Good luck! I'm hoping I can buy some and, withing a few months, exchange for USD and use that to pay some rent I owe. It'd be pretty sweet. How long have you been into BitCoin?

Also, I noticed the "bubble" seems to be crashing right now. I'm arguing with people that it will just go back up, so there's no point to worry. Too bad I didn't know about this when BTC was super cheap! I could have bought a hundred of them. xD

Predictions are hard...especially about the future.

I'm fairly new, looking at my transactions got my first 0.05 from the faucet on March 23 and first 1BTC from a pool on March 30 using the GTX285 I had at the time. Only thing I've invested in since is a 5970 card and bought 120BTC when they were closer to $US1 so will hardly be a millionaire but all going well should be a nice little bonus.

A year or so ago I cashed out some jars of $AUD coins I'd been collecting for years and had $6K for some nice photography gear, I was thinking it would be cool in a few years to have enough bitcoins to do something similar and splash out on something . Hopefully it should be a bit easier though, that quantity of fiat coins almost broke my back getting them to the bank .

All this aside, what is the maximum potential value of a BTC? (Let's say the debt ceiling stays at where it is for the US).

I've heard 650k for one BTC. Is that true?

If Bitcoin kills governments, fiat money will be worthless, so its value should rather not be measured in USD. But I guess you are talking about the purchasing power of today’s USD.

My thought is that gold is a better reference than dollars.  In a "bitcoins are the worlds currency" situation and the total value of all btc equals the total value of all the gold in the world then a back of the envelope calculation puts 1btc worth about 476 oz of gold, or $714,000 at todays dollar value.  We probably have a few more months to go before we get there.