Topic: Why Bitcoin may now level off... (Read 8669 times)

You can just as easily be wrong in 2 weeks lol

Sometimes it feels good to be right...

<3.2Kg. I could chuck that in a backpack and motate all over.
U r a wuss

The recent price drop proved you right on what? That bitcoin is volatile at its current state? I think you should try really hard to find a more ridiculous statement than yours.

If posting links to sites like blockchain.info is frowned upon by mods I apologize in advance

Here is a simple tutorial on how to make a paper wallet. I recommend using encrypted paper wallets for larger BTC amounts ( just use a trivial passphrase) so one would at least have to brute force the passphrase if the paper wallet is physically stolen

https://blockchain.info/wallet/paper-tutorial

[edit] I've not checked if blockchain.info automatically puts the remainder back into the wallet address but you should be able to see how much the wallet address contains to make sure it is there if you intend to re-use the paper wallet [/edit]

Hi,

I tried this but when I click "receive Bitcoins" it says, armory must go online to access any funds sent to your wallet. Please do not receive Bitcoins to your armory wallets until you have sucessfully gotten online at least one time.

What now? I anyway have huge problems to understand all that stuff. I printed an paper Backup but I dont get what the root key is? And people say its easy to safe your coins :/

Did I say that I am not a believer in bitcoin ? Still looking at Gold and Bitcoin price development and Volatility, Gold does look at current levels more attractive than Bitcoin.

Oh well, the recent price drop has proven me right.

I find it funny, that especially people who just joined half a year ago are the biggest fanboyz and negate the risks investing in Bitcoin does involve.

Read his assumption and my explanation again: He moves 1BTC from his 100 BTC paper wallet. How does he do this? By entering the private key into a wallet application or online wallet
and performing the 1BTC transaction. Bitcoin-qt will NOT put the remaining 99 BTC back into that paper wallet's address by default but rather place it into a NEW address.
The paper wallet contains nothing after this transaction while the wallet software has the new address with the remaining 99 BTC. If you explicitly specify the return address to be that of the paper wallet's all is good.
But you do need to know this.

If you do not spend from your paper wallet nothing happens, like you said. But that was not the assumption here

4500 million ounces, to be exact.

Ok, keep holding the gold. There are many ounces of Gold, way more than 21 million.

So why you waste your time here. There are some nice gold forums that they hate pretty much bitcoin anyway.

Obviously there are many ways to "lose" coins.  Like leaving your hard drive with 7 million dollars worth, in a Landfill.

But his comment was:  "You have to move all your Bitcoins from your paper wallet to your real wallet or the BTCs on the paper wallet get lost"

You can't lose coins this way.  

As long as he has his paper wallet and his private and public key, he isn't going to "lose" his coins if they don't get moved to a "real wallet" (whatever that means).

Wouldn't holding 100 ounces of gold make your arms tired?

I still prefer to hold 100 ounces of Gold than 100 Bitcoins at USD 1240....

Actually it is possible to lose coins. Here is the scenario: You have paper wallet P1 with a public key P1pub and a private key P1priv containing 1 BTC.
You fill that walled by transferring funds from somewhere else to the public address P1pub. Two months later you decide it is time to spend some of that BTC given the value has at least doubled ( ;-) ).
You import your private key P1priv in bitcoin-qt and tada, the amount of bitcoins stored in your paper wallet are now added to your digital wallet. You then proceed to spend from the added address P1, say 0.1 btc from the 1 BTC of P1. The expected result is that P1 now contains 0.9 BTC. This however is usually not the case. The reason is that usually the wallet software will place the remaining 0.9 BTC into a new address P2 for extra anonymity. So your input from P1 gets split to two outputs: The destination to which you are sending 0.1 BTC and P2 to where you are sending the remainder (actually the difference between the input and the two outputs will be the miner's fee and if you fail to specify a second output for the remainder the miner who found the block receive all of it). Some wallet software will let you specify the remainder address as P1pub, essentially placing the remainder back into the paper wallet but since you have had to use the private key of that address it might be compromised.
Back to the scenario: If you used your wallet software and were unaware that it places the remainder into P2 you might wrongfully assume the paper wallet contains the remainder in P1. You now delete (really, don't ever delete a wallet unless you know what the hell you are doing) the wallet software thinking your online business is done and all is swell. P2 gets deleted along with the private key for P2 so yes, your money is now gone.

