Here's a bottleneck for you "singularity" guys that ultimately limits the height of parabolic rises: Infrastructure. Remember when MtGox had an order queue of up to 75 minutes filled with market sells? Think this can't happen again in some other variation? Think again.
Infrastructure? What makes you think that MtGox past troubles in coping with demand will having anything to do with the patterns of future adoption?
This was when Bitcoin had a central point that could be swamped like that. We are already seeing that change, we are already seeing the infratstructure rise, and it will only start coming faster. New exchanges popping up, many only in beta, and of course OpenTransactions stands to change the whole game. Infrastructure will rise to meet the demand much faster than you think because there is so much profit potential.You underestimate the power(and speed) of hype, greed, competition, and logical thinking when applied to a digital free market with sound foundations.
Rome wasn't built in a day because they had to lug around rocks.
Actually, the link is even stronger. Competition -> Race to improve -> Increased infrastructure. Just look what the intense competition between miners has lead to: The biggest computational network in the world created, biggest by a fair margin. Bitcoin naturally incentivises competition, due to its fast transfer times (making switching between competitors easy) and its open-source nature (meaning one competitor can't monopolize some part of the client in some way). Now with miners the competition is induced in the protocol itself. I don't think the competition between exchangers will ever become as intense as that, so the exchanges will naturally lag behind a bit. However, it still is only a matter of time before Bitcoin exchanges obtain the type of infrastructure that the miners already have obtained. As such I don't think there is much need to worry.
