Quote from: Shinobi on July 05, 2011, 05:59:22 PM

I and several others predicted that this was going to happen:

The SRAs (i.e. the folks who found out about and bought into Bitcoin in June as a result of the Silk Road Articles) are getting bored with Bitcoin.
The SRAs would have cashed out a few weeks ago if it wasn't for the MGH (the Mount Gox hack) which had them licking their chops at the thought of a possible "reset" of the market which would allow them to buy in at pre-June prices.
As that didn't happen, the SRAs' boredom and inability to make profits on large margins because of the relatively stable $17 price since the MGH is now finally resulting in a slow but steady cash out.
The price is now dropping to the point where even the faithful are losing their nerve and cashing out.
Bitcoin will continue to drop, with possible plateaus at $10 and then steadily drop from there to around $3 or $4, if not lower.
Throughout the drop media articles will detail the drop of Bitcoin, while Bitcoin zealots like TraderTimm, Evorhees, and Atlas will continue to post about the "great opportunity to buy" as they watch their anti-establishment dream disappear along with their significant investments.

Thoughts?

There's always a zillion factors going on. Right now there's more sellers then buyers. A lot of miners are selling coins as fast as they get them to help recover their hardware investments. Some are getting out of mining. The last difficulty adjustment pushed a lot of people out of the mining business. Not because it's no longer profitable, but because people don't like seeing their income drop 40% overnight so they're getting out while they can still sell the hardware at great prices. But people will always mine. I know people who 10+ folding rigs and not only run them for free, they lose money on the electricity costs. Even if Bitcoins were $3 people would still runt their mining rigs. Difficulty adjusts, people adapt, Bitcoin keeps going.

The majority of people who buy and spend Bitcoins are for drugs. No one is going through the trouble of loading up money on some iffy exchange, buy bitcoins then go buy something they could have purchased with a debit/creditcard. The only reason you'd use Bitcoins instead of debit/credit is because it's harder to track (legal stuff like a bong you might want to hide) or it's illegal. Thankfully for Bitcoin the illicit drug market is huge. Global video game market is around 50 billion. Illicit drugs is easily over 500 billion.

The fact is very few people are buying AND using Bitcoins beyond illicit drugs. If I want to buy a used video card there's no way I'm going to send money to MtGox, buy bitcoins, then go pay for my video card. Almost everyone who accepts Bitcoins also accepts standard forums of payment. If they don't they're living in god knows where (i.e. not usa) and I'm not buying from them anyway.

So the bad news is there's lots of people trying to use Bitcoin to make quick money, using it as an investment, which relies on OTHER people to want/spend Bitcoins.

The good news is the amount of people who do buy and spend Bitcoins should slowly keep going up, those people aren't going away, so there's a lot of strength/security on the bottom. Bitcoins will more and more become an easier/better way to buy drugs (not as much locally, but it's huge internationally where your dealer might live 4000 miles away). Long term Bitcoin has a lot of strenght/upside but people trying to use it as an investment or get rich quick are going to be sorely disappointed.

So people are always going to mine, people are always going to need Bitcoins for drugs, that's not changing. The problem right now is a lot of people were trying to make quick money off Bitcons and there simply isn't enough buyers to support it. The situation long term looks very strong to me but short term it's going to be a lot of growing pains.