Some people rode gold all the way down from $1800. Is it that hard to admit that some boats can be missed? I don't think this is a stretch of imagination. Does anyone here think gold will reach all time highs again? For example
That ride is similar to what bitcoin did since september :-) grossly 1/3 of the exchange rate down, if you take the 1800 versus 1200 for gold now, and the 470 (September) to 350 (now) of bitcoin.
I don't think it is a blight on bitcoin or gold, more a result of money running into stocks and the USD rising.
The USD rising wouldn't mean so much. After all, that would have meant all other fiats falling at the same rate, which is not strongly the case. Since this summer, the USD won less than 10% as compared to EUR for instance and that's maybe more the EUR falling than the USD rising.
My idea is that after the "black tulips" of last year, the bubble has been deflating for more than a year and bitcoin is coming into another regime, more mature. I don't think huge rallies are still a possibility. Next time there would be a jump to $1000,- in a week's time, many people who bought this year will sell to cover their losses, and nobody is going to make the same mistakes as those who bought at $800,- and so - the price cannot stay there very long. That would result again in a similar crash as in the beginning of this year, but this time people are not going to sustain the slow decay, and will cut losses. Nobody (contrary to those buying at $1000, or at $800 last year) is going to believe in a sustained high price so that they will panic-buy to "get on the train" anymore. If it spikes to $1000,-, people will hold their buy orders, might give their sell orders, and will wait for the price to come down, which it then surely will ! No market manipulator can sustain a high price and cover all the losses of this year (when people sell) plus the 3600 coins a day mined, unless he's willing to spend a lot of money on that (tens or hunderds of millions of $ a week).
The reason is simply that the market fundamentals for bitcoin cannot sustain such a high price for the moment. The gold market share is not large enough yet, and merchant adoption is not wide enough for the moment. I even think that the current price can only be sustained because only a small fraction of the coins are liquid at this moment (most are held), and I would guess that most merchant adoption is still in the black market.
In other words, in my opinion, bitcoin came to a sort of "market maturity" and now the price will follow bitcoin's adoption (somewhat ahead, speculatively), so all long term price evolution will be rather slow. Up or down, depending on adoption. $10 000.- or $100 000,- are not out of reach, but not overnight, only when the fundamentals allow it.
$1.- is also a possibility. The assigned probabilities to those future prices makes up the current market price.