As for the new ATH discussion, here is my old observation from the early days of this thread, that should still be valid.
hacknoid, thanks for an interesting topic.
I am not a big fan of cycles in TA, but there is one thing that actually is very interesting in your chart. If you look at the ratio between the max and min price in each cycle, you will observe very interesting story, namely, for the first cycle (market introduction) we made more than 1000-fold increase ($0.01 to $30) in price, for the second cycle (initial adoption) we made about 100-fold increase ($10 to $1200). That leads me to a very interesting conclusion, which actually matches my expectations, in the third cycle (I would call it broad adoption) the price will go up ten(teens)-fold maximum. That would mean $2-3k as the realistic price target for the next 900 days.
I like what uki is saying here, because powers and magnitude could be trended as well, but then for trying to find a cycle where do you start and stop? Do you say it went from $12 to $120 pretty quickly or it went from $120 to $1200 pretty quickly, or do you take the whole thing and say it went from $12 to $1200 over the course of a year? I mean, before that we had a $0.10 to $30.00 increase in under a year before that, so maybe it's only a 3000x increase to 1000x increase to now *only* a 300x increase? And if so, when does the "bubble within a year" start?
Sorry if I'm asking more questions, but it's stuff like this that we should have answers to if we're going to be speculating. I think a 300x increase in a year's time is just as likely as a 10x increase from $150 to $1500 over three years just prior to that. :/ Of course, then that puts a yearly increase from a basis of $1500 to over $300k, which seems silly right now.
I think that's why I tried to do a bear-side evaluation of the price on a longer timeframe and took into account the entire history over the longest time frame possible. I'd rather be conservative in my estimates than really go pie-in-the-sky and be wrong, but I have to accept that it is possible growth continue exponentially till all 6 billion people are affected in some way daily by cryptocurrencies.
Of course it seems to the average poster that it would be equally-silly right now to be talking about prices like $10k and $60k within four years as "conservative" when the price is still well under $1k, but I've never cared much about what people think.
I venture to guess that hacknoid feels the same about his model which could end up being accurate or more-accurate as well, but maybe just off-set by a couple of months and followed up by a "super-cycle" as others have mentioned. I didn't mean to hijack this thread, either, just thought it was similar enough to mine that it seemed worthwhile to discuss here. Plus, I suspect the people in this thread are interested in timing and cycles, so it might be beneficial to talk about a LOT of them as we spot them.
1. I still see as you said, the destination to $60K after 4 years, will start depending on your newest and best model, which speculate the price to be $10K at Dec. 2017, even if you didn't mean it, but I guess you stated it, or did I miss something here ?
Yeah, I still think we'll eventually reach $60k sometime by 2021, regardless of model. There's just so many people in the world that may eventually jump into Bitcoin that what we call "Bitcoin" in 5 years might not even be Bitcoin anymore because the average person won't own one and we might have more technical names for smaller units. The word bitcoin might end up being demoted down to just a lower-case btc and we'll be talking about "mbtc" which we shorten even further to just "mills" even. We'll probably still use the BTC or
BTC symbol in some respects, but global finance as a whole might all be nation-state side-chains and we're exchanging in units that are measured in agreed-upon BTC increments. If you look at what side-chains and the lightning network is, it's basically a way to be your own bank. It could be that normal Bitcoiners suddenly start becoming independent bankers who issue and secure their own on-chain representations of BTC. Some countries may have laws about individuals issuing their own physical coins, but very few (if any?) countries have laws on the books about issuing virtual/crypto currencies. Prior to the 1910s,
bank notes were commonly used as currency in the US that were actively and regularly traded. And this is while the greenback was still in use, too!
The creation of the Federal Reserve only ended up making a single note what they called "legal tender". Some people that want to outright end the Fed. In some respects, I've been this kind of person over the years, but what I'd really like to see is just an end to the legal tender laws and a return to allowing gold, silver, and other bank notes being viable solutions for resolving debt obligations. This is less controversial than ending the Fed, and probably an achievable solution in our lifetimes for US citizens.
