For all the bears who think that 2013 was an unrecoverable bubble, please identify another bubble where 9 months after the pop the underlying fundamentals are better than it was during the bubble.
Our situation is simply that a lot of miners and short/medium-term speculative investment have coins that need to be moved to strong hands. There is simply a reservoir of coins (which is increasing by 3600 per day) that need to be moved before we can make significant moves upwards. Bitcoin is so useful that someday this reservoir is gonna run dry.
I seem to remember there was a strong argument on this forum that hoarding coins (nice euphemism "strong hands") is bad for BTC in the long run. What you are essentially advocating is the same thing Shroomskit constantly proposes: nobody sells until the price reaches a level which enables laggard early-adopters to become super-rich.
Why would everyone do this?
Saving money may be bad for the economy if everyone does it, but I think that is an open question long term. After all if you need something you'd buy it so what saving does is increase efficiency -- you don't waste money on unnecessary stuff (short term, yea, people who work in luxury industries have hardship).
But regardless of the effect on the larger economy, it is a very good thing for the saver. So please recognize the bias in your term "hoarding" and how you are inculcated to imagine that saving is somehow "bad" to save the economy at your own expense.
Saving BTC can only be good for BTC in the long run. Utility gives BTC its marginal value (very small), but saving (scarcity) is what gives BTC significant value. And there is a positive feedback between savers and merchant adoption. Merchants start taking BTC because they see more people holding it, more people holding it cause more merchants to accept it.
There's no collusion here. I'm not "advocating" any kind of "hold the line" fairytale. People ARE saving coins as part of a diversified savings plan which includes real estate, stocks, etc, due to the unique abilities of BTC to carry value during economic uncertainty and the fact that its an uncorrelated asset.
Miners and speculators ARE trying to get the best price possible so are holding back in the hopes the price will rise...
But to see this going on 9 months after the "bubble" pop, to see larger and larger merchants and payment processors adopting the coin speaks to BTC's ultimate utility.
Why did Paypal choose to accept BTC for digital assets? Because digital assets are not sent to a home address. So its too easy to get away with fraud buying digital assets -- steal CC, buy Vorpal Sword +1000, give it to another character, sell it for cash. Police can't knock on anyone's door looking for an 80" TV. It got so bad that ebay stopped allowing sales of digital assets. But Bitcoin is perfect for digital asset purchase...
k, that's all I've got for tonight, PM me if you want to keep arguing :-)
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