CRASH!

Bitcoin peaked at $266 today.  After that it bounced around ~$250 for awhile before starting to crash.  The crash was gradual at first, but became a panic sell as mtgox choked and died.  With trade lag of over an hour, mtgox has become completely unusable for anything other than panic selling.

Personally, I welcome a correction, I think it will allow for higher bitcoin value in the follow months and years, but the mtgox lag makes this unbearable.  I wanted to sell a few of my "play" bitcoins to get some USD into my trade account around $200, but with the engine lag this was impossible.

Some suspect the lag isn't just mtgox being mtgox.  Other exchanges were also lagged and difficult to use.  Even the bitcointalk.org forums were unusable at times.  Was it a criminal DDOS attack, or just too many people trying to find out what was going on at once?  In either case we need strong infrastructure.  More forums, more exchanges, etc.

I'm just going to wait it out and see where things go.  I foresee several possibilities.  There could be a very fast recovery and bitcoin value could even exceed the $266 high in a day or two.  There could be a fast partial recovery, as investors scramble to buy the cheaper coins, but value might take some time to fully recover.  Or there could be several months or even a year of depressed value and gradual loss of value in bitcoin.  The possibility I don't believe could happen is the death of bitcoin.  It's come too far and it's been invested in too much to simply die out for no reason.