People can get in on it now, yes - if they're aware.  Awareness isn't there.  Hell, my neighbor didn't even know the OWS protests were going on in the first place.

Raising awareness now about Bitcoin doesn't bode well.  The trend is down, and once it gets super-low, we have another distribution problem - one entity with a reasonable ammount of wealth can 'gobble up' all the cheap ones, and put is right into a speculative bubble.  Rinse/repeat, with no real room for reliable business transactions.

What I'm primarily concerned about is IF the variables in BTC (x coins at y rate, etc) are correct to nourish an economy before people just 'give up'.

Edit: Also, the lower the prices go, the more miners turn off their rigs, the conceptually easier it becomes to pull off a 51% attack on an exchange.

It was never worth any of those figures, the drop proves this. I doubt it's even worth even $2 mil atm.

+1

Founder, I really wish you would study this topic a bit deeper until you understand what evoorhees and others here are trying to tell you.  The price of a bitcoin multiplied by the number of bitcoins mined tells you zilch about anything.  Trying putting up 10,000 bitcoins for sale and see what that does to the price of a bitcoin and your "total value of the bitcoin economy" figure.  I imagine that would be sufficient to push the price of a bitcoin to below $1, in which case you have to ask yourself where the other $10+ million of value went if all you collected was less than $30k and the total economy is then worth only about $7million.

You are correct that the continued generation of coins will put downward pressure on the price of bitcoin.  If there's no growth in the use of bitcoin then short of another speculative bubble, the price of bitcoin will continue to fall.  You can flexbank on it, so plan accordingly.

As for rebooting bitcoin...it's already been done at least a half a dozen times...see the alternative crypto currencies section of this forum.  There, you'll find a graveyard of reboot attempts.

There is nothing wrong with the bitcoin generation function (and there's nothing particularly magic about it either).  The only thing that was wrong were expectations about how quickly people would start using bitcoin or what price was necessary to support real economic activity using bitcoin (which I think is probably well below $1).  I think even the run up to dollar parity was almost purely speculation.  If you think of it in terms of a stock P/E ratio, it's like bitcoin was trading at a 300x multiple and it simply didn't have the growth rate to justify that...and now it's falling back to a much more modest and appropriate P/E ratio.

Gah more fallacy heaped upon fallacy!

Gold is not worthless. Just because it's not for eating, nor for building things, doesn't mean it's worthless. It is attractive to people in ornamentation and that is where its original value comes from. On top of that, it is used as a money because its properties make it very effective for this specific purpose. Gold's value as money is not arbitrary... in fact it is almost inevitable given the geographic makeup of the Earth and the properties inherent in the gold element.

So people did not just "decide" that gold had value - it has value because of its usefulness and its properties. The same goes for Bitcoin - it has value because of its usefulness and properties as an international frictionless payment system. Specifically with Bitcoin, it is the protocol which has use value, and the Bitcoin units have market price because their supply is scarce and they are the only units usable with the Bitcoin protocol.

If you really want to claim that helium is more valuable than gold, because it's more useful, then you've lost your final credibility as an economic thinker  . Gold's primary value is in its effectiveness as money - this is an elementary concept. Money, as a "good," is far more useful than helium, and thus gold (being useful as money) is correctly priced above helium in the marketplace. The demand for money FAR outweighs the demand for birthday baloons (and whatever else helium is used for), so even if helium is more scarce it will still command a lower price than gold.  

Actually it's government manipulation in the market   you might see the price of Helium skyrocket in terms of an overnight WTF just happened moment.

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/07/science-policy-gone-bad-may-mean-the-end-of-earths-helium.ars

zlol   

If I had 20million USD laying around I'd probably buy out the current BTC market.

Or maybe offer an insurance backing service of some sort, insuring the value of your BTCs up to $1 each.

It's not necessary for one person to put up money to buy out the whole market...lot's of individuals with smaller amounts would do that as the price creeps lower.  The floor price is set by the demand for coins for facilitating commerce (which we know is not much right now).  Anything above that floor represents savings demand (aka speculation).

Here are some wild guess about what is needed for actual commerce today.  If you assume 10,000 people wanted to retain $100 worth in bitcoin just to have on hand for spending, then the implied price of bitcoin would be $0.13.  If 100,000 people wanted have $100 spending money, or 10,000 wanted to have $1,000 in spending money, then the implied price is $1.30.  $100 seems like a reasonable bare minimum that someone interested in using bitcoin for commerce would want to have on hand for spending.  Currently, I'd guesstimate that the fundamental value of bitcoin is definitely less than $1 and probably less than $0.25.  Everything above that reflects the savings (speculation) demand.  Of course, if actual commerce with bitcoin slows down, then the fundamental value could fall as well.  And, inflation is always eating away at the price.

One area of commerce that I've found bitcoin to be particularly convenient is paying for software related services (programming, website design, logos, graphics, etc).  I think if someone put together a nice site focused on software development related services where people could offer their talents in exchange for bitcoin, it might help get some more commerce going.

What happens if the market wants 10 cents per BTC ?  Everyone goes there to sell at 13 cents..  Until all the funds run out?  Then it goes to 10 cents right after?

it means people value BTC at 10 cents... this organization is paying 13 cents...   so it becomes buyer of last resort,  and at the end it shelled out all it's money buy the BTC .. but can't offload them at the price they paid for them.

I understand the reasons for backing them,  I don't understand the reasons on why anyone can do it profitably.