how long to $100 ? $1000 ?

[paulie_w]

ok i have to ask: how long at current growth and trajectory until we hit those OMFG milestones?

[gongcheng]

Hope we are not crazy.

[Dobrodav]

That depends on patience of old BTC owners. If their nerves will break at some point and they will start mass sell ... Than we should  talk in terms, of at least,   decades. If they will stay steady, and put BTC on market carefully, well 1000$ is matter of 2-3 years. That counts even in case of some "legal" interference.
 But you never should forget, that BTC can gone with the wind, at any moment, - that is experiment, nobody know for sure what can happen.

[chiropteran]

We had a 62% increase in the past week ($8.65 to $13.80).

62% growth in one week leads to some absurd numbers in a relatively short time frame:

6/10- $22.35 (1 week)
6/17- $36.21 (2 weeks)
7/1- $95.04 (4 weeks)
7/29- $654.63 (8 weeks)
8/26- $4,508.78 (12 weeks)
10/21- $213,884.53 (20 weeks)

So, a little more than 4 weeks to $100.  Around 9 weeks for $1000.

However, I don't think 62% growth will be sustained

[adrian33]

start mass sell

I think large holders should sell to support themselves or the eco-system (by funding startups, campaigns or institutions.)

What do billionaires do with their money: invest or lend.. via a financial institution. I don't think it'd be hard or impossible to create a financial institution. And it certainly wouldn't be impossible to fund a few bitcoin startups.

[kjj]

However, I don't think 62% growth will be sustained

No growth model ever is sustained, in the long run.  Reality prefers S curves.

[airdata]

We had a 62% increase in the past week ($8.65 to $13.80).

62% growth in one week leads to some absurd numbers in a relatively short time frame:

6/10- $22.35 (1 week)
6/17- $36.21 (2 weeks)
7/1- $95.04 (4 weeks)
7/29- $654.63 (8 weeks)
8/26- $4,508.78 (12 weeks)
10/21- $213,884.53 (20 weeks)

So, a little more than 4 weeks to $100.  Around 9 weeks for $1000.

However, I don't think 62% growth will be sustained

Would it be safe to assume that value will grow at a rate slightly below difficulty? 

[chiropteran]

Would it be safe to assume that value will grow at a rate slightly below difficulty? 

Value growth and difficulty are linked, to a degree.  If BTC value increases, it encourages more mining, which results in greater difficulty.  On the other hand, if value drops or stops growing, eventually mining profit will drop so much that some miners stop mining completely, because it costs more in electricity, resulting in a difficulty drop.

But this is a loose association, and it's entirely possibly that value could drop as difficulty increases in a short-term situation.

[Jaime Frontero]

i'll stick with our most reliable prognosticator: vladimir.

so...

$20 by the end of july.

$100 by the end of the year.

$1,000 by the end of 2012.

i'm talking about reasonably stable exchange rates, with a clearly established floor within +/-10-15%.

at this point, i'd be expecting a correction of some weight by june 15-20.  not that i care.

[BubbleBoy]

So, a little more than 4 weeks to $100.  Around 9 weeks for $1000.

You are right on the money, so to speak. If it does not burst in the meantime, that's the way a bubble inflates, exponentially on the upper slope.
If I were to have any bitcoins I would hold on to them and plot the daily/weekly view count of the "We use coins" video. Sell when the view rate levels, or, for the most adventurous, when it starts to decline.

[Jaime Frontero]

So, a little more than 4 weeks to $100.  Around 9 weeks for $1000.

You are right on the money, so to speak. If it does not burst in the meantime, that's the way a bubble inflates, exponentially on the upper slope.
If I were to have any bitcoins I would hold on to them and plot the daily/weekly view count of the "We use coins" video. Sell when the view rate levels, or, for the most adventurous, when it starts to decline.

that might have been valid a few weeks ago - but no longer.  Bitcoin has gotten so much attention, so much press, and so much word of mouth, that any one expository link is almost irrelevant.

i've gotten two other folks involved with Bitcoin - and sent neither of them to that video.  and - incidentally - neither of them are mining.  one is buying, and the other is putting together a business plan to sell goods for BTC.

