Datapoints show that you are wrong: despite deflation, it appears that bitcoins are not hoarded, or more precisely are hoarded less and less. See: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3504687&threshold=-1&commentsort=0&mode=nested&cid=43042029

Right. But my point is that if spending is shown to increase globally (which it is), we can infer that the remaining volume of bitcoins that are hoarded is diminishing (volume = number of bitcoins multiplied by frequency of transactions). Also, you need to realize that the ultimate goal of hoarders is to sell at some point in the future, in order to realize a profit. Therefore there is always going to be some amount of bitcoins available for purchase if the exchange rate continues to climb. See http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/mtgoxUSD_depth.html : the sell orders smoothly cover a price from $30 or so up to trillion of dollars. Therefore "lack of liquidity" is never going to be an issue - the exchange rate is just going to climb and entice some hoarders to sell.

Huh? By definition hoarding and spending are exclusive. A bitcoin cannot be hoarded and spent at the same time!

Of course they're being hoarded.

On the contrary, all the economic indicators point to the fact that, globally, Bitcoin spending is increasing: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5296889 Perhaps people are uncertain about Bitcoin's future, or are plainly irrational, hence they still spend bitcoins despite knowing about deflation.

Marry her. She changes both her official last name, and her pen name. And bam! the guy has to re-buy new domains matching the new name, and has to re-do the smear campaign from scratch :) And preferably, before she changes her name, pre-emptively buy domains before the ex-husband does.

Multiple errors in your post.

The Bitcoin difficulty has never been bumped up by ASICs, because ASICs have not yet been released. They should come out in December/January.

Mining is still profitable today. I am still making money with GPUs (a little), and with FPGAs (a lot). Even after the halving due tomorrow, my GPUs will still make money. It is all about electrical costs. If you pay less than $0.20/kWh, a HD 7970 can still make money. Worldwide average is $0.10/kWh.

ASICs are not expensive at all. The most power efficient ASIC vendor, Butterfly Labs, have ASICs starting at $149: http://www.butterflylabs.com/products/

I highly doubt the majority of the 40k coins circulate within MtGox without leaving it. Or else traders would erode their capital because MtGox charges hefty trading fees: https://mtgox.com/fee-schedule

This still means the 9M coins will trade in about 7-8 months. Or 3-4 months rather, since the MtGox volume has recently increased to 80k coins per day.

It is because people *think* they can profit more by day trading the coins, as opposed to merely hoarding them.

Did you read the part where I said 40k is SIX TIMES the number of coins introduced daily? This is not "irrelevant noise". 40k per day also means the entire market (9M coins) is traded every 7.5 months.

You are wrong. The "hoarding" argument has been beaten to death. Current evidence shows that people are NOT hoarding the coins: every day, 40 thousand coins change hands on the single largest exchange: http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/mtgoxUSD.html This is six times the number of coins created daily by the network (7 thousand).

In other words, people are not hoarding them, but are trading them very, very frequently.

And this is just measuring MtGox's volume. Other trades (merchant sales, other exchanges, etc) are likely doing even bigger volume...

Governments tend not to like their citizens taking part in transactions that don't have a paper trail.

You mean like... cash?

It's more than one engineer for god's sake... You too need to read the research papers!

We are just starting to be able to understand how to reliably reproduce it. See the table starting on page 16, more than a dozen groups have reproduced it: http://newenergytimes.com/v2/news/2012/2012Celani-WSEC.pdf

Believe it or not, I am willing to bet $5k that Ni-H cold fusion is real! We can use longbets.org Contact me at this.guy.from.slashdot@gmail.com

I give up. I gave you links from multiple independent research groups who show something needs explaining but you keep ignoring them... Read again from Thermacore, the CERN, Piantelli, Focardi, the Italian ENEA (equivalent to the US Dept of Energy). All are linked from http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=61 You have to read the research papers yourself and then make up your own mind.