Now what do we learn from this? a) Use paper wallets as one time vouchers and once they are digitized destroy them. (and create a new one to where you transfer the remainder) b) don't delete wallets unless you are more than sure that there is nothing you can lose c) who said printing your own money did not at least require a tiny bit of research

It has a learning curve indeed for how to secure your bitcoins but this will change or it must change at least. I think in the future reliable online wallets will make things easier for everyday people. I mean that as someone else said people in the future might use bitcoins without even know it.

Is this a serious question?

Best message of the thread here. You descriped the reasons why bitcoin will fail hard if it wont become easier to manage bitcoins. I am a nerd but my mom, my grandma and grandpa, my uncle and so on.... do you all believe they will understand how to trade with bitcoins? Lol! I have to laugh if you seriously believe in that. Thumps up for your great post!

do people really believe that those going to buy bitcoin don't understand that they can buy divisible amounts? i don't believe that for a second. they realize it the second they go to place an order. people are stupid, but not that stupid.

I don't know who said this but its wrong.

Nothing happens to coins on a paper wallet.  You probably read the sentence wrong.  He probably said you *could* lose something that is on paper.

Meaning, its possible to misplace it.  The coins don't sometimes "get lost" from paper wallets.

In fact, the coins aren't really there.  They aren't anywhere.   The blockchain is an accounting ledger, documenting where the wealth is.

The wealth is virtual.  The paper wallet just houses the private key.  And its the private key that unlocks your ability to move the coins from their location documented in the ledger.

There are no coins on your paper wallet, and they can't be lost.

We know exactly what you mean. You have been in computers for over 20 years? How easy was it to use email 20 years ago? How easy was it to even connect to the internet?

Yeah, no wonder that whole internet thing never reached any sort of mainstream adoption...

Are you really so short sighted?

I've already said, if the billionaires and hedge funds want to dump billions into Bitcoin, the price will go up.  That's a given.  Thinking that "mom and pop" are going to buy this thing up to $10,000 or even $100,000 is just delusional.  On the extreme side, only the top 1% could afford to do such so, I think it's you that simply does not live in reality.  

Until it's simple, safe, secure and preferably offers some form of insurance, you'll never see "mom and pop" sink huge money into Bitcoin or anything else, simply to "store" value.  They'd be more likely to just buy gold and stick it in a safety deposit box and that's if they could even afford to "store" $5,000, $10,000 or $100,000.  That latter being a big IF.  Most people are living check to check or just slightly better than that.  

1 mBTC is 1 U$..

No problem at all, it could reach 10 U$ per mBTC


Simple !

Add a 2(5) before it.
I spend 30 minutes at a paypoint robot because of people who need help paying a bill.

I don't think Coinseeker sees what is at play here, the really big (and relatively slow) players don't sit around and wait for this kind of opportunity to leave the station completely. Right now there are multiple billions at the gates waiting for some understanding of the stakes... when that barrage is lifted (might take 3 months but not more), we're going to be on the moon. Popular adoption is irrelevant but will enforce this trend.

To invent a new store of value is not something that happens often, in fact it's the first time in human history.

How do I use this email thing?  I've got your address, but what are all these fields?  CC, BCC, subject, body.  I just want to send a note.  Fuck it, I'm going to the post office.

In other words, give it 5 years.

Except Ripple is not a crypto-currency.  It contains a crypto-currency called XRP but Ripple, is a payment network and distributed exchange.  Maybe learn the difference before talking out of your ass.  Umkay?  

Our monetary issues are not exclusive to some "currency".  Governments can decree anything a currency so creating some new currency, doesn't solve our real problems.  It just attempts to shift monetary power to a different group of people, as if by magic, they will start doing things better than the current capital holders of the world.  Yeah, that's going to happen.  

Edit:  All of crypto-currency is extremely difficult, tedious and unsafe.  This will change with time.  For now, most people aren't going to store loads of money in something they can't trust.  And wisely so.  Simple human error or missing a vital step could cost you all of your money. 

These aren't bug reports, these are feature requests (and hence business opportunities, for the entrepreneurial minded.) I see a lot of potential to make money in creating user-friendly bitcoin solutions for the masses.

for android smartphones there are already several wallets, which make mobile payments with bitcoin quite comfortable
just scan the qr-code and confirm the transaction and the deal is done (sometimes a bit disturbing that
the merchant has to wait for the first confirmation).

