Quote from: devphp on March 06, 2014, 08:17:09 AM

Quote from: GambleX on March 01, 2014, 07:25:41 PM

Quote from: devphp on February 16, 2014, 07:32:24 PM

Quote from: Paashaas on February 16, 2014, 07:08:26 PM

$40k per coin is BS and the $40 per coin is also BS.

This.

Both numbers have less than 5% probability of happening.
Realistically, 2-3k is possible in 2014, 5k if very lucky.

The problem with bitcoin is, that it follows no standard normal distribution as of now. Many fat-tail events/outcomes make a lot of noise. So it is very difficult to pin probabilities to certain outcomes.

This is not a problem, but a natural course of events. Any asset in the free market tends to concentrate in the strong hands in the end, who are less likely to panic sell, which results in less volatility. That is why we see higher volatility percentage wise in the initial stages of an asset trading, and lower and lower volatility as the asset matures. That's exactly what is happening to bitcoin, and that's why it's getting easier to predict the future.

Of course, black swan events (sha256 broken?) cannot be predicted, but FUD is a normal thing in markets and strong hands don't tend to panic sell when they hear/read FUD, whereas weak hands do panic sell, that's why assets go to strong hands who understand and follow fundamentals of an asset, and no even distribution is ever possible. If you took all bitcoins in circulation and distributed them equally among all the population, after a year or two you would see about the same distribution as now, only less than 5% of traders or wanna-be-traders do not become net losers. So forget about even distribution, it never existed in the history of mankind for anything and never will.

Another great thing about bitcoin, making it easier to predict the future is that it cannot be sold naked short (yet?). Any commodity can be sold short because traders cannot easily take delivery. Bitcoin doesn't suffer from this issue, which makes it about the only true free market left in the world economy. True free market is very hard to manipulate, because you can only sell as many items of asset as you actually own, you cannot sell what you don't own. In any other commodity you can sell what you don't own, and if you have a lot of cash (blns), you can easily manipulate the market by trading on leverage. In bitcoin you'd first have to buy those bitcoins and possess them to be able to sell them. In other words, these actions are trackable through price charts and future price action can be predicted more or less. Enjoy the only true free market of crypto currencies on the planet while it lasts, it may not be forever.

Well said