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June 22, 2011, 08:15:00 PM Last edit: June 22, 2011, 08:48:36 PM by epii |
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Bitcoin is entirely unexplored territory, so it seems this question will only be answered in retrospect (and even then, "risk" can be a somewhat meaningless concept in retrospect, because we only know whether something went right or wrong, not what the probability of this outcome was). Theoretically, as best as I understand, the price at any given time should be pretty much proportional to:
number of users * average perception of reward / average perception of risk
This function experiences cycles of both positive and negative feedback, as fast gains in price increase both the perception of reward and the perception of risk. The perception of risk has necessarily increased since the Mt. Gox incident, so I suspect the relative stability of price can be attributed to the first variable - the publicity has caused the user-base to grow faster than ever.
Based on my somewhat naive equation, we could actually come up with a rough "risk ratio" if we found some metric for user activity, such as forum posts / day. (Though it would be a challenge to compare this to other commodities.)
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