It will get easy, too easy, just like buying candy easy, but right now people with power want it to be hard.

Sounds easy. For sure. But not for, lets say, Frank from the pet shop who uses his computer only to write letters to his big love in France. Frank does not know how to create an own E-Mail adress or how to use his computer as an Internet Kiddie, born in the 2000s.

You guys know what I mean but dont accept it

It is too complicated. Not as easy as using simple FIAT Cash to buy something.

• Buy a cheap netbook. Never connect it to Internet (disabling wi-fi in BIOS or device manager is best)
• Install Armory and run it in Offline mode
• Create a new wallet and print a paper backup of it
• Never worry about change addresses again!

There you go.

While it is far from ideal that clients like bitcoin-qt automatically generate a new private/public key for the remainder of the output I find it hard to believe that anyone remotely interested in how to use a paper wallet could not account for this. Just use the paper wallet as a one time "coupon" and transfer the remainder of your funds in a new paper wallet. Problem solved and much more secure anyways because the used wallet's private key already had "contact" with the net.

What is there not to understand about a paper wallet? There is a public key to which you can transfer funds and a private key that allows you to spend.
The only difference to the digital form is that it is written on paper!

[edit] Oh, an it IS possible to specify the used paper wallet's address as the remainder output in some clients [/edit]

Care to explain? I have some counter arguments

I had 0 experience in IT before discovering Bitcoin (other than simply being able to use a computer). It took me about 2 days to learn about secure offline storage. Make a bit more effort.

Buying bitcoins is too complicated and takes too long for a normal user. On Bitcoin Black Friday, I´ve read in a few other communitys about how it sucks to buy Bitcoins quickly with all this ID check, then sent money from your bank to your BTC Account, buy them. All in all it takes 5-10 days to buy a Bitcoin if you never did before. Way too long to buy quickly something. On Black Friday many people were pissed that there is no other alternative payment method then BTC to buy that offer.

Why ever should somebody do this, only to pay things with BTC?

And then there is the security problem. The more the price raises, the more morons try to steal BTCs from others. Oh and the paper wallet! Well, I´m in Computers for over 20 years now but I really dont get it how to safely bring your Bitcoins on paper. And actually, letting them on Mtgox or on my Wallet on the PC does not feel good at all. And then, you need x backups.

And wow, as I ve readed this, I was shocked! You have to move all your Bitcoins from your paper wallet to your real wallet or the BTCs on the paper wallet get lost  

Who really can know this? You try to move 1 BTC from your paper to your BTC wallet and lose 99 Coins or ~110.000$ because you dont know this information.

Things are way too complicated for normal people. When things will get easier and safe, then more people will get into Bitcoins but at the moment it is only for nerds.

FIAT or Gold cant get stolen by some nerd who sits in front of his PC and do some coding. Ok, except from the banc account. But who lets hundredthousands of dollars on his banc account.

Bitcoin has some massive security problem (for a normal person, an nerd can use some superduper unhackable codes and passwords).

Is this a serious question?

This is going to change, even now bitcoinity has switched to mBTC, and the price is $1.05. The change will come from BTC businesses/services, and the public will fall in line.




Institutional investors. Also, bitcoin awareness is till extremely low. Participation is even lower, there is a massive upside on this should nothing change (perception, legal action, "new" bitcoin etc).


HA! +1

It has to adopt significantly less dubious policies and not attempt to secretly steal from people?

which is annoying

edit:nvm, they allow u 2 chg it

I don't know, they're apparently still interested when it takes hundreds of cents to buy a gallon of gas...

You're comparing apples to oranges. Gold is not worth $1200, an ounce of Gold is worth $1200. Comparing that to the price of 1 bitcoin is just silly. It just amazes me how you don't seem to be able to wrap your head around this point. There are only 12 million bitcoins right now and there are much more than 12 million ounces of Gold out there. Your argument would have made more sense if you would compare the market cap of Gold to that of Bitcoin. And if you do that you'll find that Bitcoin's market cap isn't even at 0.2% of that of Gold right now. So yeah, plenty of room to go up for Bitcoin.

