Topic: What would a fast exponential run-up look like? (Read 4385 times)

Define a "short time" first.
If 11 years is short time, then check out BRK-A chart between 1982 and 1993.
It went from $475 to $17525 (similar to a move between $1k and 30K)
https://finance.yahoo.com/chart/BRK-A
choose interactive, then logarithmic

Typically, financial assets don't have many thou of $ value per most used unit of measurement.
BTC would have to move first to millies (mbtc), then bits, then, maybe even satoshi's.

Personally, the price is not rising all that fast all things considered. I don't think we are in a bubble yet. For some exponential growth we would need to see some $1,000 per week growth. A few hundred dollars a month growth here and there just seems low to me. Maybe someone can post a real life asset that went from 1k to 30k in a short time and what the rise looked like.

Time to consider this again.

Well the ultra-fast exponential run-up scenario didn't play out like I fantasized here (it was just an interesting possibility). It may have continued for quite a while longer if not for MtGox getting swamped, and it's possible that it's just delayed until now, but considering some other parameters - like how long it will take for infrastructure and user-friendliness to reach the level required for mainstream adoption - it would be impossible to continue at the Spring 2013 pace for very long.

I now think what happened was that the 2011 crash burned in people's memories left the price languishing too low for too long, and Spring 2013 was the upward correction of that. There may be more upward correcting to do, but either way I still absolutely believe that Bitcoin is on an exponential growth path. Just a slower one. Tenfold per year seems about right, since that jives with history and also allows 3-5 years for full mainstream adoption to happen, which seems not too unreasonable.

Or maybe even up to 7-10 years considering the exponential curve would turn toward an S-curve midway through mainstream adoption. But anyway, within 5 years if Bitcoin is going to do its thing it's going to be a totally different world we're living in, with anyone who has any today-decent amount of coins being very wealthy then (unless they panic sell, and most of course will  ).

10x per year is still a very fast rate that will cause all the things I mentioned in the OP to happen, as can be seen from looking over the history of this forum, even if it's much slower than the 10x per season we had Jan-April 2013.

Well Z.B. where are we now? November is a bit later than August but not too far out of line I'd say.

"This" (today) is too short-term to tell, but overall since I posted the OP a few months ago the "fast exponential run-up" scenario seems to be playing out to a tee.

"Needless to say, it'd be a white-knuckle roller coaster ride with plenty of euphoria and ample gut-spilling scares. Millionaires and billionaires would be born, profits would be taken heartily all the way up, bubbles would be called constantly, and many would miss the train - perhaps multiple times. Most of all people would be wondering WTF was going on, endless theories would be postulated and debated."

And nobody's bumped this today? 

Is this it Zangelbert?

If the next 3 months, mirrored the previous 3 months' growth, something like this:

Bubbling up above exponential again (we are at early/mid-May prices now ($140), according to trendline).

The practical point here is probably that the price is vulnerable to bad news, but otherwise is likely to continue bubbling up for quite some time before reverting to the "merely" exponential mean.

Bubbled above exponential then reverted to the mean, near perfectly.

Right on course!

Yeah, nothing is assured. Even if it continues in a near-perfect exponential run for another six months and is at $800 or something, a glitch or government crackdown or exchange hack could send the price down into the nether-reaches again. There is no guarantee, and although the upside potential isn't so hard to get a handle on, it takes people quite a while to ascertain the potential risks.

Well for this hypothetical, I was talking about people having knowledge of an assured price increase

Not exactly, for three reasons.

1) Predictable by some is not predictable by others. Especially, many people do not yet understand Bitcoin or its growth potential. It seems to take newbies several months before they understand it enough to be comfortable investing in it, and the learning curve can be much longer for the less tech-savvy or less economics-savvy.

2) Short-term volatility throws people off.

3) Most subtly, and I think this is the point that the technical analysts miss: with Bitcoin, "the market" is not a static number of people, but a constantly growing one. Since this growth is mediated by the network effect, the growth of "the market" (the totality of people who have even heard of BTC and take it seriously, know how to buy it and keep it, and are qualified to evaluate BTC as an investment) may well be exponential.

If there was some sort of predictable doubling of price, speculation would simply immanentize such price changes, discounted for the market's time value. So it would be a vertical price change.

Yep, on a log scale chart the run-up since January just looks like a straight line. It was lagging just a bit behind until today.

If I remember my 7th grade math correctly, this is called linear growth. or a *very* wide exponent that may start off about now and end at four-digit prices. you choose.

http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg60zigDailyztgCzm1g10zm2g25

Are we still on track?

I lol'd

OMG!!

ROFL! Made me laugh hahahahaha!