NEW YORK (InsideBitcoins) — Technology industries are always on the verge of world domination or sudden collapse.Biotech, nanotech, robotics, AI and yes, cryptocurrencies, all live in a state approaching euphoria one day, followed by utter despair the next.Groundbreaking innovations are matched by earth shattering failures.There is no dearth of “news” to report.And so it was at the recent Bitcoin & the Blockchain Summit in San Francisco.Like many bitcoin conferences, one speaker enthuses the audience while the next confuses.Tales of technological limits, encroaching regulation and wary consumers can leave even the most enthusiastic devotee a bit deflated.But at the end of the one-day bitcoin-by-the-Bay conference, attendees were left with a rousing call to arms, led by Andreas Antonopoulos.Antonopoulos is a security expert, entrepreneur and high-vis bitcoin advocate.With the rigid countenance — and hairstyle — of a Star Trek TOS Klingon, Antonopoulos paced the stage and made his case for bitcoin, sans graphics or gamification — just a man, a mike and massive conviction.

The audience put away their smartphones, stowed their MacBooks and drank it in.The currency is a joke, but the technology… His first target: the media.“The media is refining the message, saying ‘The currency is a joke, but the technology — I don’t know, maybe there’s something there,'” he said.“Bitcoin is a currency, bitcoin is a network, bitcoin is a technology and you can’t separate these things.ethereum miner windowsA consensus network that bases its value on the currency does not work without the currency.” Bitcoin’s greatest strength: it’s dumb Then he dug into the reasons why bitcoin works, saying bitcoin is a dumb, transaction-processing network.ethereum raspberry pi“That is one of its strongest and most amazing features,” Antonopoulos proclaimed.uva bitcoin

It’s a dumb network that supports smart devices, pushing all of the intelligence to the edge.“That means if you build a new application on top of bitcoin, you can operate the end devices and you can build an application, and you don’t need to ask for anyone’s permission to innovate.It’s innovation without permission.It’s innovation without central approval.” [Read More: Andreas Antonopoulos Lays Out the 3 Pillars of Bitcoin Mass Adoption] Compare that to the current banking system, he said – built around very smart networks absolutely and tightly controlled to deliver very specific applications to very dumb end points.buy litecoin via paypalServices the bank decides to give their customers.bitcoin handel forum“When Visa innovates only Visa wins.litecoin hash rate gpu

If Bank of America makes something new and snazzy, they do it competitively and at the exclusion of every other bank that didn’t implement that feature.Bitcoin is a common resource whose use increases the value of that resource at the exclusion of no one.The power of pushing intelligence to the edge, of not making decisions in the center, moves the innovation into the hands of its end users.” The worst year in bitcoin And as far as 2014 being the ‘worst year in bitcoin,’ Antonopoulos says that’s only if you were paying attention to the price.bitcoin in-q-telIn fact, the year saw the deployment of two remarkable technologies: multi-sig and hierarchal deterministic (HD) wallets.bitcoin is crashing“Give us two years.litecoin 2014 chartNow what happens when you throw 500 companies and 10,000 developers at the problem?” “The companies that invented and deployed those two features did so in 2012 and we reap the benefits today.

And in 2014, during ‘the worst year of bitcoin,’ 500 startups received $500 million in investment generating tens of thousands of jobs — and none of that innovation has come back yet, because they just started.Give us two years.Now what happens when you throw 500 companies and 10,000 developers at the problem?Give (it) two years and you will see some pretty amazing things in bitcoin.” Antonopoulos finished with a prediction.“You put an open, decentralized ecosystem: open source, open standards, open networking and the intelligence and innovation pushed all the way to the edge — put that against a closed system, controlled by a central provider, whose permission you need in order to innovate and who will only innovate at the exclusion and competition of all of the other companies — and we will crush them.”Survey shows Bitcoin enthusiasts remain hopeful as ever that prices will rise From The News Desk “To the moon!”It’s become the preferred rallying cry of bitcoin’s faithful.