Bitcoin can increase as long as new adoption continues, as soon as adoption declines the value of bitcoin will decline to near its intrinsic value. That being said is it possible to find data on how many new wallets are being created/ how many new people are joining bitcoin?

Go back and read the first post I wrote on the first page.  Everything you just asked me was already asnwered there.  I already explained in detail, in two different posts, why I am concerned that the price won't shoot up past $2,000.  It has nothing to do with the 'exchanges being able to handle' the volume.  Where is that coming from?  Gold a commodity that's been around for thousands of years, is considered by nearly *everyone* to be more valuable than Bitcoin, is well known to be purchasable in divisible amounts, and yet here it sits at $1200?  Yet Bitcoin is going to $100,000?  Im asking who is going to spend the money to get it there.  Not sure what's so hard to comprehend about my question...

With an option to change it back. Nicely done.

Bitcoinity made a first step, they just changed to mBTC as default.

The people interested in "making dough" keep selling for short-term profits and miss out on multiple stages of exponential ramp ups. Yes they are making really good money, but it is the people who see the real benefits and who hold long term who are making the real money.

This have been discussed many times already and that's why there are so many people around suggesting to move the price to mbtc.

Many people won't buy one share of google's stock either. Money is not distributed evenly, large investors buy hundreds or thousands of coins daily, while small investors might just skip it altogether

Yeah, you're right .. no need to poke around Bitcoin anymore.  No more world-changing here, no sir.  And yeah, it's not really a currency.  Just a bunch of BS that speculators have dumped money into, like all other cryptos except for Ripple.  No real utility.  Nothing more than hype and speculation.  Now, Ripple on the other hand ..

Really man, I can see that it IS all about money with you.  You're basically lying to serve your own ends.  You don't actually believe what you wrote.  It's a reality you would like to create because it benefits your bottom line.  We know you own a bunch of Ripple.  We know you benefit from it gaining acceptance.  Great.  I think many cryptocurrencies can live in parallel and feed one another.  Now off with you.

Is this a serious question?

Hehe, what do you think happens to a government without currency?

"How many governments it indirectly overthrows"?  Where do people come up with such delusional crap? 

The real problem is energy, so lets not go there but stick to global trade crutches.

For me it's not about value in terms of how much material crap you can buy for it, but how many governments it indirectly overthrows.

We need big changes soon or it will probably be famine and war I'm afraid, not for us maybe, but for our children.

Satoshi, the smallest unit. If you use BTC, mBTC or whatever, it is up to you.

No, it means that there is money to be made and people like to gamble.  The world didn't need Bitcoin to know that fiat sucks.  No one is taking anything away from the disruptive tech but to assume that the only issue with our global monetary system is "Government Fiat", and Bitcoin or any single crypto-currency can solve all our problems, is delusional and ignores the real issues with our bankrupt system.  It's going to take a lot more than Bitcoin to solve our issues.

It's interesting, most people are only interested in "making dough" and completely miss the real benefits and implications of bitcoin across the board of human life on earth. That said, it's not about the value of bitcoin, it's about the non value of FIAT. What a high price in USD means for bitcoin, is not that bitcoin is great, but that FIAT sucks.

I don't really care if it's affordable.  I'm here for the same reason most people are, to make money.  If I want to change the world, I'll go work on something Ripple related.  I just don't view Bitcoin as a currency at all, let alone a world currency.  I view it as speculative commodity that sure knows how to rake in the dough.  Maybe if Bitcoin just marketed itself as such and stopped trying to be something it clearly isn't, mBTC may find value for people in fractions, as simply a long term investment.  Again, no consensus on mBTC so, it really doesn't matter.  It's up to big hedge funds and billionaires now, to take this to the next level price wise.  Just my opinions.  Don't get your thongs in a twist.

You have to understand what money is to answer this question: FIAT is at the end of a very large global debt super cycle (the collateral is inflated and reused but ultimately worthless), so all players with non indebted FIAT will try to move parts of it into something "safer". Non debt FIAT will increase in relative value as the debt bubble deflates but there is a risk of FIAT failure* that anyone with half a brain can't ignore.

Things have to get ugly soon, nobody knows when, but bitcoin is catalyzing the peaceful process.

* Confiscation, Taxation, Inflation, Move of trust to something that politicians don't control = bitcoin.

+1

If you think Bitcoin should be affordable as a whole unit and used the world over with a supply of 21 million, you are clearly not thinking things through very well.