2. I had a conspiracy theory in mind and I would like to hear from you about it, aren't Governments and Banksters afraid of Bitcoin where for example assassination of core developers could happen for example ?
Oh dear. I try not to speculate on conspiracy theories despite the fact that I sometimes tangent a conversation into talking about the petrodollar or what-not. Even though my talking points might be similar to those that conspiracy theorists talk about, I don't speculate on lizard-men or the Illuminati, nor do I think the government itself is bound to some sort of evil cartel or jewish conspirators or anything. It's pretty easy to see which politicians are "bought" by which special interests using public data, but I don't think that just because AIPAC "owns" Lindsay Graham that it means they get to dictate some grand conspiracy of a New World Order or anything. It's very likely that AIPAC itself, for example, is made up with lots of people that have a wide range of opinions on the purpose of money as well!
I do suspect that core developers could and are being influenced, but I try to evaluate what they are saying without regards to who "owns" them. I know some people are concerned about Blockstream. And Blockstream for example could be argued to be "owned" by PwC. So maybe PwC wants Bitcoin to be more "auditor-friendly". But then I start to think about what it was Satoshi was building and what we all signed into when we were getting involved in 2010-2011, and the blockchain is probably best built in this manner, open and independent, with a lot of "banks" existing on top of it with it as a huge settlement network. Naturally PwC wants to have staff that learn how to work with something like that and if it only costs them a few hundred grand per year to have near instant-access for their staff to the people that are actually coding the new order of global finance, is that really all that absurd?
If PwC wants to pay the salaries of core developers to build what we were already expecting them to make anyway, then it doesn't seem right to complain about it. Yet, anyway! There still may be reason to despair about some things. For example, I worry about how the core developers are more Western-based and seemingly anti-Eastern philosophy in some respects. I worry about how English-based the communications are and how much they adhere to IRC discussions, which might not be popular to other technical people and could become "insider-driven". This is less of a criticism and more of an observation, however.
I don't think it behoves anyone to worry about what could happen to core developers by evil actors till it starts happening, though. I worry about the absence of some early Bitcoiners like DeathAndTaxes. I worry about how the US gov't treated BurtW. I don't think these sorts of things come from a conglomeration of Banksters and Gov'ts working together to hurt Bitcoin yet, but there is always the possibility that someone, somewhere, really wants Bitcoin to fail. Regardless of who may be behind ill-intent, it doesn't mean organizations they have ties to are working for any sort of overall agenda to destroy Bitcoin. The blockchain has the potential to benefit everyone, after all! We can ALL be the next big banking institutions and the people will trust our technical and financial expertise to safeguard their wealth in ways that traditional banking didn't provide them. Decentralizing banking will help avert crisises like what happened in 2008. It'll also help keep banking executives honest. whereas it could be argued that traditional bankers are really only good at schmoozing with politicians and bureacrats to protect their empires, the future successful bankers might be the folks who work independently and provide their customers the best service and protect their assets FROM the politicians and bureaucrats that want to inflate currency and ruin the people's store of value.
3. Could really governments start buying Bitcoins where they think that it's best for them to take Bitcoin as an friend not foe ?
Yes, they could buy, or just governments can easily start accepting Bitcoin as payments for fines and etc. There are no laws that I'm aware of that prevent them from doing so, though the legal tender laws require them to also accept fiat. I do suspect we're less than maybe five years away from a first world country eventually accepting Bitcoin as payment of fines/fees/etc. It might not be the US, but the US (and perhaps a state like Texas) does seem like a likely government that would eventually do this. There's really no risk for them to do so. I believe that Wyoming (US state) might still have laws on the books allowing people to pay for some things in gold. It's just never used. Similarly, states could accept Bitcoin if they really wanted to. So could the Chinese accept it for fees or fines if they so desired, but they are more top-down driven right now, it would likely require their primary state government to accept it before the provincial governments could.
