redeem it, so they could pull that trigger minutes, or months afterwards.

The tampering is evident, so one can still buy safely. It just requires more work, and my guess is that for those coins in a 'vulnerable' state, this will lead to a decrease in demand (because it is more of a pain to obtain them), and this will result in a decrease in premiums obtained for those coins.  I further speculate that those would-be-buyers are more likely to find an equivalent buy, than to give up and buy nothing.  If I were still looking to obtain more of the rare, collectible coins, I would shop exclusively from:
-Sellers, with an established web of trust, asserting a chain of custody through only trusted sellers.
-Coins sealed (ANACS graded) prior to known tamper-evident-trick.
-Coins graded post-tamper-trick, calling out the authenticity of the coin.

The first means that each sale will make the subsequent resale harder, as the custodial chain becomes longer.
The second is a pretty tiny club (of which I believe you are a fellow member, Mr. Walker!)
The third will first require ANACS to be educated on how to identify the tampering/exploit. This is not a guarantee, but given my conversations with them around the Casacius error, I think they'll be amenable to this.

So I see this being non-impactful to the majority of the coins out there, I do anticipate this will have effects on the higher end collectible market.  Guess we'll see!

Great concept!!! Any idea if we are, roughly speaking, days vs. weeks vs. months from release?  I'm eager to buy before silver gets too crazy 

They're a great concept, and I'm also eager to see what comes next.  I've got two sets of your Beta BitBills, and would love to be able to carry non-collectible versions of these around in my wallet.

But I'm reserving judgement, and a decision on whether to evangelize or warn, based on your patent intentions.

To me it's not a matter of right or wrong. Legally speaking, ever since the patent laws got ridiculously changed to 'he who gets there first wins', it has invited patent trolls.

In my mind, your intentions will go far on how successful (or not) your product is.

See a lot of success with Ripple within the Bitcoin community?  I'd never advocate them to anyone; having a massive pre-mined cache, they have their own best interests in mind, to the detriment to the Bitcoin community.

One last point - saying nothing is, in itself, a decision.  It leaves uncertainty in the air.  The very people trying to pioneer new concepts (casascius, smoothie, and lots more coming) have a significant risk piled onto their business equation, while this uncertainty remains.

That's why it would have to be a market buy (to move the price to the desired target) accompanied by a new support wall.
Done in one step if you, say, put in a buy order for 10,000 Bitcoins at 110 when the price was at 95.

The volume on the other exchanges, relatively speaking, is still pretty low. Now if they tried running the price to 200, of course everyone would come out of the woodwork and sell into the wall, eating it.
But a modest move that put the price only slightly above Gox, alongside a massive wall. If you were holding coins on Bitstamp, would you sell? How much?

I try to imagine a) my emotional, then logical reaction to theoretical events, which then leads to b) my planned actions, using those reactions as a proxy for market sentiment as a whole.

I've racked my brain for a long time to try to think of a way this logjam could be broken, prior to Mt. Gox either failing or resolving their issues.  This is the only idea I've been able to come up with that seems like it would have a chance.  But it's really just an informed guess.  Or as some might call it...speculation 

Agreed.  At least, as it pertains to normal market participants. I believe a whale can break us out of this equilibrium (more at end of post).

Current, relatively-stable prices are:

Mt Gox - 106.25
Other BTC-E/Bitstamp - 97.50

Price difference of 8.75.

8.75 / 106.25 = 8.25%

At equilibrium, people seem willing to take an 8.25% loss on their funds to have them represented somewhere other than Gox.

I take that to mean that, absent conclusive data, the market speculates there is an 8.25% chance that Gox defaults, or that they will fail to be able to receive their fiat.
(Or viewed from the other perspective, people are willing to assume the additional risk of getting nothing, in exchange for an 8.25% premium when they sell.)

I am expecting this stasis to be broken when a whale decides to leverage the power of his money by driving the price on a non-Gox exchange above the Gox exchange.
A market buy alongside a new support wall, let's say driving the Bitstamp price up to 110 while Gox is at 106.25.

What happens next?
Suddenly, everyone sitting at Gox not wanting to take a hit by re-buying, now has a motivation to buy their coins, as they can now move them over to Bitstamp.
Except this in turn moves the price on Gox back to equilibrium (or more likely, a premium over that, as we are now.)

Which suggests we are no better off than when we began.
Except we're not.

The market as a whole would now be xx users/volume closer to being done with Mt. Gox.
The whale will have won, as he bought coins from 95 to 110, and the resultant price jumps on Gox establish a new floor of 110 for all of those coins.

After the necessary several days of consolidation, he or another will try the same thing again. Each will move price upwards.
At some point, the trick stops working, for one of two different reasons:

1. Not enough volume and users remain on Gox - the well is completely dry, the market just needs to realize it. (This will happen relatively quickly, as volume is easily discoverable data.)

2. The repeated price moves that were profitable for one in fact begins a true rally, one which is not focused on Mt. Gox, but rather, any other exchange.

EDIT: This was originally a long post trying to clarify I was talking about my assumed impact to the collectible aftermarket, and not the coins in general.  But I since read that formally speaking, this was not an exploit, as the tampering was evident.  Now, I used 'exploit' all over in that post, and re-writing it to be appropriate would have mangled it.  The last thing I want to do is mislead people or create confusion, especially around a product with such great support.

(see http://casascius.wordpress.com/2013/08/04/def-con-21-preliminary-results-from-sunday/ for a great example of this.)

Thanks for your tireless support and advancement of Bitcoin, Mike.

I am suddenly soooooooo thankful I got mine graded and hard-cased (ANACS) months before this exploit was discovered.
It seems to me that we've just further split the already-rare, collectible Casascius coins into two camps - potentially compromised and almost-certainly-uncompromised.

Short of the already-graded coins (alongside documentation of date-of-grading, preceding this exploit)...I cannot think of any outstanding coins whose legitimacy would not rely in part on the trust of the integrity of the seller.

I was holding onto these tight before this news broke. Now...the phrase cold, dead hands springs to mind :-P