This is my take on the situation.
It's speculative value vs network value. Bitcoin's value is still mostly speculative, but the network value is growing all the time, and will eventually be much larger than the current price. By network value I mean the total amount of fiat value in motion or stored using bitcoin divided by the total number of bitcoins.
The speculative value is a function of
1) how much it will be worth in 5 years? maybe tracking the long term exponential trend (i.e. > $10,000 or a lot more)
2) what is the cheapest it will be between now and then? Maybe <$300.
3) risk of technology failure ( not zero, but very small)
The second question is clearly the important one right now, as we are in a 9 month down trend, so it's in some ways reasonable to assume that the long term investment can be made later for a much lower price. On the other hand, the Paypal announcement is a sign that the future network value will be higher sooner than some might have thought. One group of people (GABI) have decided to start investing now and take the risk of missing out on a lower entry point. Another group of people (over leveraged Chinese mining operations among them) are deciding to liquidate now because they owe fiat loans taken out on the assumption of a bitcoin price > $600. We had a brief spike from the paypal news, but it got eaten by bankrupt industrial miners and over exposed get rich quick schemers.
I don't think this is a case of early adopters cashing out, the fundamentals are all looking fantastic. I suspect this is bad mining operations selling at any price to avoid bankruptcy, or perhaps Chinese money mining at a loss to launder fiat out of the country. Who knows, but once some of these sort term operations wind up we'll end the down trend, and once this is fairly clear in the TA a lot of investors will realise this cheapest point to enter has past, and we'll have another big leg up.
So is it a good idea to sell now and buy back once it goes lower? All I can think of is endless posts by people who sold at $1 at the end of the last major downtrend, and have been miserable ever since. So I am personally too afraid to sell. May or may not go down a lot more, but right now I like how many bitcoins I have, and I can't predict the price short term.
OMG, yes! At least one tought trough response, thanks.
Well i would not sell all of my BTCs of course, just a portion of it (half?) to buy them back (at 200 or 300 probably.)
So you agree that the price spike after the recent paypal annoucment was ridiculously small, but you blame the bankrupt miners for this. interesting.
I think the btc people (the foundation or someone) should not only be focusing on persuading merchants to accept btc, but to also keep some of them (and not immidiatelly sell them into market like the coinbase and similiar merchant "providers" do).