[Dobrodav]

By the way, is there some open code platform for bitcoin accepting sellers ?
 Is there any open soft that will help, even small, buisness owners to manage their wallets in that assets ?
(There is a lot of problems, if you check corresponding threads).
I am think there is a good use for old BTC moneys.
Is it time to declare BOUNTY for such a software right now  ?

[Apolo29]

i'll stick with our most reliable prognosticator: vladimir.

so...

$20 by the end of july.

$100 by the end of the year.

$1,000 by the end of 2012.

i'm talking about reasonably stable exchange rates, with a clearly established floor within +/-10-15%.

at this point, i'd be expecting a correction of some weight by june 15-20.  not that i care.

That is a spectacular scenario, is this assuming btc wil be accepted for at least one county?

[mewantsbitcoins]

i'll stick with our most reliable prognosticator: vladimir.

so...

$20 by the end of july.

$100 by the end of the year.

$1,000 by the end of 2012.

i'm talking about reasonably stable exchange rates, with a clearly established floor within +/-10-15%.

at this point, i'd be expecting a correction of some weight by june 15-20.  not that i care.

That is a spectacular scenario, is this assuming btc wil be accepted for at least one county?

I think this prediction assumes that bitcoin stays a parallel economy and only fills niches like poker and online payments. If any one country makes it legal tender, you should add quite few zeros to that estimation

[dayfall]

I have predicted $100 near the end of December.  (My miners will heat my house quite well).

I don't think that we will be in the $300-$700 range too long.  It will either fall to $100 or jump really high.  If we make it over $500 then I say $1000 by then end of 2012 or mid 2013.

[Adam]

Make sure you put half your net worth into bitcoins then!  A 1000% return by December and 10000% by 2013?  You could turn $10,000 into $1,000,000!

Sorry, but it just seems ridiculous to assume that returns like this will continue for a year or more to come, unless you are balancing that by saying there is a 99% chance it goes to 0 and and a 1% chance it goes to 1,000, which would be closer to my guess.  There is no reason to expect it to keep going up without a mitigating downside risk, and since the downside is $13 and the upside is hundreds, one has to assume that the chance of going to zero is much more likely.

[denizen]

Using mt gox price data rounded to the nearest dollar starting at 6 April, the best exponential (c + E^(b x)) fit to the data is:
  0.0195987 + E^(0.0399244 x)

Giving this --

https://i.imgur.com/0iumb.png

X axis is 1 for April 6, 2 for April 7, etc.  The dots are the rounded data points.

Exponential growth is unlikely to continue occurring forever, but that equation reaches $100 at about day 115 (July 30), and $1000 at about day 173 (September 26).  Unlikely though. 

[Phenomenon]

ok i have to ask: how long at current growth and trajectory until we hit those OMFG milestones?

A better question is how long until I can go to walmart and checkout using BTC?

[airdata]

Do any of the naysayers take into account the money being pumped into the economy because of bitcoin?  I just dropped $500 on mining gear.  Nothing compared to what others are doing.  But still, $500 going out into the economy that otherwise would not have been spent.  

[Adam]

Do any of the naysayers take into account the money being pumped into the economy because of bitcoin?  I just dropped $500 on mining gear.  Nothing compared to what others are doing.  But still, $500 going out into the economy that otherwise would not have been spent. 

But does that serve any real purpose?  If difficulty increases by 100x because of all the new miners does that help bitcoins as a unit of exchange?  All that equipment is basically wasting power to do arbitrary calculations that only have value because of an artificial currency.  I don't want to sound anti-bitcoin or anything, it's just that argument reminds me of when people saying government spending is good because it creates jobs without considering whether those jobs add anything of value to the economy.