Quote from: danconia on March 27, 2013, 10:23 amQuote from: Aurelius Venport on March 27, 2013, 09:41 amwhat makes you think they will go that high? not critique, just curious what your position is on it.Everyone will have differing opinions but here is my bottom line: supply can only increase at a limited rate while demand is growing exponentially. How many people heard of BTC 6 months ago? How about now? The truth is that BTC are incredibly useful... not just for illegal activity but also for ease of transaction and *gasp* hiding income / activity from being taxed.The very very large majority of people who would want to use BTC still haven't even heard of the currency. The same variety of reasons that we here are using them are the same reasons that other people will want to use them (once they know about them). In my honest opinion the only two serious threat I can think of are a.) someone hacking or cracking the algorithm and producing a ton of BTC for super cheap or b.) another digital currency that is better replacing it. Since there is a sort of "tipping point" for currencies (ie they are useless unless a decent number of people are using them) then perhaps the latter concern is moot for the medium to long-term.Some people are even pointing to some of the economic crises going on and how governments are grabbing more and more of people's money. They would have serious challenges even attempting it with BTC.These are just my opinions and I'm sure others here have ones that differ.Definitely differing opinions, to be sure. The algorithm being cracked is extremely unlikely. A mathematical breakthrough could render them trivial to mine, sure, but I doubt it's going to happen within a decade let alone soon. As for governments not being able to take them, what a bitcoin wallet really is is a collection of public keys (the bitcoin addresses) and private keys (the unshown part that allows you to "own" a bitcoin address). It's very similar to PGP keys; Bitcoins are just public key cryptography applied to something totally different than message encryption. The government can't take your bitcoins any more than they can crack your high-bit-count PGP encrypted messages.The funny part is that the private key is basically the same thing as a password. Except the private key doesn't protect anything except itself. There's nothing there. It's just a bitcoin address that the blockchain records say has received a certain amount of coins. Whoever has the private key is capable of generating bitcoin transactions using that address, and so they can send them to any other address. I just get a kick out of the fact that bitcoin wallets are just locks & keys to little boxes that hold -- absolutely nothing. Yet their price is going up practically by the minute :)