Actually they are stupid, if they weren't they would understand that this is a non-issue.

OP makes excellent points.  I've raised them in the past myself.  Bitcoin has already sold itself as a "whole" Bitcoin, with all the fancy "coin" images on every new story and the fact that it wasn't changed to mBTC sooner.  All news pricing is in whole Bitcoins.  People don't want to buy fractions of something.  They are not stupid.  Either some really big money is going to jump on board and buy up BTC or it could be a long, stagnant road ahead.  Since the Bitcoin community still to this day, can not come to consensus on how to denominate Bitcoin, I doubt it will ever happen.  Good thing there are alt-coins.  My $0.02

Look who turned out to be a non believer =))))
Oh , god ! how Ionic-Ironic.

Sure they do. They just split or emit more stock before they get that far. Nominal values are meaningless except psychologically.

Yes that is true that the higher we go the larger investments have to be made. but they will be, bitcoin has been on national tv of most countries by now. so the real money are coming, and the longer bitcoin does not collapse, the bigger money are feeling safe here.

As for daily percentage moves, just look at the charts they will answer your questions well. $100 per day is the natural movement of btc price now, about 10% as it was in two and three digit ranges.

Yeah but this is a different animal altogether at $1,000.

$1,000 is a thresshold that 99% of stocks never pass .... and 99% never even reach.

That's kind of why Im taking this viewpoint more seriously.

I bet daily on the "1 penny to 1 dollar" chance with alt coins, and have been paid handsomely on nearly every one of them.

Something being at $1,000 and going to $50,000 needs an outside element which pushes up its price.

If its just Sally and Bob buying a Bitcoin on Coinbase .... we're done going up.

-B-

Sadly not economics or business, rather what's inside a paramecium or what's crime and punishment about. Thankfully there are guys like you willing to explain.

Back to the subject - what makes you think that the price will move by same % daily when BTC reaches 5k or more? Daily movement of 20$ whe the price was 500 was normal. with 5k we would need +/-200$ to keep up. IMO unreal...

I gave my old man 5 bitcents for his birthday, worth about $50. Even in his old age he understood .05 btc just fine.

Now when .01 btc reaches $10,000 then we might have a problem. I'm ok with it levelling off there.

What exactly is your argument against the price of bitcoin rising further to $2000 and beyond? I don't see why the exchanges couldn't sustain higher prices, as long as they can handle the volume and the increased amount of fiat on the books. Your point about Gold also doesn't make any sense whatsoever to me. An ounce of Gold is sitting at $1200 right now, so what? It doesn't explain or say anything at all, what the hell is your point? 

if there would only be 12mil ounces of gold mined to date, then the price would be quite different - about $500,000 per oz, based on a fact that 174,000 tons of gold are mined to date.


And yes Panda, percentages work that way, what the hell you guys learn in schools these days? The higher the base price, the bigger is every single %.

So you think the exchange is gonna go up and down by larger numbers as btc price grows? We will one day end up investing 5k in a single btc just to see the price move by 20$ which will not even cover trading fees.

Yeah , i just haven't been able to grasp why people say "We will hit $1,000, then $5,000!  then the moooooooooooooon!"

What takes us to the moon?

I know what took us to $1,000 ....

-----------------  In order for Bitcoin to continue to 5,000, 10,000...etc....
-----------------THERE MUST be something unique about Bitcoin that pushes its price up *EXTERNAL* from the buying and selling on exchanges.

If there is such an element, then my original question in the original post is answered.

If somehow adoption by merchants translates to "increased price per bitcoin" ... then there's the answer to my question.

But does it?

If Bitcoins "per coin" price depends 100% on the buying and selling on exchanges, then we have reached pretty close to our maximum price.

Gold has been around thousands of years and here it sits at $1200 or whatever ....

So what is that unique thing about Bitcoin that pushes it from $1,000 to $2,000 *outside* of the buying/selling/trading on exchanges?

-BittBurger-

you don't know what percentages is right panda? in the first example, you invested 1000, bitcoin went up 6%, you got 60. in your second example, price goes up 2% and you expect the same returns for some reason.

The price is IMO slowing down speculative trading. If you bought BTC for lets say $300, you could get 3 for a 1000 and it went up by 20 you were getting $60. Now you can't even get 1 BTC for that price so if it goes up you get $18 while investing the same 1000. (Ofc not counting the fees).

