Quote from: mccorvic on March 21, 2013, 05:26:35 AM

Quote from: MoonShadow on March 21, 2013, 05:09:32 AM

Quote from: mccorvic on March 21, 2013, 04:54:27 AM

Quote from: arklan on March 21, 2013, 04:47:38 AM

Quote from: 100x on March 21, 2013, 01:27:12 AM

I owed $15 to this girl I am hooking up with, and she was excited to get 0.3 bitcoins instead! She said she was gonna use it to pay for her kids to go to college (mostly jokingly lol)

This must mean we are in a bubble Cheesy

ok, that's almost as bad as that investor who, in 1929, was getting his shoes shined and the fricken SHOE SHINE BOY was talking about stocks and such. guy went and pulled his investments immediately. crashed happened the next day or something. i forget who this was. one of the big names.

I don't think the analogy works with bitcoin. Our goal has been to push adoption in order to push main stream acceptance and usage. I find it strange that all of a sudden we are trying to act shocked, SHOCKED, that people we talk to about bitcoin continuously start to show interest in bitcoins.

People talking about bitcoin is not a sign of a bubble. People being interested in bitcoin is not a sign of a bubble. It's a sign that bitcoin is doing what it is supposed to be doing.

My problem with that theory is that much of the recent gains are due to a recent rash of good news. What happens when there is bad news? Granted, the good news is real news, but it's been decidedly pro-Bitcoin for weeks. We are due some bad news, like a major exchange hack. We are, IMHO, beyond a price point that is justifiable with the current size of the actual bitcoin economic activity alone. Hype leads to speculative bubbles. We all know this. What we don't know is how long we can ride it before sentiment turns sour. What happens to the European banking panic when the asinine deposit tax proposal in Cyprus goes down in flames? Or there is a compromise that doesn't spell the worst? The sudden influx of Euro denominated wealth cannot be maintained. Once the pool of risk adverse Europeans (an irony, I know) has all moved the greater part of their deposits into Bitcoin (or gold/silver/whatever) who is going to be left to support the bid wall? Can that bid wall be supported by Argentines and Iranians evading capital controls? I doubt it. That's what Bitcoin is good for, but it doesn't really matter so much what the exchange price actually is if Bitcoin is only being used as a workaround for a bottleneck in the fiat currency system.

I really can't imagine worse news happening than the fork, and we made it through just fine. I think that event was actually a fairly unsung hero in the recent rises past $50. It really boosted confidence in the system.

The rest of your post comes down to a pretty philosophical difference that we, ultimately, won't be able to answer

If the market was 100% speculation, then yea, we'd be in trouble no doubt. BUT the first step of getting people to use bitcoin is getting them to have a bitcoin. If 1,000 speculators buy 1,000 btc each to "make a profit" with there is a chance that a good number of them will actually come across a scenario where using BTC instead of other means is actually beneficial. This will push adoption rates up. Victory.

So even if your grandma buys a bitcoin with the initial purpose of flipping it, I would hope you'd explain to her all the other benefits of holding the coin at the same time. Maybe she'll come around.

If we get enough Argentines and Iranians to use BTC to get around capital controls or the fiat bottleneck, a lot of them will eventually see the benefit and just use BTC directly.

I am also of the opinion that our current price is way, way, way to low and is held low by speculators. Bitcoin is a powerful financial tool in a wide variety of ways and people will continue to realize it in ever growing numbers.

^ This. One week ago we had awful news -- how can people have such short memories? There's hardly been a "rash of good news". This is just the beginning of big players getting on board. The FinCEN regulations will accelerate that as virtual currencies move from the fringe. We're not in a bubble; we're at the foot of a mountain looking up.

Certainly, we will go down a little in order to go up again, but prepare for the long climb ahead -- don't waste your energy in the foothills.

The Cyprus haircut looks like it won't happen after all, but it has a magnifying effect of people looking for safe havens for their assets... across the whole of Europe. However I think the result from this is more speculative than real right now.