No need to ostrichize anyone
LOL; That's some funny shit.
I've been around long enough that I'm pessimistic on it. I seem to remember that e-gold lasted over 10 years, while bitcoin just barely hit the 5 year mark. We'll see if it even lives long enough to match what e-gold was.
Yep, we'll certainly see.
The question is, how many coins will you have in your possession on that day?
Anyone have stats on bitcoins usage in non "black market" type transactions? I've seen that huge list of bitcoin merchants but it might as well be craigslist since it's a bunch of small and independent ecommerce sites. I know you can see the daily transaction volume but right now it's a noisy metric due to speculation, are there any details from larger merchants like namecheap or reddit on what percent are using bitcoin vs paypal/credit card?
Black market? No. When the silk road was taken down, bitcoin only dipped for hours, and has been shooting up like a rocket ever since.
I don't think the black market using bitcoins is a measurable part of our economy at all; maybe a few thousands worth daily.
It's those 20,000+ merchants and Chinese speculators that account for mostly all of the bitcoin price. Since BTC China is only available to chinese bank account holders, it's easy to quantify that volume by looking at the volume on BTC China.
Bitpay, coinbase, and the other vendor services aren't giving volume for their customers but occasionally hint that the number is very large.
As for the the rest, all I can do is point you to this:
Coinometrics
That's like the official scoreboard. We hope to destroy Western Union and paypal both in the next couple of years, which according to that chart would put the price of bitcoin x5 at least, or @ $1,500 minimum.
