You only lost money if you sold your bitcoins. If you bought bitcoins at the instant before the last crash, you'd still have more than doubled your money even now after the $30 drop. Bitcoin may crash to $1 tomorrow; who cares? The real question is where will Bitcoin be a year from now, and 10 years from now?

I don't think I can have 100% confidence that I would be able to cash out of bitcoins in an efficient manner 10 years down the line, so you have to discount for that risk (whether it be technology, new regulation, etc).

As much as I like the idea of BTC, it lacks fundamental structural features that would allow it to not eventually be revealed as a sham.

It doesn't have to be "revealed as a sham", it has to simply not be worthwhile to continue using. I see the speculators as being far more harmful to its long term viability than any nation-state.

As counterexample I bought bitcoins just before the previous crash. I haven't sold them an I kept them for nearly two years an I recently sold them with better profit then I could get anywhere besides actual casino.

I don't quite understand the reasoning here -- it seems like you're advocating a long-term buy and hold approach with bitcoins, based solely on the fact that they've recovered from every crash thus far? While bitcoins certainly have a lot going for them as a currency, I think it's the "bitcoins will keep going up, buy the dips" mentally of the true believers that makes this sound like a bit of a tulip craze.

I'm not advocating buying and holding bitcoins necessarily. I'm saying short-term buying and selling of bitcoins in an attempt to outsmart the market is a bad idea. If you're going to buy, do it because you think bitcoins are valuable over the long term, or because you want to pay for something with bitcoins. Otherwise, don't buy.

Fool me once, shame on etc.

Bitcoin only gets so many chances in the public eye.

It's broken through enough that enough people are paying attention to Bitcoin. And it's just in time to watch the textbook crash--(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Stages_of_a_bubble.png).

"Where will Bitcoin be a year from now?" Oh--isn't that that one currency that people lost a lot of money in 2013? Litecoin? BitBucks?

Good luck getting anyone to take it seriously again.

You could say the same re the stock market about various swings etc

In my opinion the current volatility is more a sign of the immaturity of the investors rather than the underlying concept being flawed (many markets are conceptually flawed and absurd from an independent viewpoint however human psychology maintains some weird interest in them that keeps them afloat)

The current volatility is clearly a bubble and the best explanation that I like is that all these computer nerds across the world who haven't been involved with stock markets before have dropped their cash on bitcoins and facilitated the bubble and are unaware of the law of bubbles; that is; that they pop

The stock market has at least some value in the equity owned, bitcoins are the ultimate castle in the air investment. That doesn't mean people shouldn't use them, but they're a pretty poor investment.

Bitcoins have at least some value on the Deep Web, the stock market is the ultimate castle in the air investment. That doesn't mean people shouldn't use it, but it's a pretty poor investment.

I continue to watch the Wall Street bubble unfold, fascinated, popcorn at the ready. In the end it'll be like sending herds of cattle through a cheese grater.

"No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the...public." -HL Mencken

Observing the last about 1 year of data (N = 363), BTC/USD has had an annualised daily volatility of 6 880 bps (100 bps = 1 percentage point). This is more volatile than the most volatile U.S. stocks.

What does this mean, practically? A Gaussian distribution is a bad fit for the data. Using the more appropriate Normal Inverse Gaussian (NIG) distribution [1], we find that this is an event that would be expected once every 3 1/2 years. Still seems high since just last August we saw a -24% day.

[1] http://www.unc.edu/~maguilar/UNCNCSU/NIG_EGW.pdf

This is what I want to happen. I want to market to crash so I can join it. I want to use bitcoins in personal projects. I want to try it out shopping, see what can be made with it, play with the projects that have done something with it.

Just not for 150 bucks.

You can join the market with $1, or $10, or $20... nothing says you have to buy at least 1 BTC. If Bitcoin continues appreciating, it may be $1000 US per BTC next year. That won't stop people that only want to spend $5 from transacting in it; it's designed to be divisible. You can hold and spend a fraction of a bitcoin. We don't round transactions to the dollar even in USD.

yes, but if I was gonna do that, I might as well tap bitcoin faucet or take a cruddy graphics card I have laying around and join a mining pool for a week.

I want to try buying things. No one's selling for 0.6 µBTC

Yes they will, everyone selling actual goods in BTC sells at the USD equivalent, if you previously wanted to play with X dollars of whatever currency you use, you can still play with X dollars of whatever currency you use.

If bitcoin will crash, I will definitely BUY.

I think there are a lot of people like me, and therefore I doubt it can crash really hard. There is no panic moment because I can afford to lose all my "investements".

It's basically (at least given the current climate of EU periphery countries) an instrument to place bets on consumer/investor confidence in the Euro. Now similar speculative behavior exists in other markets including currency, fixed income, etc, but bitcoins have such low transaction volumes compared to other avenues that its Beta (basically the "gain" in engineering terms) is going to be sky high.

On the other hand, I am sure that there are many waiting for this crash, looking to buy in, or buy more.

There's always a new entrant into any bubble, thinking this would be "the" ideal time :)

That said, I love the concept of BTC and could see using it at some point for some thing or other, the "investments" just give me such a sour taste that I don't even want to own any at any minor cost.

Price stability is the only way to lose the interest of the investment crowd. I think it will happen eventually, but it might be so far away that another similar currency might become preferred for exchange first.

s/investment/speculation/g

A crash today would effectively DDOS Mt. Gox. I don't think Mt. Gox would be able to stay up for the next crash. Hopefully... they're preparing for it.