Increased knowledge of what it is and understanding how it can be used, negative possibilities becoming less likely, and middling situations becoming more powerful. The recent rise was due to what seemed like positive reactions from gov't officials here, along with China, and drop due to China backing off. The vast majority of value is speculation, but there is also significant investment in areas where it will provide huge value. Add in that there are too many countries with awful currencies that have technologically connected populations that this has to retain a decent amount of value barring some huge flaws.

Trying to see if I am overlooking the downside. I can see longer term sputtering out, I can see replacement by something superior. I can see value damaged by governmental problems, but the global game makes it hard for all the dominoes to fall at once there. I can see some huge flaw just damaging it where it cannot recover (backdoor NSA type thing) as well.

I'm far more bullish outside the US than inside it, although a lot going on here in the US too.

The analogy to online poker is bad. Online poker inherently requires points of centralization; Bitcoin doesn't. (Think of how easy it would be for the govt to ~100% eliminate the online poker market. They just seize Merge and Revolution and I guess a couple others, and do it again every once in a while. Simple. OTOH eliminating ~100% of Bitcoin activity.. totally different.)

And plus online poker is a niche thing that most people don't play, and it's just a game. There's only so much resistance against banning it. If Bitcoin is actually superior to other methods (even if slightly), then it adds up to an enormous amount of wealth/wellbeing that's at stake, and so the govt is against that kind of resistance.

It amazes me the way people think the govt banning things drives long-term progress, as if what's actually best and the will of what people want are just irrelevant. I wonder if in 5-10 years or whatever when the govt either never tried to ban Bitcoin or it didn't work if these people will re-think where the wagon and the horse are. The government just adapts imo. They're not so unsophisticated as to ban new technologies that may be subversive to them in some ways. To the extent it's bound to happen, they get involved and have a hand in it and use it themselves. They'd run out of gas and everyone would ignore them if they tried to ban everything.

As the second poster in the main thread taking a lol @ 0.70 bitcoins many will wish to ignore anything I have to say. I did however acquire some coins after that post and have been posting on bitcointalk ever since so I am a bitcoin believer so far.

Right now for me I am concerned by the miner situation where individuals are being priced out of mining and only those with incredible capital will be able to afford them. There was talk of future miner hardware drawing in excess of 2500W which most people's homes cannot supply. This all leading to further centralization of the mining process which is antithetical to a decentralized currency.

As the price is almost 100% speculative, the downside is very real. I am unsure of how much more speculative upside is possible. The exchanges are infantile. Can they support 5k bitcoins? 10k? Could they deal with $20m wires? I guess if that came to fruition Wall-Street would get their slimy hands into the mix and develop and exchange that could.

The issue with China isn't great because it cuts off a closed loop between retailers like overstock (amazon? newegg?) who cannot just pay their Chinese suppliers in bitcoin, but would have to use a payment processor like bitpay. A closed loop is preferred because it would remove fiat from the process (proving bitcoin's utility) and reducing frictional costs to the bare minimum (no conversion fees).

Part of me feels like this is the top to a very long and equity destroying downside, the other, another repeat of last year. Blockchain contracts, colored coins, there is a ton more that bitcoin can do and no one has really gone there yet.

What makes bitcoin unique as a cryptocurrency? Why coins be worth 5k each when an alternative currency is so easy to set up? I don't think crypto currencies are going away any time soon, but I don't see any reason why bitcoin will reach any of the skyhigh values mentioned in this thread.

You laugh at "many countries with awful currencies" and then you propose a currency that is $200 one day, $150 a week later, and $1000 a few months later. Do you realize how ridiculous that sounds? Not even Zimbabwe's abysmally bad old currency was this bad... well... maybe that was the only currency on earth this bad. Regardless, do you think that Zimbabweans are going to flee to a currency that makes them paper rich one day, poor a week later, super rich a few months later? No. It's a joke. If people flee, they flee to super stable currencies like the dollar and Euro and pound - all of which are available in every country of the world. And this is exactly what Zimbabwe eventually did. They just went from using dollars unofficially to using dollars officially.

I will say that after Bitcoin pulled back from 200ish, I thought it was never going to see 200 again. And prior to that, I was on the fence trying to mine it when it was 40-60ish but it seemed like mining wasn't going to be profitable for much longer.

But Jan 2014 is a different. I'm willing to speculate, but at $1000/coin, I just don't want to risk it. 100%-300% upside doesn't seem high enough to justify the downside risk, IMO. For me, this ship has sailed. I am more interested in upcoming highly speculative investments.

15% zero = NSA or technical fault could shut it down
25% about $500 = new coins like worldcoin or dogecoin start to hurt marketcap, also bitpay gets shut down
50% about $2000 = slow growth as world adjusts
5% about $10,000 = new rally with few coins.
==============
$1625 with a lot of r squared

I am very surprised at the number of people predicting $0 or <$5. It's one thing to be bearish and think it's overpriced but thinking it's going to zero is something else altogether. The only way it goes to zero is if there's a serious technical flaw and I think the risk of that happening decreases every day. Bitcoins have been around for four years now and survived many crashes. There are enough hardcore anarchist bitcoin fanatics alone that will prop it up above $50/coin.

