Don't be the "bag holder" of US dollars when inflation from the fed's endless QE finally hits us.

Yes 2 days was a short "handle" but obviously it wasn't done forming yet, and still isn't. Still looks on track to me though:

Read more about the cup and handle: http://stockcharts.com/school/doku.php?id=chart_school:chart_analysis:chart_patterns:cup_with_handle_cont




Cup:



Handle:

The "network effect" is from people telling their friends and relatives about something they think is cool and useful. Part of what made Bitcoin interesting and useful was the fact that everyone started on an equal footing. Everyone who read the features of Bitcoin and liked what they heard could go get them on an equal footing to anyone else. That fairness from the beginning is what made Bitcoin's networking effect so strong. Even if new people looking to mine wish they could have mined at a lower difficulty the people who had previously concluded that the mining was fair prevented them from forking.

If the features of Bitshares are not ready before mining starts people will fork the blockchain after the useful features are implemented. Mining should not start until the primary features of the currency are ready. At that point you should just release the protocol itself instead of an alt coin. I think you're making a big mistake releasing an alt coin before it has full intended functionality.

You can't just assume that everyone will honor the "protoshares" as equal to "bitshares" when they are released though. That's a big part of open source software, people can change it as they see fit at any point in the future. It's at least equally likely that once you release the source code for Bitshares everyone will simply use a version which strips out any sort of previous mining or initial coins. There's actually a big incentive for future miners to ignore pre-mines like this. Imagine if Bitcoin had had a pre-mine of some sort (even in the form of another currency that gets hard coded in to be equal to Bitcoins); likely the first action of the community would have been to hard fork and start from 0 coins.

I have been skeptical of your project from the beginning since you seem to assume that the market is magic and will do whatever you want it to regardless of profit motive. However I was planning on mining Bitshares once you got things figured out. Mining protoshares just seems like a waste of time and effort for everyone involved. I encourage you to scrap this idea and work harder on Bitshares themselves (since any real attachment to a currency only comes from its unique utility). At least you are going about this whole thing more honestly than Dacoinminister with his demands of money up front in exchange for a 100% pre-mined non-functional alt-coin.

As uncertainty over whether Bitcoin will survive longterm subsides the #1 determining factor will be how many people are currently interested in Bitcoin. As more people learn about it the price will continue rising (barring the encryption being catastrophically broken).

Theoretically a government could declare a crypto-currency they issue as the new legal tender and offer an official conversion rate for people to exchange their old currency. The problem with getting this system implemented would be political rather than technical however. The current fiat system gives government total control over the money supply already, and cash has zero transaction fees (unless you send it electronically). Moreover the inefficiencies of the current system (ie the transaction fees) prop up a network of bankers that is highly intertwined within the governments of the world. Money and political power are never far from each other. Just look at how easily the bank bailout was passed in the US.

Adopting crypto-currency as the official currency of a country is therefore highly unappealing to governments because they already have the system that gives them the maximum of power over money and greatly benefits the most politically influential people of the world. The US can literally print its way out of massive amounts of debt over time. It can also acquire that debt at an insanely low rate through things like QE. And all the people who make money off of this system basically have the Congress and Senate in their pockets ready to write a check whenever they are in trouble. What makes crypto-currency uniquely useful is the fact that it can circumvent the traditional money system without the need for a centralized authority (read Satoshi's whitepaper).

Centralizing crypto-currency is trying to reinvent the wheel as a square and expecting it to work better.

There will be boat after boat after boat, but the room for profits on each will become smaller and smaller. The real last boat is when we have reached the saturation point and everyone knows/uses Bitcoin(then it will make about as much profit as "investing" in the US dollar aka almost none). Talk to the people you know and you'll realize how small a fraction actually are into Bitcoin already.

Before the end of October.

Looking at the previous bubbles along with this chart I can't help but get a fractal-esque impression. For example go to clarkmoody's bitcoin charts, set each candlestick to w1, then zoom back to 2011 and you get this picture:

(This is what happened after the 2011 crash leading up to the bubble (on the right side))




That looks remarkably close to where we are now (however the bottom is not as low since we survived a bubble already making people more confident):



It looks like a similar pattern is repeating on a shorter scale during each successive bubble.

