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I don't think you're intentionally trolling, though bct has not done your personality any favours for sure.
I don't know how you know this or why or how it is even relevant to anything? My personality has changed because of bitcoin? Sure it has, based on more than three years of investing, studying and posting... but so fucking what.
You wish people stay the same and don't learn anything? Again, seems quite tangential to the extent that it could be relevant to anything.
So I'll try one more time. Forget mass adoption. Shorthand is useful when typing on a smartphone. Think greater adoption, a prerequisite of which is people actually knowing about bitcoin. New people, outside of the message boards which are a really very small part of the world.
Yes, it could be that we are talking about similar things and phrasing the matter in different ways. My earlier point was that you seem to be giving way too much emphasis to the concept of mass adoption in your attempt to suggest that the ATH of GOX is actually relevant to BTC fundamentals or any kind of price movement dynamics or psychological barriers. Several posters, including me, have asserted that the GOX ATH deserves little to no attention (sure that does not mean that you ignore it completely, but it seems to be a quite less important factor as compared with other factors.. and why put a less important factor in front of more important factors is somewhat beyond me
).
The reality is that journos will only prick up their ears and publish a story at the Gox ath. Then more people will read about it and a proportion will be interested enough to look into it more. This is how lots of people come to bitcoin and new things in general.
It's such a simple progression. Exposure equals greater user base. I really don't see what's so difficult or controversial about that.
Again, what you are saying is not untrue.. it is just a matter of the amount of weight that you seem to be attributing to such...
Mass media attention is a factor; however, most of us should already realize that there is and has been and will continue to be a lot of misinformation out there about bitcoin, and certainly folks have to filter through these various conflicting information sources.
Part of my point, that I already made, is that bitcoin is going to move up and down and sideways based on a large number of factors, and mass media may be one of them.. yet it continues to be one that does not necessarily correlate well with anything (including price) as you seem to want to suggest.
Let's say for example, we get a lot of mass media attention while the price is going up and being pumped.. yeah.. that can temporarily push the price pump longer and further, but in the end, it is only one of many factors pushing the price.. and sometimes can even be a sign that price is about to go down.