I predict $2k by June and $5k by year end. Wall Street will get involved at some point and more major online retailers will begin accepting it as payment.

Network effect. You cannot clone the Bitcoin network, even if you can clone the software.

http://themisescircle.org/blog/2013/...with-altcoins/

There is something awful about owning something that goes up in value? Oh noes, I be having more purchasing power.

People are fleeing stable currencies FOR bitcoin simply due to its instability and upward movement. That's helped drive adoption more than anything.

LOL @ 100-300% upside potential. 10 years out, we will see $100K coins or <$10 coins.

The governments of the first-world nations will shut it down if it ever becomes close to being actually useful in the exchange of goods and services and not just a speculation vehicle. It won't be able to survive long-term if it isn't actually useful in transactions.

It's just too much of a threat to the world financial system for the governments of the world to let it exist as anything other than a novelty currency.

This seems to be a bit of an overstatement.

I didn't say a lot of people are, but the vast majority of people who are getting into Bitcoins are people who are turning fiat into bitcoins because they think it will go up in value compared to fiat.

All governments need to do is make it less useful to use. Which is incredibly easy in a lot of countries, because it's not terribly useful in many countries (US included). It does not take much resistance to take away that edge, and then a lot of demand dries up. There are a lot of places where it's significantly better, though, so it likely will still survive there.

I was pleasantly surprised by the US approach where it seems to be that adaption is the key. Either they don't view the threat seriously, or are actually smart enough to realize it's better to be the center of this than on the outside looking in.

People don't want currency to be speculative. They want it to be stable as a rock so that their life and well being doesn't depend on the whims of the speculation that week. Rich one week, poor the next, or vice versa.

You make it sound as if it's a free lunch, and it only goes up.

It's value volatility isn't an inherent quality to Bitcoin itself, it's a predictable attribute of a currency in it's infancy. Once governments have stopped tanking and create policy (positive or negative, it doesn't matter), as Bitcoin becomes more widespread and more understood the volatility will reduce.

Just to point out, fiat currency is also volatile. Take a look at GBP/USD over 10 years:
http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?fr...o=USD&view=10Y

High: 2.19
Low: 1.29

And the high low range was established in ~18 month period. Take a look at other currencies as well, huge swongs are commonplace. And these are currencies with exponentially higher total dollar values.

If you demand currency should be "stable as a rock" it would be useful to quantify what you mean/expect.

Tell that to the people who are getting in. They seem to want it just fine.

Of course it's not for everyone. Yet they also get involved in speculative property investment that might not always go up. At least then, the government will just inflate values to help them out.

Sure it's volatile, but it's +EV, especially compared to crap currencies that are guaranteed to lose value. Losing 20% to Bitcoin is perfectly acceptable if it might go up and you are going to lose 20% with Aregentian Pesos.

So if one of the major flaws with BTC is that it's wildly unstable, which is not a preferred characteristic of currency, how does any alt crypto deal with that issue?

I've read about one that is attempting to implement a dynamic supply-demand model witht the intent of price stabalization. Haven't read whitepaper specifics but what do you think about this conceptually?

Why to people repeatedly keep suggesting that volatility/instability is an inherent property of Bitcoin? It's not, and it should grow out of it. Nothing needs 'fixing'. It's got a low total dollar value which makes it sensitive.

That's all?

As a user, why would you care if it's $5K per coin vs. $1K per coin? It's like saying Korean Won are better because you get 1000 of them for the cost of $1. It doesn't matter. However, you have a very powerful network that is very secure in Bitcoin, vs. one that can be overtook by a small botnet for alts. You have something that is accepted at tens of thousands of retailers, vs. one that is maybe accepted at 10. The software can be copied, but all those things simply cannot. And users get no benefits out of using a junkcoin compared to Bitcoin.

Probably because BTC has been extremely unstable/volatile since it's conception. Is that a result of a market cap that's too small or the number of speculators? How long will those issues take to work themselves out?

My prediction: Bitcoin is a crazy ass speculative bubble and I will get blasted in this thread for saying that. Just like how I posted that silver was a bubble and got blasted in that thread.

Go ahead, blast away, I'm not going to respond. In 5 years we'll bump this thread (quote me) and one of us will be able to say, "told you so."

No reason at all to think that it's not a bubble. It may very well be. You shouldn't get blasted for having that opinion. But you probably will lol.

The street cred for having said "it will rise" or "it will fall" is pretty much none. Make some high entropy guess or stfu imo. And put your money where your mouth it, having made money on your predictions is much more street cred.

Just make it quantifiable. If it drops to $250, does that make you right?