4. What you think about this, since you've talked about this a bit earlier in your above reply
Well, he's mostly right with some statements and maybe borderlines on some others as they approach the conspiracy angle of things. I'm not sure ALL of the gold in certain reserves have been sold to China but we do know COMEX is kind of screwed and allows contracts for more in gold than is regularly mined. That shouldn't be a problem as long as no one takes delivery, but like the Hunt brother's example, what is to stop someone from eventually doing exactly that?
The way COMEX goes about ensuring prices don't accumulate too much is through margin calls, which will only work for so long till alternatives to it in India and China start becoming more widely-available and used by someone attempting to corner the market again. Then maybe you'll see the real price of gold accumulate higher than COMEX and the paper ETFs can keep up. That'll be a fun bubble to watch pop as the entirety of the Western world asks how derivatives markets like this could still exist when we just had a housing crisis that showed why this was a problem only eight years ago. Western bankers love their derivatives markets! The public be damned, though, because the governments are always going to bail them out.
I'm not sure that both the foreign and domestic gold held at the Federal Reserve has ever been audited at the same time, which is probably my one and only "conspiracy" belief, I think they both should be audited to ensure that the same gold they show Germany they have isn't the same gold they claim the US public owns. Aside from that, the petrodollar isn't even a conspiracy-laden topic anymore. It's common knowledge that OPEC has
required all contracts to be made in USD since the 70s.
When it comes to how worldwide finance works, I always try to consider a term called "Hanlon's razor". My belief is that Western governments aren't corrupt, they're just incompetent. The full statement is "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." I don't think bankers, politicians, and bureaucrats are
evil, they are just dumb, and the public will inevitably suffer because of their incompetence.
5. While talking in simple terms, what do you think about this as well ?
I don't have much to comment on this one. I'm not going to take the same tone that zimmah did, at least. Without any context, I'll try to analyse "the average amount of bitcoin people will have is less than 0.003 bitcoin".
I don't know what led to that comment, but I'm going to assume it went something like this:
1. There are ~6 billion people in the world.
2. There are going to be about 20 million bitcoin in active use till it hits 21 million in 2140.
3. 20,000,000/6,000,000,000 = 0.003 repeating so that means there's enough Bitcoin for everyone to own .003
BTC which means that most people will own less than that cause there will always be wealthy people and institutions that own more.
Does that sound about right? I wasn't involved in this conversation, but it seems like that might be the argument. That said, I'm not sure how we're supposed to address it. Take gold for example. How many people the world over own any gold? Do they need to own any at all?
It's possible that very few people will ever own Bitcoin itself. Instead they might own side-chains representing goods or services that get settled once per month or at other iterative times. It's hard to visualize or process this fully right now as we all deal in Bitcoin as if it is a normal investment for us and don't see our ownership of coin as a way to settle other people's payments. It is possible that you and I could be banks in a decade, though. We'd protect and run Bitcoin nodes for ourselves and hire technical staff to maintain the nodes and we'd store our immense wealth in cold wallets, sure, but we'd have hot wallets with a few thousand or tens of thousands of dollars in equivalent crypto-currecies in them. All of our friends and family would trust us with storing their wealth and we could issue side-chain currencies or use side-chains that each of us trust and for the ones we don't trust, we could settle in Bitcoin itself.
Ultimately we'll have to trust our own technical and finance staff, but naturally the people who understand the technology better than others while still understanding people better than others will build the most successful systems. My guess is that there will be a lot of M of N or
Shamir's Secret Sharing in use in the future business world. A lot of people's reputations will be hinged on how well they secure their private keys and pass phrases. It'll be a different world for sure. So many people right now are not used to being held accountable in Western finance. I doubt they'll be able to tolerate it. That's part of the reason why I think things like the DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) and such might be better sold to the Eastern markets, but over time the whole world will eventually see the value in it.
, but I knew that we would get there 
