Why Bitcoin may now level off...

[BittBurger]

Can someone explain this to me please?

People can afford $200 ... $400 Bitcoins ... $900 bitcoins... and with all the money in China floating around, its not too big of a deal for people go buy $1000 bitcoins.

You reach the $1000 mark and you've got Snoop Doggs buying up 20 or 50 of them .... but that's Snoop Dogg.  He's a multi millionaire. 

People have been able to afford to buy in to Bitcoin up till now...

Who the hell is going to afford to buy into Bitcoin at $2,000 ?   $5,000 ?   $10,000 ?

At some point shit is going to simply stop shooting up. 
I know you can buy bitcoins in divisible amounts.   But 90% of the public has no idea they can do this, and Im not even certain that someone buying 0.00004 BTC at $10,000 is going to push the price up at all. 

So my "Speculation" ?   That we're reaching a point at which human beings can no longer buy in to Bitcoin enough to keep pushing the price up so quickly. 

Can someone please explain to me where the money would come from?  Even if India gets on board ... how the heck will their participation affect price? 
Its not like a bunch of people in India can start blowing money on $5,000 Bitcoins .

Can someone explain to me why people here think a rise from $1,000 to $10,000 could even happen at all, let alone quickly?

[xenon481]

You don't have to buy whole coins. You can buy by the mBTC.

[aminorex]

estimated 350,000 holders a couple of months ago, according to some random paper i read.  since then the price roughly sextupled, so perhaps  22 million holders could naively be taken to correspond to a 10k level.  

funds are buying at least half the mining output now, probably much more, and this is a very recent development.  the impact on price trajectory is likely to be more upward pressure than seen in the past.

it's starting to look like we're basing around the 1k USD / 1oz Au gap, but the newsflow on btc has increased by a factor of 10 or more in the past month, so i suspect at least ten times the number of people are learning about btc each day.  admittedly this is a lower quality audience than the early technophile demographic, but it also includes technically unsophisticated by financially sophisticated business people and investors.  as they become comfortable with the concepts and perform value calculations, they will do the paperwork necessary to buy coin.

people who understand how money is valued on its fundamentals will be much more willing to buy speculatively, will have a much longer-term discounting horizon, and will understand the mechanics of future sustainable gains, and will invest accordingly, as compared to the average relatively uneducated and less affluent neophyte.

the difference between $900 bitcoins and $800 bitcoins is not substantial.  neither is the difference between $1000 bitcoins and $1100 bitcoins.  in fact, it is less substantial.  for that reason i do not expect the latter to be more difficult to achieve than the former transition.  the critical factor is demographic penetration.  as long as awareness is spreading at an exponential rate, to a first approximation, growth will continue to be exponential.  the exponent may decay over time, but it remains over unity for the time-being.

[grimsparkle]

An extreme example would be a universal currency...so governments would be the entities buying bitcoins.
Napkin math would say 100 trillion dollars in global currency divided by 21 million bitcoins is...$4.75M.

If your new  'unit of currency' was a microbitcoin, a unit would be about $4.75 and a "satoshi" would be 1/100 of that or about 0.05.

[msc]

Im not even certain that someone buying 0.00004 BTC at $10,000 is going to push the price up at all. 

If someone is willing to pay 40 cents for 0.00004 BTC, and nobody is willing to sell it for less than that, then the price becomes $10,000 per BTC.  In other words, it doesn't matter what amount is being traded, just the price it's being traded at.

[traderCJ]

funds are buying at least half the mining output now, probably much more, and this is a very recent development.  the impact on price trajectory is likely to be more upward pressure than seen in the past.

..snip

the exponent may decay over time, but it remains over unity for the time-being.

Interesting - how do you know the mining output is being bought by funds?  Which funds?

I agree that the growth will be exponential for a very long time.  I think it has to do with how information propagates through networks .. 5 people tell 5 people who tell 5 people and so on.

Edit: One more thing - I think the reason we haven't seen a bump today (man aren't we greedy?) is there hasn't been much Bitcoin-related news besides the sheep swindle ..

[kromer]

I hope that the community and eventually the media start refering to value in terms of mBTC. A lot of my friends would invest but they think that a coin is too expensive for them.

[bitcon]

who will be interested in fiat when it takes a thousand dollars to buy a bigmac?

[beetcoin]

what about the big players? hedge funds? wall street? while the psychological effect does have a role in changing the price, i think sometimes we put too much focus on it. before we hit $1,000, i thought there would have been a pretty big sell-off and that we'd have somewhat of a crash.. well, that didn't really happen.

another things we don't know of: where the news comes from, and whether it's good or bad. if, for example, tigerdirect were to announce that it is going to accept BTC... what do you think would happen? people would ignore the psycholgical barrier and buy up some coin.

[eternaluniverse]

this problem with people not understanding you can buy half a bitcoin frustrates me so much!

[beetcoin]

this problem with people not understanding you can buy half a bitcoin frustrates me so much!

i honestly don't think it's that big of a deal. if someone were seriously interested in getting bitcoin, they'd do the research and learn that they can buy fractions. if they are just saying "im interested," but are unwilling to put the effort out to join the game.. they probably wouldn't have bought them anyways.

