I'm sticking to my price target of $2 by late June/early July[1].
Still no sign of adoption by any popular retailers, the majority of demand is coming from speculators, and the exchanges are getting slower every day (MtGox is down as I write this and the queue to open an account is several days deep).
At this point, BitCoin is still more of a toy than a currency.
If you believe this so heavily that you are already quoting your previous comment, why not short Bitcoins at https://icbit.se/? Surely you'd make a killing on it if what you believe is true.
It's easy to make grandstanding statements from the sidelines. If you're wrong, no one really remembers. If you are right, you get to harp on it whenever the subject comes up.
Much like housing, shorting BTC is hard to do. I have no idea if https://icbit.se/ is reliable. If BTC crashes will they actually have any money to pay out? I've played around enough with real currency trading to know that even the big reputable companies screw over the little players all the time.
If you're not really willing to put money down on your prediction for whatever reason, you should at least use Prediction Book. I even made the initial prediction topic for you: http://predictionbook.com/predictions/17184
The ratio of trade volume to transaction volume has been trending downwards since the start of the year. In other words, the growth in goods/services exchange has outpaced the growth in speculation (in terms of BTC, not USD). [1]
Further, it's inaccurate to generalize performance problems to all exchanges. MtGox is the only exchange that has these kinds of issues. I've never seen any lag on any other exchange. I'm still baffled as to why they've remained so popular for so long, but I do know it's not for lack of other well-performing exchanges.
Of course no one - including you - will remember your prophecy come August, but I am pretty sure you are wrong. Why? Because history does not repeat itself, esp. not when it comes to speculation.
That is quite possibly one of the stupidest statements I've ever read on HN, let alone the wider internet. We don't study history because we seriously think we can avoid making the same mistakes, really. We study history because we need to know what other people are going to get us entangled in because "this time, it's different".
Still no sign of adoption by any popular retailers, the majority of demand is coming from speculators, and the exchanges are getting slower every day (MtGox is down as I write this and the queue to open an account is several days deep).
At this point, BitCoin is still more of a toy than a currency.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5324722