When prices were rising throughout the second half of 2013, crypto-anarchists and speculators were having the slogan printed on t-shirts and coffee mugs, while creating and sharing an endless stream of digital memes across message boards and forums.There were predictions of $10,000 and $100,000 bitcoin prices within the decade.With prices falling, slowly but steadily throughout 2014 (and, now, into 2015) the cheers were less confident, but no less exuberant.With each exclamation, bitcoin believers seemed to be saying, buy now while prices are artificially low because this wont last forever.Doubling down, they’d say, was the only smart move.So the question is, what is sentiment like today with prices ($236) being at their most depressed levels in 15 months?Asset management startup Hedgeable is attempting to answer that with a public survey asking people to estimate the one-year, two-year, and three-year bitcoin price.The company has divided the respondents into five categories: Bitcoin Enthusiast, Investor, Trader, Entrepreneur, and Media.

The company writes: Our bitcoin estimator allows the wisdom of the crowds to decide what the price of bitcoin will be over the next 1, 2, and 3 years.As part of Hedgeable's mission to provide sophisticated investing solutions to all investors, we are committed to offering the most robust bitcoin research and investing solutions.With an (admittedly limited) total of 155 votes cast, the consensus prices returned by the survey are that bitcoin will climb back to a price of $450 in one year, $800 in two years, and $1,852 in three years.It’s worth mentioning that the survey has seen the most respondents from the enthusiast category, at 72 votes, followed by entrepreneurs at 50, traders at 12, media at 12, and investors at 9 Perhaps it’s not surprising, given the inherent biases, that enthusiasts have already submitted two votes for a price of “$10,000+” over a one year time horizon, four votes for two years, and seven votes for three years among the enthusiast category.Entrepreneurs have been slightly more conservative, on average, with just two predicting that prices would reach five-figures within three years, and a handful more predicting that it would reach $3,000 to $5,000 over that same period.

Only one trader and one member of the media have bet on a price of $10,000 or more, both predicting it would take three years to achieve.No investors have been this bullish, with the most aggressive predictions being $2,000 in two years and $3,000 in three years.While the prevailing sentiment seems to be positive, there were some predicting doomsday scenarios.For example, one enthusiast predicts a price of less than $50 within three years.Two others predicted it would be less than $200.Two entrepreneurs predict sub-$50 prices, one within two years and the other within three years.Investors are holding to a much narrower band with their predictions, with each believing that bitcoin would remain above $300 on the low-end, over the next three years.Similarly, the most bearish prediction from traders is a price range of $100 to $150 in one year, and $200 to $250 in two years.If anything this data seems to indicate that professional investors and traders are more moderate in their predictions, indicating that bitcoin prices will neither rise nor fall to extreme levels in coming years.

Entrepreneurs and enthusiasts, who some might describe as unsophisticated, appear to be far more emotional with their predictions.Speaking to the significance of assembling this sort of data, Hedgeable CEO Mike Kane tells me via email: It is important because there is no place to get sentiment about bitcoin.Because it's such a nascent space, everyone is looking for opinions from experts on what the price will be, yet nobody has ever aggregated that data.We will be putting out periodic studies with analysis on this data, and as we get more data we will be able to track how sentiment is changing from different stakeholders, geographies, etc. This will help investors, entrepreneurs, and VCs, as they judge the potential for bitcoin.Bitcoin is still a very small community, and the data is quite fragmented and not easy to consume for the average person.Avid bitcoin venture investor Marc Andreessen* offered perhaps the most articulate assessment of the state of bitcoin prices beginning the year in one of his infamous tweetstorms.

He noted, among other things, that price volatility was part of the system design and necessary for its early growth.Moreover, Andreessen argued that many of the most interesting applications for bitcoin and its underlying blockchain are price and volatility independent: 23/The price of BTC has very little to do with the level of creativity of thinking that's going into new Bitcoin apps, or their usefulness.— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) January 5, 2015 As we have seen over the last 18 months, bitcoin prices can move wildly both on the back of significant industry news and macroeconomic factors and when driven purely by emotions market momentum.The reality is that none of the above respondents knows where bitcoin is headed.But as has come to be expected, the consensus in the community at large seems to be that bitcoin prices will rise over time.Have you bought your digital treasure?--- Submit your vote and see the real-tim Hedgeable bitcoin price estimates below: (*Disclosure: Marc Andreessen is an investor in Pando.)