Quote from: oOoOo on October 20, 2011, 12:53:05 AM

With a drop like that (+93%), the reputation of bitcoin is probably already damaged to the point where it will never return to previous highs, or even close. Thereby rendering any effort to "load up" and sell later for profit a futile endeavour.

Inflow of money from currency investors proved to be useless for the development of a new currency, that's for sure. At this point I believe that its "bad reputation" as an investment tool would be a good thing. "Never" is a bit of an exaggeration, I'm expecting Bitcoin to be pretty alive 5 years from now, and will probably reach new highs until then.

There are two obvious practical questions about Bitcoin, one is clone inflation, the other is security. Latter seems to have proved itself until now and I would trust the system with all my money without second thought. The former (alt-chain question) also seems to be settling. It's either that the alternate has a different purpose altogether (Namecoin) and survives, or it proves that some improvements can be made and passes that to Bitcoin (e.g. scrypt can be imported to Bitcoin as an alternate hashing algo), though it's not a tradition yet.

I tend to draw parallels between BTC and I2P. They will always be around as a safety guard against totalitarian control no matter what. Maybe you won't be using them?