Coinbase removed that delay. It's possible to sign up and buy within a few minutes. The coins are locked in a "pending" state, until you've verified your account quite thoroughly...but, they are bought on your behalf immediately. I think we've seen the spike from the senate hearings already, and have seen the correction afterward...setting a new lower bound for BTC (about $500USD), assuming nothing catastrophic happens.

I suspect we're in for another gradual climb with occasional dips and peaks until there's yet another media blitz around it. Whether it will reach a tipping point and become actual, you know, currency, for a large percentage of people is up in the air. But, it's already got some value for a lot of people.

A major retailer choosing to accept BTC as payment would be a logical next step for a media blitz. Think someone like Google accepting BTC as payment on the Google Play Store.

Agreed. If someone were planning the PR for Bitcoin, that'd be where they'd probably be working. It could be anything big, really...Heck, Starbucks isn't even that outlandish of a thought. It'd get Starbucks a lot of press, too.

Could you imagine if Amazon started accepting Bitcoin. The price would skyrocket.

I disagree. I think that there will still be a delay of another 3-4 days before the crowd that started getting interested around the senate hearings start to purchase.

For one thing, Coinbase has consistently run out of Bitcoins the last few days.

For another, I think a lot of folks will make their first purchase on Bitstamp, since it's really the biggest exchange now, and one of the most professionally run.

I've very rarely seen Bitstamp come up in any of these conversations. I know nothing about them...but, looking at their site, I can see that there's no way they will be preferred for first time BTC buyers from the US. It's not even a contest, because Bitstamp isn't even in the running for US buyers. Coinbase will fund your account via ACH from a US bank. Nobody else will. Thus, anybody wanting to start with Bitcoin in the US is going to go with Coinbase.

I'm gonna assume you're outside of the US; the difficulty and expense of sending an international wire from a US bank is rarely grasped by people outside of the US. My bank charges $40 for a wire transfer in US dollars, and more for one in the destination currency. My first BTC purchase was only ~$300...the wire transfer would have been more than 10% of that.

I agree that Coinbase running out of coins would have had an impact. But, I noticed that they were replenishing them relatively quickly...I tried to make a buy one evening, was told the daily coin limit had been reached, and an hour later was able to buy, and bought a little more the next morning.

I suspect they were sitting at their computers all night during the run up to $1000, trying to manage fraud while also trying to buy and sell as many BTC as possible.

Anyway, I'd be surprised if there's another big spike...but, a gradual climb back up to $1k and beyond does seem entirely realistic to me.

CampBX also transfers funds in and out via ACH, as well as money orders and domestic wires.

They're also a direct exchange, and if they started to run low on coins (thus driving the price higher), someone would happily provide more coins via arbitrage from elsewhere.

Couldn't someone use that to send false orders and then leave them there until they are cancelled? in order raise the price?

Coinbase has talked about fraud a few times. They obviously have a strong interest in preventing fraud, since they would be left holding the bag, if a massive price spike were followed by a massive drop.

They reportedly prevent about 3% of orders from going through for that reason (and I seem to recall there was someone complaining about it here in a previous HN thread, as they'd run into the fraud filters and couldn't place an order as rapidly as they wanted).

They also limit less verified accounts to buying (I think) 1BTC per day, so someone doing it to manipulate the market (rather than simply by BTC fraudulently) would need to create hundreds or thousands of fraudulent accounts, back them up with a US bank account (or some other supported funding source), and then get past the fraud filters.

To raise the daily buying limit you have to verify a credit card, and perform other verification steps. I think it's more careful than my bank about security; at least on the surface.

> now is a pretty good time to buy

Are you bonkers? Price rose nearly 10 times in about a week. That's practically textbook definition of a bubble. Wait until it crashes and comes down to 200$.