Quote from: kjj on April 09, 2013, 08:06:15 PM

On the other hand, it is getting harder and harder to imagine bitcoin not taking off and becoming the main settlement system of the world. We are all over the damn newspapers, we are on TV, everyone is hearing about it now. I'm nobody, and yet I've been contacted by a couple of reporters.

The dot com bubble was indeed a crazy time. But it is easy to overlook that before it happened, no one knew what the internet was. After it was all over, no one didn't know what it was.

The dot com bubble happened during the birth of an entire new industry, and basically excess investment caused the companies in that space to build out capacity too quickly, before the demand was ready for it. Some of the fiber that was laid in the late 1990s didn't get used for a decade. In this way the current situation resembles the dot com bubble. The adoption of Bitcoin as a currency has not kept up with the increase in the exchange rate.

On the other hand, the current situation differs from the dot com bubble in that during the last 1990s other, non-Internet, forms of communication were not in the process of collapsing. Right now the financial system of every developed country in the world is a house of cards and it's anyone's guess which domino topples first.

The possibility exists the Bitcoin bubble will never pop because before that happens there won't be anything else left.

Either way, predicting extreme turbulence between now and when the question ultimately gets resolved is a no-brainer.