Yeah that sounds close enough, keep in mind not this Dec 17, but December of 2017. It's probably just a date-format thing, but in the Western world, doing the last two digits right after the month makes it look like the 17th of December. If you do want to write it like you have, maybe "Dec '17" would be best, the apostrophe implies the "20" in front of it.


I've always kind of wished I could speak directly to the Chinese bitcoiners, but the language barrier is a problem and I have never liked to write without eloquence about important issues. I think most of the breakdown between the Core team and the Chinese and Eastern miners is communication-based, too. If the Chinese knew half of why Core was being so paranoid and slow, they might be more accepting of it. There's a piece I wanted to write up that covered a bit of Bitcoin's history in late 2011 and early 2012, going over the popular Russian mining pool called Deepbit and the BIP 16/17 debacle. I wanted to finish it and post it so that the Chinese miners could understand why 75% of the mining world accepting bigger blocks is actually not enough, but I kind of just gave up on it because I don't think I could ever get it translated right. Still, I think it's a piece of Bitcoin's history that is worth knowing, and there aren't a lot of people that remember what took place from that time.

The thing is, Western philosophy and legal interpretation is bogging down innovation quite horribly right now. The US, at least, has a judicial system that is too afraid of the executive on the federal and state levels. We have developers willing to make peer-to-peer apps like AirBnB (rent out your house for X days) and Uber (provide a taxi-like service better than actual taxis), but we still have governments unwilling to change regulations or loosen legal restrictions. These startups and small developers don't have the money to fight the legal battles. Meanwhile, the courts were always the last bastion for liberty, but right now even they are failing when even our own government is spying on us. It's too expensive to fight important battles to restore our freedoms in court, too. The people here fear their government. That might change someday, but right now it's about as bad as it can get. Bitcoin can't do much better here.

In the Eastern world, however, it is the government that fears the people right now. People tell the government that restrictions are too burdensome and the government actually listens to them, even if reluctantly. The Chinese vice-president (now president) fought so much against corruption, too. I remembered looking into it while he was still vice-president and came to the small US state I live in. I was interested in why he came here because I had worked on technical matters and ran a website for an English teaching department at a public university here. I was always astounded at the large number of students interested in learning English and in some cases agriculture and farming. I eventually found that the reason he came was to promote agricultural ties and found another article later on that said that the reason he was going around purging corruption in the Chinese government was because they had to. So many people were well-informed on the "Princelings" and nepotism that these officials had to win back the people's trust. I thought that was kind of an amazing thing.

Here in the US, people ignore stories of rich and powerful people buying silence from officials, because they are so beholden to the TV news and journalist organisations that are bought by those same people. That said, I'm aware that there is still so much more that needs to be done in China in cleaning up corruption obviously. Judicial concerns plague China just as they have in the US. But for some reason China at least looks like it might be improving while the US intelligence community continues to use glittering generalities about why it's OK to spy on us and even lie to our elected politicians about the spying. But it's the government's healthy fear of its own country's people that gives me hope that something like Bitcoin could spread even faster than it has in the Western world, and yes, perhaps to a higher market capitalisation as well.

I realize my answers might be kind of long-winded, and I'm sure this one is no exception, but a wider-scale Chinese adoption of Bitcoin is, of course, a passion of mine and should be for every Bitcoiner, IMHO.


Yeah, it looks promising. Britain has always had a more traditional "hands-off" approach to financial independence and currencies, so if they extend fiat into Bitcoin and operate on top of the Bitcoin blockchain, it could be pretty huge. Especially if it came with a loosening of restrictive policies on exchange into the coin itself or if it provided a "like coin" that came without a tax obligation. Hell, it would maybe even be enough to convince me to move there someday and set up a hedge fund or something.


I'm not sure I know who he is, sorry. I mean, I try not to put too much stake into rumors of things like this. LinkedIn investors might get money, but they might have already bought Bitcoin knowing they are going to get fiat, for example, so it's hard to say it'll be going straight into cryptocurrencies.


No problem. Thanks for letting me post here and thanks for the original cycle thread and idea. I'm glad there's others out there doing cycle analysis as well.


Yes, though it looks like today the price is taking a hit. I often wonder if, because I'm a Donator, putting my estimates out there can trigger buys or sells just because the name and title can sometimes convince people and they try to time buys/sells based on others taking my advice as gospel. For what it is worth, I haven't bought or sold any Bitcoin since $240, when I last purchased a non-trivial amount. I might sell if it goes to $10k next year, of course, but it'll be a couple coin so I can semi-retire and maybe take a vacation. I'd hope that if it goes to $10k then maybe more companies will come out and I can finally buy groceries and/or pay my mortgage in Bitcoin.

I think slower and longer timeframes are probably going to be the only way to justify the patterns, maybe. I might have been wrong about us getting to $900 in July/August, before falling again, but that's still my second model's prediction and I think it is the more accurate one. Slower and longer time frames could also result in higher magnitudes as the overall volume reaches what we would expect to be the GDP of a larger European country over the next five years or so. If we go crazy and hit $500 billion market cap or $1 trillion like Fakhoury pointed out, then maybe I should have been analyzing the price from the bull-side. I think 1/22 of China's market cap as a whole is a big target to strive for, though. I hope we hit it, but it's a big target.