Quote from: jinni on April 12, 2013, 06:53:21 PM

But I don't see it as very realistic to have multiple hundred-million-dollar-investments.

This is where the evaluation of each bitcoin has a very big impact on what to expect.

Before our little bubble popped we were heading into this territory with speed. If the coin would stabilize at 1k usd we got plenty of motive for huge infrastructure projects. But now as the price is down a chunk it does not really make sense unless you primarily make the investment as a charitable deed or with great faith that you will change the market fundamentals with your project (typically something big VC's never want to try).

A wonky side effect from this is that it becomes good business strategy for mtgox to destabilize the whole bitcoin system. Statistically it should be impossible for them to make the transition from small scale to big scale. They can maybe get to a point which is a factor 10 better than the current one but small chance they can do the factor 1000 needed for bitcoin to take market share from VISA, PayPal and the rest. As long as bitcoin is small potatoes mtgox is safe with a natural monopoly. They should be interested in protecting their market share, even at the cost of reducing the future potential of bitcoin on the whole. If they allow the price to climb above 1k usd they invite their own doom, why take that risk when you can keep on picking up safe profits from a small niche bussiness?

The technology outside the exchanges is also important, but in practice I can not imagine a path where the adoption of bitcoin increases without its price also increasing. From my noobish point of view on bitcoin I can only really detect the exchanges as the expensive development project. Eventually once adoption grows there will be further incentives for auxilary services but these should be much cheaper projects...