Topic: There is No Bubble - page 2. (Read 2932 times)

I'm only relatively new (February, 2011), but I use bitcoins to buy things.  That's kinda what they were made for.  I have some savings, but I spend quite a few.  When I do, I buy new ones with the fiat I would have spent.

As we know, BTCs value isn't judged by its usefulness and application but by attention and revolutionary nature. The more people are interested in it, the higher the price, the more it will be used/spent. Period.

I fail to see the difference between a bitcoin user and a bitcoin speculator.
what are all these new users using bitcoin for?

It is my belief that Bitcoins' current price is not dangerously speculative nor are they in a bubble of any reasonable magnitude.

As someone who deals with website rankings, trends, and internet virality on almost a daily basis, I immediately became interested in just what fashion Bitcoin's user population is expanding as a possible indicator for why it is BTCs have experienced such a significant growth in the past couple months. A few questions arose: "How much of BTCs recent gains are due to speculation, hivemind, hype, and hoarding?" and "Does BTCs recent growth correlate to a greater number of users?"

In attempts to answer these questions, I looked at some traffic data from Alexa.com:
http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?&w=400&h=220&o=f&c=1&y=p&b=ffffff&n=666666&r=3m&u=bitcoin.org

And the Google insight trend for the term 'bitcoin':
https://i.imgur.com/qkSsi.png

And finally the price of BTC in ~the same time period:
https://i.imgur.com/rHfjt.png

Although you may find this graph rather uninteresting, I see this somewhat loose correlation as an indicator that the recent jump in price is not due (primarily) to an increase in hoarding, speculation, or hype, but rather to a simple jump in users. This is not to say, however, that hype did not cause the jump in users and interest.
It is simply being said that Bitcoins are unlike precious metals as of late in regards to their principal reason for an increase in price.

What is your take on it?

If you found my post helpful or interesting, any donations would be hugely appreciated and help my enormous college debt immensely:
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