- <i>Bitcoin? Sounds interesting but I am not going to waste CPU cycles on it. This will never be of any real value!</i><p>- <i>Bitcoin seems to be steadily growing. Well, as soon as they realize it is worth nothing, it will return back to non-existency.</i><p>- <i>Yeah, this is definitely a fad. It is growing too fast. No way I am going to mine.</i><p>- <i>So, mining at home is redundant now. Well, don't picture me buying into it! It can collapse any second.</i><p>- <i>Haha, it collapsed. Good grief. No way I am buying all the leftovers. This will never recover.</i><p>- <i>Recovering? This will be temporarily. Bitcoin has no future.</i><p>- <i>A new peak? Well too late to step in, now. Just wait for the new burst.</i><p>- <i>Yet another peak!? This is the last one. Buying now would be stupid.</i><p>- <i>Bitcoin heading towards $(peak of some arbitrary rounded number), new bubble forming</i><p>Every time.
$200? Hardly. Maybe if you look at Mt.Gox, it might look like you could get $190 per bitcoin. Howerver, there is no way to actually get that money to your bank account, since Mt. Gox hasn't been doing any banktransfers for months.<p>The price is high on Mt.Gox because people that have money on there can only get it out by buying Bitcoins and transfering those to other exchanges. This drives the Mt.Gox price up.<p>If you look a the exchanges that are actually solvent, the price is more around $160.
I'm going to sell when I can retire on it. Which won't be for a couple orders of magnitude yet. Some of us are holding for the longest time...<p>I apply this same logic to my startup attempts. If anyone offers me enough to retire, I'll sell with no doubts.
I know you can sell your coin when the price is high; but can you trade quickly enough to profit from such temporary surges (buy low then sell high only a dozen hours later) ? What is the average request processing time if you want to buy, say, 10 BTC on mtgox ?
It's better to not use MtGox as a baseline price anymore, it's at about $20 higher then any other exchange due to the fact that you can't actually get your money out of it ATM. Check the btc-e graph for a better view:<p><a href="http://bitcoinwisdom.com/markets/btce/btcusd" rel="nofollow">http://bitcoinwisdom.com/markets/btce/btcusd</a><p>(They both show the same trend, I'm just being pedantic)
I'm still hesitant to sell my (smaller) stash. The probability that bitcoin will explode is fairly low, but trading a small but real possibility of becoming a millionaire against a few thousand dollars is a difficult decision :)
How many legitimate real world services and products currently accept Bitcoins? I understand it is only the Chinese search engine. I also take it for granted that any major Euro/US-based organization (be it Google or Domino's Pizza) that starts accepting Bitcoins will instantly face very serious political repercussions. Given these facts it is astonishing that Bitcoin seems to be heading from strength to strength.
For a more clearer picture, look at this graph:<p><a href="http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg1460zig12-hourztgWzm1g10zm2g25zvzl" rel="nofollow">http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg1460zig12-hourztg...</a><p>Bitcoin is deflationary and has enough actual use to support small trading volume even without speculators. It's perfect vessel for speculators and bubbles, but the long trend is pretty obvious. I suspect that it will grow until it has reached all of it's potential users and potential speculators.<p>It has actual use as currency for bad stuff, money laundering and avoiding currency restrictions like in China for example, so I think the exchange rate will grow for some time. I suspect that grey economy might support money supply worth of 200-300 billion at least. Government interventions might cut it into much smaller number though. Virtual currency has little value if you can't interact with the rest of the economy.<p>It's not path to cyberanarcist-utopia, but it's not clearly useless either. I think it might find it's niche or be replaced with something similar.
I've said it before and I'm sure I'll say it again: the biggest risk to bitcoin is a government (specifically the US government) deciding that they don't like it. Barring that, its growth will likely continue.