I humble opinion: I believe we are at the chasm. Bitcoin's major obstacle right now is avoiding obscurity. Anyone who would be in the early majority has already heard of Bitcoin but is not buying in because there is no gain for them at present, or they listen to others opinions on the subject who are giving misleading/false information, or many other reasons. I also believe that the potential, the enormous VC interest, and the growing list of vendors will push us up and over and at some point, the early majority will pull the trigger. The fact that Bitcoin is global cannot be ignored. Mass adoption has way too many places to come from.
Bitcoin owners are in the position of Segway owners. It works surprisingly well. It's useful. It's not going to go big.
segways are not that useful... the purpose of a segway is for the lazy person, yet the majority of lazy people are too fat and exceed the maximum weight to use one... thus segway has a very narrow niche..
bitcoins niche is ANYONE and EVERYONE, should they voluntarily choose to use it
the Segway comment made me pause, but franky1 is dead on. Look at the scooter market. Those things have nice little baskets to put your twinkies in.
we are definetly in the innovator | early adopter line. as more bitcoin infrastructure is being built. even the bitcoin protocol is still at 0.9 meaning its not even version 1 yet.
bitcoin is not the dying breed, cyberpinoy is the dying breed. he thinks demand is dying. the actual reality is that bitcoin is not dying, just the PHP exchanges are dying.
i personally trade away from exchanges and the demand is HUGE. the simple fact is that whales wont touch PHP exchanges due to lack of trust of third parties, and AMLKYC regulations limiting FIAT movements.
so these PHP based exchanges are no longer playing around with 50k coins a day, but rather 12k a day. whilst private trading has increased immensely.
i truly laugh at cyberpinoy because he is watching the outdated and dying exchanges that play 99% with satoshi dust amounts per trade, while the smart ones are seeing large volumes and better prices of $500, simply because people can get bitcoin from fiat alot easier privately instead of through the red tape of exchanges.
a prime example of what everyone should be doing is what happened in February 2014. once people realized they could not get FIAT out of MTGOX. yea it took them from December 2013 - February 2014 to realize it, but once they did the smart ones ignored mtgox's price and started to value bitcoins from other sources. even when mtgox sank to $100, no one gave a crap, as the other exchanges remained at 4x that value.
i cannot wait for the basement dweller coded exchanges to die off and the people to start to value bitcoin based on private trading rather then trying to peg the value of 13million+ coins based on movements of just a few thousand coins on an PHP exchange.
Could you please explain, what you mean by private trading? Do you mean e.g. LocalBitcoins?
localbitcoins
bitcoinOTC
private sites
other places that only whales (1000+btc) know, that wont be posted on public forums for noobs to invade
you will see that once public OTC's/ETF's are properly running, they will take over where basement dweller PHP exchanges left off.
Localbitcoins has its usual premium over the php exchanges, but I am not able to see any bids on bitcoinOTC or anywhere else for that matter that suggest that php exchanges are undervaluing BTC/USD. Could you be more clear as to where to go to get the true value? I think that would be extremely valuable information to this community, as the question has been asked a few times in this thread.
TLDR: where does a noob get the true value of BTC/USD? Buyers want to know.