re: Predict the 12/31/2014 bitcoin price (plus 2013 year in review)

quote:

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what is stopping a govt with supercomputers from shutting it down now?

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I think it's the lack of hard resources. The ASIC miner's that are used for Bitcoin mining are very expensive and even harder obtain. The manufacturer that are producing them are extremely shady. It also wouldn't be in the manufacturer's best interest to accept a contract to produce the ASICs for the government, due to most of the company's money is being held in BTC. If they knew that BTC was about to plummet then they would dump all of their's and crash the market to oblivion, because I would assume that they have millions, if not billions of dollar's worth of BTC.

Speculation is that Butterfly Labs(the largest maker of the ASICs) uses the mandatory deposit, around 30% or several thousand depending on the device you're purchasing) to cover the overhead of the device. All the while, they are using your device to mine and delay shipment of upwards of 3 months. They have delayed shipment in just about every scenario that I've read.

The government could pay someone to reverse engineer the chips and waste tons of money on a "problem" that isn't even that big of a deal in the whole grand scheme of things.