A lot of the money coming in from China is from big players. They all don't concern themselves with buying fractions if the price gets too high. The only concern should be with the new people considering buying bitcoins who don't know that you can buy fractions. I don't know if there are so many of them that it's holding the price down.

I doubt quickly, but once fiat can be changed to Bitcoin easily and quickly (Bank supporting it, Bitcoin ATMs), $10,000 wont last long

When I saw bitcoin for the first time, it just finished climbing from 0.10 to $1 and I had exactly your thoughts, OP. I thought - fuck, now I won't buy it anymore and who would if it costs more than a dollar, so I can't buy 100 coins for 10 bucks any longer. So I didn't, then.

Now, in retrospective, dollar does not seem like such a bad entry point. So it's a matter of getting used to a certain level. For example, very few people can buy gold by pounds, because 1pound  costs around $15000, but alot of people buy gold in smaller quantities and don't see much problem holding 1/2oz coins. Same applies to bitcoin, so no, your logic is invalid. It's just an issue of getting used to 4 digits. When we hit 5, 4-digit coins would seem funnily cheap to you.

Yes, I bought some bitcoins at $1000. 10 times less than I did at $100, but it is exactly the same amount in USD.

I don't know anybody who has bought yet.

But after having made a transaction I know that what will happen, is everybody will want to use them to buy things online because it is way better than paypal and banks.

So the answer is 6 billion people will buy a digital currency at some point in time. To them the price will not matter at all.

*You are investing in a medium.*

Let's assume there are a total of 2 million people in the entire world holding 6 BTC each on average (not a bad estimate I think). Now let's think about what would happen if 8 million more people got interested in bitcoin recently after reading about it in the papers, and they decide to invest $2000 each on average in bitcoin. Together that means $16 billion will flow into bitcoin, which as you can imagine will push up the price considerably. And 8 million people is still only a tiny fraction of the world population, so $10,000 and higher can be easily reached when more people get interested and start investing a small portion of their wealth.

well i dont care if people dont know if bitcoin is divisible they will one day probably after we switch to uBtc. Big pockets dont want the avg joe to know either. The price will go to a million but Joe wont start buying until 100k, then that will push the price to 1 Million if joe is buying at 1k he will be selling all the way to 10k and 100k because normal people dont wanna be rich and will do everything in there power to lose the money to get back to broke. So already they are broke thinking 1k is to much to buy a bitcoin. Not even spending 5 min knowing what bitcoin is divisible. This is a currency for semi intelligent people. If people wanna stay broke thats on them. Same reason people dont buy stock. They dont think they can make a million over night so they buy penny stock only to lose all there money. Same here, people will be buying all the Alts and it will be going up and down never knowing why they cant spend it cuz everyone is still focused on bitcoin going to Da moon. Think 10x a year not 100x a year. Most people that bought at 1200 already sold it at 800 during the dip. They buy things they dont even research.

So what you're saying is, growth of Bitcoin will eventually be stopped by the limited amount of fiat people have available (or said differently, by the size of the economy.)

This is absolutely true in the long run and will happen eventually. But the way to look at it is in terms of market cap. The total market cap of BTC right now, if all coins were mined, is 21m * $1150 ~= $25 billion. That's actually a TINY amount in the context of world trade or a major currency. The global forex market alone has a daily turnover measured in TRILLIONS.

So if bitcoin ever makes it anywhere near "mainstream" usage, we still have some ways to go.

If 90% of the public down't know you can buy a fraction of a bitcoin I wouldn't be concern.
Currently , assuming the best scenario we have around 1 million users and that it just 1/6000 of the people on this planet.

Also , the switch to millie or minnie or donaldbits may also help.

If true about funds buying half, the run up to summer/fall 2016 (halving) will be interesting to watch.

