RE: Discuss: Bitcoin; How high will it go?
I think the upcoming network split in October is the elephant in the room here. I think that if the "2X" part in SegWit2X launches successfully and without any noteworthy incidents, the moon is the limit. It may also grow if the 2X-part is dropped.
Currently, neither of those are on the trajectory, currently it seems like we'll have a network chain split, and it's going to be much worse than the "Bitcoin Cash"-split (some people withdrew their bitcoins from the exchanges to make sure they would possess the cash-part of the bitcoin cash, some exchanges closed down withdrawals/deposits just to make sure, except for that it really was a non-event).
There will be no replay protection (so a signed transaction will be valid at both chains unless the coin owner has gone through hoops to make sure to split his coins), "ordinary folks" will possibly have no idea which side of the chain split their wallet happens to be at, and people will fanatically scream that their chain is the one and only proper Bitcoin chain.
Much can happen before October, though - and I believe markets will react swiftly on positive or negative news regarding the upcoming split.
I agree that we have some fun times ahead. How do you feel about the reference to moores law when it comes to btc? So far, despite crashes and tech changes, it doubles every 8 months.
I'm not sure that Moores law applies to the block propagation latency - it was argued that even 1MB is too big, as miners far away from the Chinese mining centers would be wasting significant time mining atop at an old block. Then again, with technology like Matts relay network, heads-first mining, xtreme thinblocks, FIBRE, etc, the argument is not relevant anymore.
The argument that the hardware requirements are too heavy for "ordinary people" to run their own nodes - at one hand, I can feel it myself as the equipment I had dedicated for this purpose doesn't work out anymore (I turned my node off - one of my servers didn't have enough memory, the other didn't have enough disk). Then again, everyone that really has a need for running their own node can afford setting one up - and I bet the total amount I've paid in mining fees amounts to several dedicated computers running Bitcoin Core or similar software.
I just realized that you never answered my question lol. I know that it is pure speculation but it is still fun; how high do you think this run will go? How long?
Come again, what was the question?
In Bitcoin context, Moores law is usually used to explain that network growth can be handled by increasing the block size, and that the cost of resources handling the network growth will stay constant due to Moores law. The usual counter-argument is that the biggest problem with bigger block is the latency involved in broadcasting new blocks. The bandwidth available is growing, but not at the rate predicted in Moores law. Hence my answer above.
Until the 1st of October - unless news appear in the scaling debate, the bitcoin price will not grow more than 5%. According to my own tracker, the current market rate is 27244 NOK/BTC, so at the 1st of October I believe it will be 28606 NOK/BTC. (I don't follow the USD rates, they are pretty much irrelevant for me).
Then again, I believe we'll see a lot of black swans before that time. Bitcoin price could collapse on bad news - it may be that we're in a bubble now. If the SegWit2X vs Core issue is resolved in a good way, we may see the price double.
Apropos Moores law, I have an anecdote ... I was doing some DBA work in my previous work place. We had one central database server, and we were always pushing it hard. The database server was constantly "bleeding edge" - the very best "ordinary" server we could get. We often we had performance problems - and most of the time we solved the performance problems by upgrading the hardware. We were efficiently surfing on Moores law to keep up with business growth and growth of database size.