I think it's definitely a distinct possibility, banks are some of the most powerful lobbyists in the world and they can probably start putting on a lot of pressure on governments whenever they want.

This

Which is why the Bitcoin community needs to strike first and push their local governments to regulate Bitcoin before the banks are able to strike!

It's hard to know what the best game plan from the banks point of view is. Try to stamp it out early on when it's small? Or maybe they beleive it will fail and they don't need to intervene until it reaches a larger valuation. I don't think anyone without inside info can know this.

Perhaps betting on BTC now is merely a bet that banks aren't going to act until it reaches a larger valuation. I do think governments dissaproving of Bitcoin (in one or more of the many possible gradients of dissaprovement) would introduce a lot more volatility into Bitcoin and encourage other governments to follow suit.

i think its too soon since the last bubble/crash, thats still fresh in everyones mind. so i can't see the same huge mania run up/panic crash just yet. the last parabolic spike before april 2013 was 2011. it just 'feels' like its too soon for another. i'm happy to be wrong tho

that said, we could break the $266 all time high just based on increased exposure alone

Judging by this thread and a few other indicators on 2p2 I wouldn't say it's too soon for anything....

indicators on 2p2 have an affect on the bitcoin market price? please do tell us more.

Governments don't have to shutdown bitcoin to make it drop like a rock in value. A lot of the value right now is speculation. That speculation loses a lot of value if it is not easy to transfer money in and out of exchanges. You think bitpay or coinbase works without bank support of exchanges? If the US government wanted to they could make it difficult to use most of the exchanges. If a decentralized exchange popped up that could go a long way to easing this concern.

I wouldn't call that support. But it certainly is tolerant of it.

Incorrect thinking when determining value. It goes to being a niche item rather than something of large adoption and institutional investment. I know a lot of hardcore Bitcoiners want it to be the currency of the blackmarket and somehow not be subject to regulation and all, but this isn't reality.

Government regulation affecting any legitimate business from being able to use Bitcoins without substantial costs greatly affects its usefulness. This greatly affects price. I wish it weren't true, but reality sucks sometimes.

Value certainly can be affected. Sure, people play online poker in spite of the ban. How many fish are playing today vs. before the ban? How many people play today vs. before the ban? To say it has had no effect because it isn't 100% perfect is faulty thinking.

It would be much easier and more effective to just do a 51% attack. Wouldn't even cost that much. I still don't get how the hell they design something like BTC and leave such a hugely obvious flaw. Many people have the means to do this. Basically any gov or credit card company. They all have the motive to do it too. This is why the long term viability of BTC just doesn't seem very good as there's pretty much a 100% chance it will get attacked when it gets bigger.

I'd also just like to add how this 51% thing just kind of gets swept to the side. Nobody wants to admit this flaw is the end-all of BTC, so they just shrug it off and look the other way. I want BTC to work so badly that even myself has swept it aside somewhat.

Yeah, the government has crushed US online poker. I was just reading today that France and Italy, whose combined populations are less than half that of the US, are now each individually larger than the total US-facing online poker industry.

One thing I worry about is huge fees or taxes on bitcoin profits and/or usage.

Tell me a better solution to this if it's such an obvious flaw. Such an obvious flaw is the best solution anyone has ever come up with for such a problem.

As it gets bigger, the harder it is to attack the network. It's probably out of scope for a credit card company to attack, and governments might be able to for now, but that could very well be out of their scope to attack compared to the benefits of attacking.

Real-time ticker of the cost of a 51% attack

It is not just that there is no better solution, bitcoin has the ONLY KNOWN SOLUTION to the Byzantine Generals problem that does not require trust. Here is an elegant explanation:
http://www.quora.com/Bitcoin/Is-the-...in-a-good-idea

That number is so far far off it's not even funny. You don't think if you produced $50 million of your own asics you'd have 51%? I'd bet the number is closer to $20 million.

If it's the only solution then it just won't work.

Do you have any reason to pick these numbers? If it cost $20M to get the ASICs and get and KEEP 50% of the network, you would be looking at 3600 bitcoins per day (at least). 29 day return on investment! You should be raising VC capital right now to do this. Rather than attack the network, just mine at 50% and make $40M before the end of the year profits!

Well last bubble the run up took about 20 days followed by a week of crashing and then about a month to stabilize again. It went up 3-4 times during the upswing and crashed to about a 1/4 of the peak.

I baselessly speculate that we see a runup to ~$400-$500 in the next two weeks followed by a crash back to $150 before stabilizing at ~$200 in December.

Long term valuation of bitcoin I'm still interested in hearing people's thoughts on how to compute it. I looked up the market cap of paypal and it's something like $30-$40 billion with 137 million active users. Number of active users of bitcoin is pretty hard to estimate from what I can tell.

The current market cap of bitcoin is over $2 billion. I don't think it's unreasonable to foresee it be worth at least 1/3 of paypal in the coming years (~$10 billion) which would be a price of ~$800. Anyone know the market cap of some small country's currency?

Cointerra is SELLING 2 th miners for $6k... so 3k/th. Keep in mind this is what they are selling them for and we can only imagine they are making a pretty penny on them. So if someone wanted to supply you as a retail investor, it would take $10.5 mil to double the network today. The current hash rate is 3500 th's x $3000 = $10.5 mil. A far far cry from $650 mil.

Now take into account what these guys can actually produce them for and you may be looking at less then $5 mil if you could bring them up today. Trust me, if I had the slightest clue on how to get some sort of chip producing business going I would have long ago.

That ticker was so horribly wrong when ASIC's were released that I don't trust it now either. Any of the ASIC companies was capable of a 51% attack before they started shipping.

anyone want to buy some btc for stars holla at me betudontbet skype.

definitely possible. However if the chinese people entering the bitcoin markets are entering for the first time, then they may not be too aware of even very recent history with BTC, and the psychology could still be similar, although maybe less pronounced

How much electricity does that take to run? And they aren't even available now, and the hash rate will likely be huge by then. And remember, you have to keep making more to keep up with the network, and keep operating them.

If you had a clue about anything, you would have stopped posting by now, though.

Quit arguing about government 51% attack. We all know a government could 51% the network for some number of millions if they really wanted to, and it's unknown if a workaround could be invented to save bitcoin. The idea that some agency is going to authorize such a large expense to launch a dubious attack on something that cannot even be proven to threaten national currencies seems rather unlikely. If the bitcoin price stayed at $130, the network hash power would be 10x higher by the end of next year and stabilize around breakeven electric rates. When bitcoin value hits $1000, the hash rate will likely be too high for even the US government to consider a 51% attack with the cost in the billions of dollars, and it will only keep going up.

Why do we even have the 51% discussion every time bitcoin is moving upwards. Governments have plenty of other ways to limit bitcoin if they want to so they won't bother with an attack. Individuals or companies would be better of just mining at 50% and selling bitcoins if they found a significantly faster way to mine and managed to keep the method secret.

The biggest thread to bitcoin right now is caused by the size of the blockchain. People are starting to use light wallets that trust specific servers to hold the blockchain for them. There are a lot more ways to mess with that and news about a successful attack on one of those wallets would definitely hurt bitcoin.

SPV clients dont need to fully trust a server nor download the whole chain.

There are also proposals for allowing you to trim the blockchain as well.