+1

And I'll elaborate:

I guess that some of you are following the progress of Safebit, so some of you know that I'm raising funds to make really something out of it and not leave at a "open-source bitcoin wallet" status that most of the wallets out there are stuck on.

During the last couple of months, I've started meeting with very interesting people in the world of finances and high-tech, and I'm very surprised at how far and wide the idea of Bitcoin has spread.
There is only a handful of people in those areas who haven't heard about bitcoin at all, they may not know it by heart as we do, but they are listening and looking, following the progress.
I'm talking about Fortune 500 companies, venture capital, angels, financial companies, and technological companies. Everybody seems to know about bitcoin.

Their take on the idea itself is as varied as we see here on the forums, it seems that some think that it's passing fade, others are sure it's the next best thing, while some think that's it's like the Napster and we're still waiting for our Bittorrent (which I disagree with, because Bitcoin is already at the Bittorrent stage imho).

What most of the people here think wrongly is that this forum is any indication of what's really going on. There are numerous start-ups and entrepreneurs out there trying to make Bitcoin the big success that we all think it could be, and there are business people who are putting money on those ideas and people.

Currently 90% of the development we see in Bitcoin is catered by developers who invest their time into it without seeing a coin out of it (well, not true in this case, but you get the drift), open-source is sweet and all, but you can't build businesses and economy around open-source and free developers, it just doesn't work.

Soon, 6-or-so months from now, we'll start seeing high-quality work coming out of those not-free developers, where high-end products will start to dominate the Bitcoin landscape and bringing in more and more outsiders that would take interest in Bitcoins' great features and the fact that you don't need to pay for transactions of any size, and the fact that Bitcoin is unregulated and extremely hard to trace, this especially will cater to black-market, which is part of any market, and also porn. It's not coincidence that porn were the first businesses we saw using Bitcoins.

We all know that Bitcoin has boat-load of advantages over the existing monetary system in terms of transaction fees, regulation, and anonymity. We are all here because of those feature, and it's interesting not only us, but everybody around the world. Most just haven't heard about Bitcoin yet.

The price of Bitcoin does not reflect anything, it's pure speculations. People are making a lot of money by playing with the price of Bitcoin, but for now the only things that people are buying with Bitcoins are USD and drugs, but that's going to change soon with the advent of high-quality developers backed by high-equity funding.

You don't have to believe me, and I even may be wrong, but just wait. And for those who are selling their coins because of the fear - I say good! at least there are buyers

It's failing because nobody is going to buy a solid house on a shitty foundation.


solid house-> bitcoin
shitty foundation -> internet.

Freenetgeek?

Where have you been the last two months of rape and pillage?

Exactly. I am a developer. Money is not the issue.

I've started a big project, now it is on hold for several month already.

Reasons? Total mess and lack of clear leadership of BitCoin (not that I pretend), uncertain BitCoin fate with all the scandals, hacks, legal problems, scalability issues, and again - the general mess and the amount of morons, nobody can do anything about.

It's just a mess now. I guess we have to let it sort of die out, the price to drop to 1-2 dollars, morons get tired and move to new online "adventures" and then this project can quietly and slowly begin to evolve into something usable...

A wise man speaks!

Yeah, I personally welcome the fear mongers here for this very reason.  I think it's good to scare away the skittish speculators.  It'll inspire much more confidence if prices rise due to proven utility, rather than hopeful expectations.

Wild growth combined with infrastructure not ready to support it has been a pretty bad mix so far.

Thank you for a reasonable post. We got ahead of ourselves in many ways, and like it or not this price drop will give us time and reason to focus on real challenges. We'll lose most of impatient (now upset) speculators who were only doing damage to the system hoping to profit fast out of thin air. Good riddance.
The past year or so, if nothing else, has taught us that even in this early stage Bitcoin is resilient - it survived major attacks and scams, and a speculation bubble. I'll keep mining, and I look forward to exchanging my coins for goods and services. Not tomorrow, not next month.  

FINALLY!!!

Lets talk about your projects! About the Bitcoin development... Do not be discouraged now because of the apparent mess, it's easy to rearrange and, maybe this is just a cloud of dust in front of a great thing... The Bitcoin itself... It is there, shining, but we only can see it through the Hubble Space Telescope infrared cams... lol

The Bitcoin development needs of nontechnical people involved. And this asks for a kind of "Interface" to the Bitcoin future, where everybody can participate.

The Bitcoin-Development mailing list as a few messages per day... I'm reading it one per week, I like it... Go ahead and sign up there!

Best!