[bitcon]

i was interested in USD, but then i realized their damn $1000 bills couldnt be divided so i decided just to trade my trusty clam shells instead. *cough * *sarcasm perhaps*

[calian]

Minicoins. And someday mikes.

[cr1776]

funds are buying at least half the mining output now, probably much more, and this is a very recent development.  the impact on price trajectory is likely to be more upward pressure than seen in the past.

..snip

the exponent may decay over time, but it remains over unity for the time-being.

Interesting - how do you know the mining output is being bought by funds?  Which funds?

I agree that the growth will be exponential for a very long time.  I think it has to do with how information propagates through networks .. 5 people tell 5 people who tell 5 people and so on.

Edit: One more thing - I think the reason we haven't seen a bump today (man aren't we greedy?) is there hasn't been much Bitcoin-related news besides the sheep swindle ..

If true about funds buying half, the run up to summer/fall 2016 (halving) will be interesting to watch.

[niothor]

If 90% of the public down't know you can buy a fraction of a bitcoin I wouldn't be concern.
Currently , assuming the best scenario we have around 1 million users and that it just 1/6000 of the people on this planet.

Also , the switch to millie or minnie or donaldbits may also help.

[bitleif]

[...]
At some point shit is going to simply stop shooting up.  
I know you can buy bitcoins in divisible amounts.  But 90% of the public has no idea they can do this, and Im not even certain that someone buying 0.00004 BTC at $10,000 is going to push the price up at all.  

So my "Speculation" ?   That we're reaching a point at which human beings can no longer buy in to Bitcoin enough to keep pushing the price up so quickly.  

So what you're saying is, growth of Bitcoin will eventually be stopped by the limited amount of fiat people have available (or said differently, by the size of the economy.)

This is absolutely true in the long run and will happen eventually. But the way to look at it is in terms of market cap. The total market cap of BTC right now, if all coins were mined, is 21m * $1150 ~= $25 billion. That's actually a TINY amount in the context of world trade or a major currency. The global forex market alone has a daily turnover measured in TRILLIONS.

So if bitcoin ever makes it anywhere near "mainstream" usage, we still have some ways to go.

[GriTBitS]

well i dont care if people dont know if bitcoin is divisible they will one day probably after we switch to uBtc. Big pockets dont want the avg joe to know either. The price will go to a million but Joe wont start buying until 100k, then that will push the price to 1 Million if joe is buying at 1k he will be selling all the way to 10k and 100k because normal people dont wanna be rich and will do everything in there power to lose the money to get back to broke. So already they are broke thinking 1k is to much to buy a bitcoin. Not even spending 5 min knowing what bitcoin is divisible. This is a currency for semi intelligent people. If people wanna stay broke thats on them. Same reason people dont buy stock. They dont think they can make a million over night so they buy penny stock only to lose all there money. Same here, people will be buying all the Alts and it will be going up and down never knowing why they cant spend it cuz everyone is still focused on bitcoin going to Da moon. Think 10x a year not 100x a year. Most people that bought at 1200 already sold it at 800 during the dip. They buy things they dont even research.

[Miz4r]

Can someone please explain to me where the money would come from?  Even if India gets on board ... how the heck will their participation affect price?  
Its not like a bunch of people in India can start blowing money on $5,000 Bitcoins .

Can someone explain to me why people here think a rise from $1,000 to $10,000 could even happen at all, let alone quickly?

Let's assume there are a total of 2 million people in the entire world holding 6 BTC each on average (not a bad estimate I think). Now let's think about what would happen if 8 million more people got interested in bitcoin recently after reading about it in the papers, and they decide to invest $2000 each on average in bitcoin. Together that means $16 billion will flow into bitcoin, which as you can imagine will push up the price considerably. And 8 million people is still only a tiny fraction of the world population, so $10,000 and higher can be easily reached when more people get interested and start investing a small portion of their wealth.

[jballs]

I don't know anybody who has bought yet.

But after having made a transaction I know that what will happen, is everybody will want to use them to buy things online because it is way better than paypal and banks.

So the answer is 6 billion people will buy a digital currency at some point in time. To them the price will not matter at all.

*You are investing in a medium.*

[piramida]

When I saw bitcoin for the first time, it just finished climbing from 0.10 to $1 and I had exactly your thoughts, OP. I thought - fuck, now I won't buy it anymore and who would if it costs more than a dollar, so I can't buy 100 coins for 10 bucks any longer. So I didn't, then.

Now, in retrospective, dollar does not seem like such a bad entry point. So it's a matter of getting used to a certain level. For example, very few people can buy gold by pounds, because 1pound  costs around $15000, but alot of people buy gold in smaller quantities and don't see much problem holding 1/2oz coins. Same applies to bitcoin, so no, your logic is invalid. It's just an issue of getting used to 4 digits. When we hit 5, 4-digit coins would seem funnily cheap to you.

Yes, I bought some bitcoins at $1000. 10 times less than I did at $100, but it is exactly the same amount in USD.