I come across as overly self-important. It is because I tried to warn about the dangers of Bitcoin (while being fair to also praise its virtues) and in the process I had to shout over a lot of hurt feelings. And this hardened my resolve. Sorry this is not overconfidence, it is uber confidence because it is based in fact checking not in wishful careless arbitrary dreaming. Because when I spend a year digging into the details of something, I make many key insights and discoveries. And you all do not know what I discovered technologically because I haven't revealed it. Why should I give you my secret recipes when in fact you would piss on them any way. The only way forward is to prove you wrong. Sorry this is not a desire to be a jerk. It is a desire to do what is best for mankind, a desire to get wealthy doing it, and a desire to build a bigger ecosystem with more people like you profiting and smiling.
Now on to the analysis...
Well if this is the bottom it is U shaped, not V, which is what I predicted upthread.
The price action seems to be very quiet, so not much to talk about from a TA perspective.
First a math point about relating adoption rate to price.
Peter R confirmed upthread with a chart that proxies for adoption, N, are tracking price = N x N. And if adoption is growing by rate R per year, then it grows R x R rate in two years. Thus we can say that the annual rate of price increases is proportional to the biannual rate of adoption. You see when our Y axis is logarithmic (e.g. log 10 on chart Risto shows) then exponentiation becomes additive and thus linearly proportional.
So I've been FA thinking about why Bitcoin adoption is likely declining, i.e. as I showed a
log-logistic curve fit.
As I explained in that linked post, the slope of the price increase was 0.33 before July 2011, and has been 0.09 since January 2012 until now. So it had already declined. The question is was the early period an aberration or part of the trend?
SlipperySlope had been fitting a logistic curve to Bitcoin's price, because technology which spreads out to the masses typically has that S shape of exponential adoption. The key factor is that logistic adoption rate (slope) increases until the midway point, i.e. at 50% of the adoption before decreasing. Whereas, log-logistic adoption rate (slope) is maximum at the start and is always declining. This is a very important distinction because logistic means we can expect Bitcoin's price rate of increase to accelerate, whereas log-logistic we can expect the rate of price appreciation to slow further (as it already did slowing from 0.33 to 0.09 after July 2011).
I gave the explanation that money is power-law distributed and thus we should expect the greatest serious network effects on adoption at the beginning because the power investors come in the earliest. The log-logistic (cumulative distribution function) curve corresponds to the power-law distribution.
I had an epiphany in my dream last night that there is a simpler explanation which also corresponds to the power-law distribution of money as follows.
"Most people who learn about Bitcoin, don't adopt it".
Why? Because it doesn't fulfill a general need. The need it fulfills is very specific to a white male, hate central banking demographic. It doesn't have fast transactions, doesn't have consumer protection, the money is difficult to secure, it is technically challenging to use, etc..
A consumer adopted item such as a washing machine has logistic adoption curve because every person who hears about wants it. Thus maximum word-of-mouth is reached at 50% of adoption. Whereas, for Bitcoin maximum rate of effectiveness of word-of-mouth was when only the correct demographic was listening back before July 2011. Now as Bitcoin tries to speak to the masses, they mostly don't care.
Thus if you want to build a Bitcoin killer altcoin, you simply make sure it is something every person will want to do.
I have experience doing such things, as I created an application that had 1 million users and 1% of the internet back in late 1990s. Before that I was involved with what became Corel Painter and I helped bring it to 1 million global units and also the first $million milestone in Japan. The key thing is I sought out that company, not them finding me. I have always been attracted to paradigm shift technology and thinking about how to make it easier for people and thus increase adoption rates.
My reputation doesn't matter. I won't be using it any way. What matters here is determining what is really going on. Because an investor without the correct interpretation of reality is destined to lose money.
If there was a black budget team who designed Bitcoin, it appears they may have failed in their analysis. It appears they have no way to get the masses interested. But let's see if that changes as offchain services and fiat masks such as Bitpay and Coinbase proliferate.
Put Coinbase and Bitpay together and you have both the consumer and the merchant, you don't need the block chain any more. Also the mining is already centralized. How much more obvious could it be?
And during this time our core development team and Foundation have been doing what to ameliorate this outcome? Meeting with the CIA and CFR.
And then I wake up to see this at the top of the Google search for "Bitcoin price":
http://gigaom.com/2014/04/04/this-week-in-bitcoin-the-push-to-get-the-currency-in-the-hands-of-the-consumer/And so again I will challenge Risto according to our original focuses when we first met each other back in 2007. What are you doing about this? I know what I am doing. And you know
I warned you about this outcome from Day 1 when you shouted to me that Bitcoin was becoming very important.
) A decent welfare net is not the end of humanity. You can't always reward the sociopaths on top of the food chain (who appear there very frequent according to the statistics) The problem is how to make a decent welfare system that is efficient. Speaking as the tax guy I am, I don't think it is probable that bitcoin gains will be taxed by 70% in any country. But if you have insider sources, act accordingly, because that would mean a US bitcoin ban without officially banning it. 
buy and HODL 