I hope I'm wrong; but I doubt it'll hit $54 anytime soon. And even if it did, Bitcoin like all other monetary markets / exchange (if Bitcoin in fact grow up and recognize by everyone to be a monetary unit); greed is going to come in and ruin Bitcoin just like everything else.
I'm a newbie to Bitcoin; have been checking out Btc in different things for about a month now. Here's what I have been checking out and how greed is going to ruin it for BTC in my opinion.
1)
www.bitcoinplus.com currently pays out at 0.00003516 btc / share. Btc / share is much lower than a pool; which is fine. You are told upfront about it. What I just found out after mining on and off for 1 month is that, it costs
0.01 btc to transfer your btc out to your account. 0.01 / 0.00003516 = ~ 285 shares. This is not much for those with high GPU cards and invested in mining rigs. However, it is very discouraging for a newbie checking out what BTC is all about. Take me as an example; after 1 month of mining (mine only when I'm using my computer); I thought I had 0.0100xxxx btc only to find out I can't transfer out to my home bitcoin client because it costs 0.01 btc to cash out. The greed of that website is very discouraging and I have since no longer be bothered to mine it from there.
2) Then I tried GUIMINER against
bitcoinpool.com. Maybe I don't understand the concept of "shares"; but, I must have gotten 30-40 shares at bitcoinpool to find out that it was not "registered" to my account. Upon checking at the bitcoinpool forum; I came to find that GUIMINER has issues. NICE ... I can't help but wonder who ended up with my 30-40 shares. Is someone pulling a fast one on me? OR Do I just not understand the concept of "shares"?
3)
www.bitcoinrigs.com supposedly builds a system for you. I am not sure what kind of operations it's running over there; but, from reading its site; I'm kinda taken back by their return policies stated there. A buyer has 1 month to return their defective system; but, it takes 1 month to process and refund their customer's purchase. The time frame is just too fishy if you ask me. It sounded like they are playing the "ohh ... your 1 month warranty has expired and you are no longer eligible for the refund" when the customer's system fails. Even if the customer's system were replaced; by that 1 month; the difficulty rate would have gone down 4 times and possibly no longer be profitable to run the system given the Mhash/Joule rate. Then what?
4) And of course, the MtGox incident. My friend had 20btc in there and still hasn't got back despite what MtGox claimed. Hackable exchanges is going to be the target of greedy capable hackers. The hack at MtGox probably made alot of people realize the vulnerability of P2P currency (like my friend) and is thinking twice about putting effort into it. The effort could be a lose cause. Maybe that's why the rate of BTC/USD hasn't go back up before the MtGox incident.
So far, my 1 month experiences hasn't been totally warm and fuzzy. Warm and fuzzy feeling is important for Bitcoin because without it, newbie like myself will leave it before starting on it. Without newbies, bitcoin is as good as dead in the water.