Quote from: zkay on April 03, 2013, 02:32:57 AM

Things are kind of reaching a fever pitch here. Anyone else scared? Even a bit?

Yes, a bit. The forum is showing that giddy kind of euphoria with lots of swagger and bravado and posts about huge anticipated prices that once often sees at the top in a market.

However. Keep in mind this is just the forum. Which is the tiniest sliver of the world. Sentiment indicators tell you it's a top when the sentiment is at a max. But the vast majority of potential bitcoin buyers probably don't know it exists yet. So I wouldn't take the sentiment you see here as any kind of broad indicator. Just read the comments in the latest Zero Hedge article that might mention bitcoin. They are almost uniformly hostile towards it, and so complacent in their ignorance. And those are relatively well-informed people who should know better.

Here are a couple things I think give some perspective:

The Fed's open market operations are buying up ~$80B every month. New money into the monetary base. At the current price bitcoin's total value (valued at $100/coin) is about $1B (order of magnitude). So the fed is "spending" 80x bitcoin's market cap every single month. That's a lot of dollars looking for somewhere to go.

If the bitcoin were regarded as an equal asset class as gold, such that the value of all bitcoins had the same dollar value as all gold in existence, bitcoins would be worth ~ $1 million/coin. (based on ~$10 trillion being the value of all gold in existence, and the current ~10 million bitcoins).