Lately i've been going back throught the old satoshi posts and there are at least two i found really interesting.
First this one
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=845.msg11403#msg11403Bitcoins have no dividend or potential future dividend, therefore not like a stock.
More like a collectible or commodity.
And the other is this one
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=242.msg2078#msg2078What the OP described is called "cornering the market". When someone tries to buy all the world's supply of a scarce asset, the more they buy the higher the price goes. At some point, it gets too expensive for them to buy any more. It's great for the people who owned it beforehand because they get to sell it to the corner at crazy high prices. As the price keeps going up and up, some people keep holding out for yet higher prices and refuse to sell.
The Hunt brothers famously bankrupted themselves trying to corner the silver market in 1979:
"Brothers Nelson Bunker Hunt and Herbert Hunt attempted to corner the world silver markets in the late 1970s and early 1980s, at one stage holding the rights to more than half of the world's deliverable silver.[1] During Hunt's accumulation of the precious metal silver prices rose from $11 an ounce in September 1979 to nearly $50 an ounce in January 1980.[2] Silver prices ultimately collapsed to below $11 an ounce two months later,[2] much of the fall on a single day now known as Silver Thursday, due to changes made to exchange rules regarding the purchase of commodities on margin.[3]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornering_the_marketThe main difference i see between bitcoin and a regular commodity is that a regular commodity's price is aligned around production cost, whereas bitcoin is the other way around which is the production cost gravitate around the demand's price.
So thats the eternal question around bitcoin is what is supposed to be the "right" price for it ?
My reasoning is that instead of asking this question peraphs the good question is how to know if it is overpriced ?
And the answer would be another question, how do you inflate artificially a commodity market ? By people with too much monney hoarding it to expect the price to rise and making more profit out of it than just exchanging it as utility as a regular use.
With this reasoning people with lots of monney hoarding expecting to make a profit would end as the Hunt brothers.
People using it as its supposed to be as a commodity or currency would not loose too much as not having too much in stock at any point.
Then ok there are always external economic factor that lead to people being more in saving or spending moods, so there is always some amount that is going to be organically saved. But then saving like keeping monney under the matress is a different attitude than hoarding for profit like "investing" as if it is a stock or a productive asset with some level of risk.
Is this reasoning correct ?
After all bitcoin was designed as digital cash with the coins circulating from address to address which is also part of the security model as i understand it because it makes it even more pointless to search for hash collision on a public address as the coins are always moving and are not supposed to sit on an address for long period but move between single use address which also increase anonymity.
If this is correct it mean some kind of "silver thursday" at some point when hoarders make the price so high nobody really want to buy it anymore and it ends up loosing all value on the market.
Anyway bitcoin as a currency can function at any market price as long as it not null because it still needs to be mined so the price cant go to zero but it can function at 1$ if thats the global economic value as a commodity.