Quote from: thezerg on February 03, 2015, 05:09:11 PM

200 is the new 2 (and all you bears should keep in mind that that's 100x return in 3 years)

^ This.

Quote from: rocks on February 03, 2015, 05:21:30 PM

I just continue to be floored by the growth in the ecosystem. Two years ago our only options to acquire bitcoin were home mining or sending money to a flacky website in Japan through Dwolla which limited transfer sizes. Today there are plenty of professional options integrated directly with my bank accounts. It feels like a night and day difference. And this growth in infrastructure continues to accelerate, IMHO faster than any startup ecosystem I've seen before.

^ And this.

Quote from: silverfuture on February 03, 2015, 08:55:41 PM

...Relative newcomer bitcoiners, both trollish and non trollish, often can't see the amazing growth of the network and infrastructure in only 6 years because they weren't there see how rickety it was only a few years ago during initial bootstrapping...

^ And this.

Elaborating on these, from when I discovered bitcoin in 2011, I thought it'd take >10 years to get to where we are today. There was basically nothing in terms of ecosystem or buy-in from any notable "mainstream" people, and we were experiencing a 94% crash from a blow-off peak. It certainly seemed like it would take forever to bootstrap the ecosystem, if it was to happen at all. Furthermore, bitcoin hadn't *really* been battle tested at that point. The risk was huge for a number of reasons.

The risk is still large, of course, but there's little comparison. We've experienced *too-rapid* growth in awareness and hype, and now we settle in to the longer task of building polished tools, educating people, and integrating bitcoin into broader systems and workflows. It's going to take time, but we're over what was a pretty high-looking hurdle from 2011's point of view.