I'm as happy that my holdings are rising as the next guy, but I admit that I cannot see the cause of it. This kind of advance is not unprecedented within the Bitcoin economy, but the last time we were in this kind of multiple week advance it turned out to be a hype induced bubble, not the result of fundamental increases in the size of the BTC economy. Anyone know what I'm missing?
Let me point to a post of mine I made a while back (we were already in rally mode):
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1447544I think we are generally overestimating the short-term effect of positive news (like wordpress, goldmoney, bitpay,...) and underestimating the long-term effects.
Sure, on good news
traders with fiat at the exchanges
will buy. But keep in mind these people are prone to
take a profit even on a $0.15 rise, so the
effect will be short-term and short-term only.
No new fiat comes in through this mechanism so there wont be a lasting effect.
The long term effect of good news bringing in fresh blood on the other hand
is too easily forgotten about by the time the news is old and we then ask ourselves: "why the $0.30 rise on
no news?"
See for example the reasons I gave for justifying my intution of a rocket about to be ignited in this thread on Nov 5th last year:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/my-intuition-says-were-sitting-on-a-rocket-about-to-be-ignited-122454. We might still see the effects of this 2 month later. Think about it:
it takes time to go from hearing about bitcoin to actually making a sizeable purchase: First the guy has to get his initial infos about bitcoin. He will then ponder the idea for a while and let the overwhelming info sink in (a week or two), then revisit bitcoin and get excited, take another week to make the decision to get in. Then it takes a week for him to actually get money to an exchange (yes, a majority of newbs will think mtgox is
the way to buy bitcoins). Then he will wait for a dip or rally to actually get int (another week or so). Add this up and you have 1-2 months.
;tldr: the current rally is fueled in considerable part by newbs generated by 2 months old good news.It's "old good news" that's generating newbies (both users and speculators), helped by the network effect.
Also: it's much easier nowadays to sell bitcoin to new people. Just yesterday I irc-chatted with some dudes that made twrp (
http://teamw.in/project/twrp2, an android recovery system that support encrypted mounts) and it was easy to convince them to accept bitcoin donations. A year ago they would've told me to go away and stop spamming their channel with bitcoin propaganda. Now they were open, had heard about bitcoin already and asked newbie questions like what wallet to use.
Usage is also going up as a result:
http://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions-excluding-popularhttp://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume-usdhttp://blockchain.info/charts/my-wallet-n-usersOn the other hand, there is a good chance we might see another -30% drop. I think a lot of coins are in the hands of speculators who see bitcoin merely as a vehicle for making fiat money. These dudes will panic-dump easily (also many bitcoin-lovers will panic-dump if the drop is harsh enough, hoping to increase their bitcoin stash). I'm having a hard time guesstimating numbers, but I think a 30% drop is quite possible. $12 will likely hold and recovery might be very swift.
Overall I'm not concerned.