There is no "low-hanging" fruit for P2Pool
Some bloggers have recently been claiming that P2Pool adoption can be increased by addressing so-called "low-hanging fruit," which in software development generally refers to issues that require little time to resolve and provide a significant benefit. The idea is that the serious technical challenges could be postponed until later because the little things done now would make those serious challenges less pressing.
P2Pool has some issues that could prevent pools from adopting it, but it is naive to claim that doing things like changing the P2Pool website address is one of them. Apparently, p2pool.in is the official P2Pool site. P2Pool.org is a pool that runs on top of P2Pool and charges a fee. The flaw with the reasoning of "low hanging fruit" is that if people were indeed being fooled into thinking that P2Pool.org is P2Pool's official site, then the results won't make any difference in P2Pool's hashrate anyway. Since P2Pool.org is a "P2Pool pool," people joining the .org pool would simply add to P2Pool's hashrate. Therefore, spending lots of money in an attempt to acquire the P2Pool.org domain is unlikely to have any effect on the actual P2Pool hashrate.
Why bitcoins aren't widely used
I want to devote a section today to examine why bitcoins aren't widely used now. First, everyone can agree that bitcoins have some issues with how they are implemented now, like a lack of insurance and so on. However, despite the shortcomings, I still think it's pretty clear that bitcoins, even in their current state, are already superior to the other options. Anyone trying to send money internationally has found that out long ago. Trying to pay someone with PayPal is a significant challenge, and requires both parties to have a PayPal account and to incur large fees in the transaction.
Meanwhile, if you want to send money to someone without worrying about volatility, you can at the very least have two people sign up for Coinbase accounts. The Coinbase signup process is less difficult than the PayPal signup process. The fee totals are only 2%, instead of 2.9% plus 30 cents, and Coinbase will pull the money out of the account just in time. If you want to buy things at most stores, you can save large amounts of money using the gift card sites, which can save 3% or even 6%.
And it isn't true that it is particularly difficult to secure bitcoins using this method. Simply choosing a strong password and enabling two-factor authentication will be good enough for the majority of people who aren't holding thousands of bitcoins. Therefore, there is something that is preventing uptake of bitcoins quickly as many people here believed that is unrelated to the benefits of the technology. I do not agree with the assertion that ease of use is preventing bitcoin adoption anymore. A few months ago, that might have been true, but the technology has advanced rapidly and anyone who can go to a website (the most basic form of Internet usage) can sign up for Coinbase.
The stubbornness of the market to move isn't due to usability follies; it's due to something else, whether it be the development issues I talked about, less interest by institutions than believed, or something else.
Why usability is a false argument
I just wanted to add one short section about why the "usability" issue is an excuse that does not explain the reason for the price movement. It doesn't require a lot of explanation or many paragraphs.
Why is usability suddenly an issue now, but it wasn't an issue during the harder-to-use times when buyers were running up the price to $1100?
What happens if a new all-time high isn't reached
On Friday, I spent a paragraph discussing the effects on the bubble cycle if a bubble doesn't form within a week or two of July 24. Long ago, I discussed how we would know that the cycle has broken, but I realized since then that the cycle may not break at all. There has been precedent in the earlier cycles for there to be "false" bubbles that cause only a slight rise before another period of bad news and stagnation, but where the price still remains above the lower boundary.
Therefore, I'll suggest that there are three possible outcomes as the July 24 date approaches. First, the rise begins and the cycle resumes. Second, the cycle breaks because the price falls below the lower boundary, and I and a lot of people were wrong. Third, this is one of those "false bubbles" where there will be a crash, followed by another few months of bad news like happened earlier this year, with the next bubble not happening for another 235 days or so.
Of the three, I'd probably say that #1 or #3 are more likely, because I don't see what has changed in the fundamentals to cause the cycle to break.
Cannot extrapolate to a longer cycle
There is a fourth possible outcome that I discount because it does not seem likely to me, but in which other commenters have placed some credence. This outcome is the idea that the current bubble is delayed until September. The reason that I discount the suggestion is because there is little evidence to support the assertion. The theory of a "longer cycle" seems to be a way of changing the data to fit the prediction.
Looking at the charts, the current price movement does not resemble any phase of any of the other cycles. In the other cycles, there has been a crash, followed by a stability period, then a rise. Some people say that there has been a second stability period after the first, but even if they are right, those periods did not result in a decline like the current period has. Rather than the auction producing a run or a crash, there has been the perplexing behavior of bitcoins slowly losing value, which is simply a continuation of the trend that was in place before the auction occurred. Those with a short time horizon might think we are in a bear market, given that the predominant trend has been a slow leeching of money out of the system despite hundreds of "good news" stories. This behavior is not like the upside of any previous bubble.
In /u/moral_agent's bubble charts, there are few slow downtrends anywhere, let alone in the upside of bubbles. We can continue to use the current model without needing to massage the data if we acknowledge that we are starting turn into a bear market rather than suggesting the model failed and that we can fix it by making this cycle 300 days long.
Should this pattern continue, people are going to see this slow decline, look at the calendar, and realize that something is different this time. Bad news will give people excuses to sell. That's why, if things don't turn around soon, there will be a crash that ends this cycle. The number of people who are precariously perched in massive long positions will see a huge squeeze, hastening the crash. However, since the high of $680 won't have been that high, we could probably expect the end of this bubble to be less dramatic than the end of the previous bubble in December. In that case, we wouldn't expect the next really high bubble to form until mid-March.
If this were /r/bitcoinmarkets, I think that if things don't turn around within two weeks, I would change my flair to bearish. A failure for this bubble to occur doesn't mean that it will just be delayed a month; it means that it will be a weak, false bubble, and we won't see any significant gains until early next year as the next cycle approaches.
Why good news doesn't affect the markets
As a final thought on this issue, it's almost a given that bad news causes crashes, while merchant adoption and good news doesn't affect the markets. But that hasn't always been the case. In November, good news like the Senate hearings caused astronomical rises. What if that assumption is wrong, and the cycle dictating people's reaction to the news is correct? In the past week or two, it seems that the bad news, like that European ruling, is starting to have an effect again.
This supports the notion that perhaps this bubble already peaked, with the date moving towards the past, not the future, as I suggested it might. We may already be in a downtrend and won't know it until we see it in retrospect.
Other
- Days until July 24: 17