[EduardoBautista]

Isn't anyone worried about the Bitcoin bubble bursting? The price is going to get really high because of all the exposure it is receiving right now and people buying a bunch of it hoping that it will just keep going up and up and up.

[jlgreco]

It's happened already. Everyone (who tries to store wealth in it) just gambles that they won't be the people who lose out.

[Amarandei]

Of course it's a bubble. But like all bubbles, some people will profit greatly if they know when to get out of it. It's a gamble.

[kenthorvath]

Is freedom a bubble? There is tremendous value in freedom. Bitcoin provides this in abundance. Like P2P filesharing, no amount of legislation and regulation will wrest control of it back into the hands of the government and financial institutions - it will only continue to be embraced as public awareness grows.

It's not a bubble, it's a snowball - at least in the long run.

[Amarandei]

Whooo, easy. I'm not arguing with anyone. Yes, I could be wrong. But what will happen if an alternative to Bitcoin shows-up. Or 10. Won't that bring the price down? You have to admit, this "freedom" is kind of hard to control at the moment and it's moodier then a women. It crashed before and it can happen again. I'm not against or for it at the moment(maybe slightly the second), I'm just waiting to see what will happen.

[kenthorvath]

Now worries - I didn't mean to sound argumentative and I agree with you that in the short run bubbles form. ^_^

Though, I would say freedom is not just _hard_ to control - it's impossible by definition. Freedom is not a short term thing, it's a long term outcome - it's the low energy state that's thermodynamically favored. Eventually the world will be a truly efficient, democratic, free society. But, it takes time and catalysis to get there.

Bitcoin is a catalyst for freedom. It or something like it will be adopted.

My gut tells me bitcoins are here to stay.

[scott_meade]

Anyone say "Beanie Babies"?

[ricardobeat]

More adoption means it can only go up.

Maybe too optimistic, but read http://falkvinge.net/2013/03/06/the-target-value-for-bitcoin...

edit: yeah, brainfart. I meant to say that "people buying a bunch of it" can only make it go up, not that it can't (or won't) go down again.

[tptacek]

"It can only go up". Yes. Certainly. Nobody has ever said that about tulips, the South Sea company, real estate in Florida, truncated SHA256 hashes, or dot-com shares.

[jonknee]

And people always need a place to live, but that didn't stop the housing bubble.

[dylangs1030]

I think you might be too optimistic. "It can only go up" is pretty much the hallmark phrase thrown around right before something goes...down.

Unless you also share the cousin belief that things can become "too big to fail".

[bluedanieru]

More adoption doesn't necessarily mean that. Of players who hold on to Bitcoin for longer than a few minutes, virtually all of them are speculators. If you accept Bitcoin as payment for services, your biggest technical challenge is converting them back into dollars/euros/whatever as quickly as possible. No one is accepting Bitcoin as payment and then holding on to them in order to buy something else or pay their workers.

As a long term (or medium-term anyway) store of value, Bitcoin is really quite useless for the time being.

[rishimoko]

> No one is accepting Bitcoin as payment and then holding on to them in order to buy something else or pay their workers.

Brewster Kahle at archive.org gives his employees the option to be paid in bitcoin received by the site.

> As a long term (or medium-term anyway) store of value, Bitcoin is really quite useless for the time being.

That's quite incorrect. Bitcoin has proven to be an excellent tool for buying low, waiting for a price rise, trading some of the bitcoin for gold, selling some of the gold and buying more bitcoin with the proceeds.

It's a great tool if you're willing to learn how to use it.

[bluedanieru]

>Brewster Kahle at archive.org gives his employees the option to be paid in bitcoin received by the site.

That's pretty cool actually, although personally I wouldn't do it. Hope to see more of that.

>Bitcoin has proven to be an excellent tool for buying low, waiting for a price rise, trading some of the bitcoin for gold, selling some of the gold and buying more bitcoin with the proceeds.

This speaks to Bitcoin's utility as an instrument for speculation, not for storing value. If it was a good store of value you would print out your private key and put it in a safety deposit box, confident that whenever you returned to retrieve it, it would represent approximately the same amount of wealth that it did when you left it.

This is most definitely not the case with Bitcoin at all.

[rishimoko]

> If it was a good store of value you would print out your private key and put it in a safety deposit box

I have quite a number of btc stored in cold wallets.

My point is that because of Bitcoin, I actually have fluid wealth to move around and store, be it with metals or cryptocurrency. I didn't have that freedom with US cash, an instrument whose value is rapidly decreasing and has been for a long time.