^ posts like this make me think we are going nowhere but down, please stop
aw come now, don't hush his advocating for such a cause as saving the whales.
Personally, I wouldn't call this a shit year for bitcoin. Whether you've seen the year as a success or a failure is only a measure of your expectations against reality, but given this is in the speculation sub. with a perspective based on price, I do see your point.
But from a completely different point of view, we see large amount of businesses and business investments which happily develop infrastructure *not caring a single bit about what the price currently is*. And that's what matters, not how many new short-term profit seekers we can attract. They will run on the next dip, anyway. Infrastructure will stay. The "common people" will go where the infrastructure is the most convenient and use that.
This pretty much sums up my opinion. The catalyst for the previous meteoric rise was popularity fueling speculative investing. The foundation for such prices was not there, and when speculators looked around the room to only see more speculators, the bottom dropped out. That is why the plethora of good news we've had this year hasn't impacted price in an equally staggering way -reluctance.
What's exciting then to consider is that $1200 was attained on almost entirely hot air. What is going to happen when the infrastructure beneath bitcoin is further developed? When B2B transactions are facilitated in btc? When couch-potato joe discovers how easy, and cost efficient using btc can be? When the infernal USD<>BTC loop is narrowed and bitcoin becomes an independent ecosystem?
Edit: Forgot to give my answer to the ATH question, if it wasn't already clear. Yes, I expect many new ATHs. Only a matter of time...