Minicoins. And someday mikes.

i was interested in USD, but then i realized their damn $1000 bills couldnt be divided so i decided just to trade my trusty clam shells instead. *cough * *sarcasm perhaps*

i honestly don't think it's that big of a deal. if someone were seriously interested in getting bitcoin, they'd do the research and learn that they can buy fractions. if they are just saying "im interested," but are unwilling to put the effort out to join the game.. they probably wouldn't have bought them anyways.

this problem with people not understanding you can buy half a bitcoin frustrates me so much!

what about the big players? hedge funds? wall street? while the psychological effect does have a role in changing the price, i think sometimes we put too much focus on it. before we hit $1,000, i thought there would have been a pretty big sell-off and that we'd have somewhat of a crash.. well, that didn't really happen.

another things we don't know of: where the news comes from, and whether it's good or bad. if, for example, tigerdirect were to announce that it is going to accept BTC... what do you think would happen? people would ignore the psycholgical barrier and buy up some coin.

who will be interested in fiat when it takes a thousand dollars to buy a bigmac?

I hope that the community and eventually the media start refering to value in terms of mBTC. A lot of my friends would invest but they think that a coin is too expensive for them.

Interesting - how do you know the mining output is being bought by funds?  Which funds?

I agree that the growth will be exponential for a very long time.  I think it has to do with how information propagates through networks .. 5 people tell 5 people who tell 5 people and so on.

Edit: One more thing - I think the reason we haven't seen a bump today (man aren't we greedy?) is there hasn't been much Bitcoin-related news besides the sheep swindle ..

If someone is willing to pay 40 cents for 0.00004 BTC, and nobody is willing to sell it for less than that, then the price becomes $10,000 per BTC.  In other words, it doesn't matter what amount is being traded, just the price it's being traded at.

An extreme example would be a universal currency...so governments would be the entities buying bitcoins.
Napkin math would say 100 trillion dollars in global currency divided by 21 million bitcoins is...$4.75M.

If your new  'unit of currency' was a microbitcoin, a unit would be about $4.75 and a "satoshi" would be 1/100 of that or about 0.05.

estimated 350,000 holders a couple of months ago, according to some random paper i read.  since then the price roughly sextupled, so perhaps  22 million holders could naively be taken to correspond to a 10k level.  

funds are buying at least half the mining output now, probably much more, and this is a very recent development.  the impact on price trajectory is likely to be more upward pressure than seen in the past.

it's starting to look like we're basing around the 1k USD / 1oz Au gap, but the newsflow on btc has increased by a factor of 10 or more in the past month, so i suspect at least ten times the number of people are learning about btc each day.  admittedly this is a lower quality audience than the early technophile demographic, but it also includes technically unsophisticated by financially sophisticated business people and investors.  as they become comfortable with the concepts and perform value calculations, they will do the paperwork necessary to buy coin.

people who understand how money is valued on its fundamentals will be much more willing to buy speculatively, will have a much longer-term discounting horizon, and will understand the mechanics of future sustainable gains, and will invest accordingly, as compared to the average relatively uneducated and less affluent neophyte.

the difference between $900 bitcoins and $800 bitcoins is not substantial.  neither is the difference between $1000 bitcoins and $1100 bitcoins.  in fact, it is less substantial.  for that reason i do not expect the latter to be more difficult to achieve than the former transition.  the critical factor is demographic penetration.  as long as awareness is spreading at an exponential rate, to a first approximation, growth will continue to be exponential.  the exponent may decay over time, but it remains over unity for the time-being.

You don't have to buy whole coins. You can buy by the mBTC.

Can someone explain this to me please?

People can afford $200 ... $400 Bitcoins ... $900 bitcoins... and with all the money in China floating around, its not too big of a deal for people go buy $1000 bitcoins.

You reach the $1000 mark and you've got Snoop Doggs buying up 20 or 50 of them .... but that's Snoop Dogg.  He's a multi millionaire. 

People have been able to afford to buy in to Bitcoin up till now...

Who the hell is going to afford to buy into Bitcoin at $2,000 ?   $5,000 ?   $10,000 ?

At some point shit is going to simply stop shooting up. 
I know you can buy bitcoins in divisible amounts.   But 90% of the public has no idea they can do this, and Im not even certain that someone buying 0.00004 BTC at $10,000 is going to push the price up at all. 

So my "Speculation" ?   That we're reaching a point at which human beings can no longer buy in to Bitcoin enough to keep pushing the price up so quickly. 

Can someone please explain to me where the money would come from?  Even if India gets on board ... how the heck will their participation affect price? 
Its not like a bunch of people in India can start blowing money on $5,000 Bitcoins .

Can someone explain to me why people here think a rise from $1,000 to $10,000 could even happen at all, let alone quickly?