We could very well see >$1000 soon.

Each planet could have its own crypto currency. They could be sold on interplanetary exchanges using quantum entanglement to communicate instantly.

Bitcoin will have monetary inflation until Bitcoins stop being generated (currently 3600 BTC per day). As long as public interest continues to increase as it has in the past however prices of goods denominated in Bitcoin will continue to deflate.

Q: When a currency is devalued by hyper-inflation from printing too much money who benefits? A: The person printing the money.

Governments that devalue their currencies by printing way too much have no incentive to switch to another currency. Printing money is an indirect tax on the current holders of money.

The only way a country like Zimbabwe would switch to Bitcoin is if the people revolted and forced them to. African nations have rampant corruption so while it might be one of the best things that could happen economically it is very unlikely politically.

What a confused post you've made. If it's useful for illegal things, we can't assume that everyone who wants to do those things has already adopted Bitcoin. In fact a very small % of the world even knows about it currently (look at a map of the locations of Bitcoin users). You then compare the convenience of traditional money transfers used for legal purchases to the convenience of Bitcoin. I hope you can see how that doesn't make any sense.

How about the fact that his project is illegal in multiple ways?

He's directly issuing a virtual currency in exchange for real money. Sound familiar? http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/may/28/liberty-reserve-arthur-budovsky-arrested-spain

There's a reason Satoshi Nakamoto didn't reveal his true identity.

If you take investors money for an asset that is actually illegal in the first place, will the SEC prosecute you for that too? Likely yes, especially if you've raised as much as Mr. Willet has.

So really how can you call this anything other than a scam? If he doesn't flee with the money to another country he's going to jail eventually.

Something you're overlooking is the more hashing power the network has the more expensive and difficult it will be to attack the network. It's not wasted money and electricity. You might as well count the number of light bulbs per bank, multiply their power usage, and say that traditional banking hurts the environment. That's not even counting the massive server farms that handle current electronic transactions in the traditional money infrastructure.

It's a decent comparison. What you're describing is really an extension of basic supply and demand, not necessarily only related to what happened with .com domains. The lower something's price the more demand for that product there will be. Giving something with a fixed supply away for free (or nearly free) naturally attracts a ton of people's interest if that asset could eventually have any value.

This likely won't happen until it costs about as much in electricity to mine a Bitcoin as it does to buy it. As long as mining appears to be cheaper people will pump money into mining equipment (and to pre-orderers not using a calculator with high enough difficulty adjustments it will look very profitable until most people's asics get delivered). When mining finally reaches the point of being barely profitable at all even with already owned asics it'll be a very good thing for the network. We'll have reached a point that will make it extremely expensive to 51% the Bitcoin network so it will be much more secure.

Why would people who pre-ordered miners and waited months ever stop mining considering how quickly their device's lifetime coin generation will drop off as other's asics are delivered though? You can't ignore how massively oversold every company's pre-orders are. People with pre-ordered asics are much more likely to mine 24/7 without turning off no matter the price (they have to count on the price going back up to ever hope to have a return on investment now). We're not going to see a drop in difficulty until mining is totally dominated by the most efficient possible units.

My point for this post was simply that miners want to make a profit, and they will have to wait to sell until a certain price point to get one. Buying a miner is basically betting on a minimum price of Bitcoin in the future (since difficulty is all but guaranteed to go up for months due to the stack of pre-orders). If this decreases supply it's possible it will be balanced out by the increased supply from faster block confirmation though.

Obviously it's not going to keep up forever, and likely won't keep up for a whole year either. For the next half a year or so though? That certainly seems possible at least.
There's an insane amount of network power that's already been pre-ordered and just needs to go into production already. Great job wasting your time on straw man calculations though. At least mine were somewhat related to reality (that % is predicted based upon previous difficulty changes observed, I didn't just invent it to make a point like your numbers).