Thats weird, i thought these "round" numbers are mostly psychological. The previous bitcoin peak was around $1000 and followed by a looooooooooong winter. I thought it would repeat itself, hover around $10000 for a little and then go for another looong dive.

But maybe there's too much market activity to stop it yet.

It's fun making this kind of predictions. I would wager for fun that it will not reach $20000 before it starts the dive.

But my concern is where that market activity is coming from... extremely fast rises in other markets (outside of IPOs or legit business successes) tend to be pump & dump efforts. Is such a thing possible with Bitcoin?

>The previous bitcoin peak was around $1000 and followed by a looooooooooong winter.

That was mostly caused by an exchange at the time (MtGox) going under. The price increase was because bitcoin was the only way people could get their money out of the exchange, so you had to buy to transfer it out.

Coinbase is the #1 trending app in the iOS App Store right now. Crossing $10k is getting a lot of press and causing a lot of FOMO. The wall of dumb money about to enter is huge and may be able to keep this rally going for a while.

thats why i assumed that the previous peak had to do with a lot of press about bitcoin crossing $1000. but maybe it was just mtgox

This feels so much like a "Pyramid" scam, or "irrational exuberance" and markets are climbing with it, and for no good reason other than too much money in too few hands.

No doubt. There's a few parties with a lot of money to invest; I'm sure every once in a while they chuck a few million into the market, raising the price above a certain threshold. News outlets pick up on it, a lot of people's interest perks up, they buy quickly to ride the upwards wave, annnd the party that bumped the price up initially slowly sell off again. Easy 30% return on investment.

In this case it might be a bit more than 30%.

There was a story on the BBC News site about it crossing $10,000 just... well, today, actually.

Part of me is disappointed that I missed out on an opportunity to make an awful lot of money quickly when I wondered about buying some a couple of years ago and decided it was too dicey.

But then part of me thinks anything that has gone up in on-paper (on-screen?) value by an order of magnitude this year, and now roughly doubled in just the past month alone, is still surely being carried by pure hype, and some people are going to lose an awful lot of what they thought they had if it turns and they try to sell and find they can't.

the true investment apocalypse will happen when BTC falls back to below $1000 and the average Joe invest thinking that it is now so cheap. Then it's the time for bitcoin to be replaced by another coin and to fade away into nothingness.

Is this the hyper-deflationary collapse of a currency?

Hyperinflation gets all the rhetoric but currencies in fact have two different failure modes. (Well three if you count apocalypse but that's different.)

If this is failure, I'd love to see success...

A currency is only useful to the extent that it can be traded. Something which is 1 dollar one day and 10000 the next is worthless as a trading medium. It's why we don't buy and sell things in gold any more. We just sort of sit on it uselessly.

Well maybe some people really can’t live without bitcoins

Wow, it was hovering around $8,000 less than a week ago.

Let's turn back the time a few years, I want to make some adjustments to my investment.

It's time to buy.

That's exactly the sentiment that the large BTC traders want to share, so they can sell off the stocks they bought a week ago at 30% below what it is atm.

The correct time to buy is when the price is low. Is $11,000 low?

(No one knows)

that was in 2012 :)