

Bitcoin may be following this classic bubble stages chart.  - teawithcarl
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jessecolombo/2013/12/19/bitcoin-may-be-following-this-classic-bubble-stages-chart

======
dmk23
But, THIS time everything is going to be different! Because of Bitcoin's
paradigm-shifting, gravity-defying, game-changing properties, the normal rules
of bubble economics and financial regulation no longer apply! The Brave New
World has arrived! /sarcasm

Seriously though, Bitcoin is going to enjoy its glorious rise for only as long
as the politicians/regulators/law enforcement fail to realize the true extent
of the threat to their power, IF Bitcoin's intended properties are allowed to
continue unrestricted. Once all these players wake up, the crackdown will be a
lot fiercer than anything ever done against P2P file-sharers. Napster
threatened just one industry, Bitcoin is taking a swing at our entire
political and economic system.

It is just a matter of time before every Bitcoin exchange is forced to turn in
all their records to IRS, the transaction histories are fully outed and the
main benefits of using Bitcoin are minimized. The regulators have no reason to
leave alternative currencies alone vs. crack down like they've done to the
likes of the Liberty Dollar (
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Dollar](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Dollar)
)

At the end of the day, any currency is only as viable as the enforcement power
behind it, which ultimately means "people with guns". Bitcoin has none of it
and US Dollar has the largest world power behind it...

------
SuperChihuahua
The Bitcoin 40,000 comment by the Winklevoss twin
([http://mashable.com/2013/12/16/cameron-winklevoss-
bitcoin/](http://mashable.com/2013/12/16/cameron-winklevoss-bitcoin/)) is
actually similar to the 1999 book "Dow 40,000: Strategies for Profiting from
the Greatest Bull Market in History"

------
ozh
My feeling everytime I read a paper about btc: everybody watches with interest
but nobody has the slightest clue of what this will become in the mid & long
run

~~~
BrokenPipe
We kind of do.

The tendency is to say that it either incorporates a lot and becomes very
valuable and the de-facto international store of value and currency (as well
as representing a number of assets such as stock or estate property) or it
goes to zero.

It's volatility is certainly decreasing as times goes by and the big picture
is certainly positive as things stand although I agree that it would take a
simple coordinated move to ban it in the western world to take it down.

Yet this has not happened yet and I can't stop but wonder why given what it
has happened to Liberty Reserve and we have seen coordinated moves for far
less (Kim Domcom with Mega for instance).

It would be enough for it to be regulated such that tax or vat needs to be
added and bitcoin would immediately be heavily affected.

Furthermore we do not know who created bitcoin and their real motive.

In my view it is much better than the current central bank situation but it
seems there is a side of it that means it has no one accountable.

Should mining ever get compromised (if it is not already) it is not really
clear to me that we would even notice.

------
boon
This is because I don't know anything about reading the tea leaves in a market
graph like this... but does the (somewhat) significant dip near the top (where
it bounced twice to $1200+) make this different from what the author is trying
to fit?

------
Grue3
Last time it bubbled, it followed this exact chart, but on a smaller scale.

------
aw3c2
I can't flag anymore but please don't give this clickbait Forbes rubbish any
traffic.

~~~
philhippus
How else would I have seen the correlating bubble graph to the bitcoin chart
if not for this Forbes link today?

