Reddit mentions of Thinking Statistically

I routinely construct predictive (Bayesian) models for a living (well, as part of my research work), and prior beliefs do get taken into account as part of the modelling process, often encoded as parameters of the model or in form of the choice of prior distributions. In fact, the priors greatly influence the resulting predictive distribution inferred from the data.

The first lesson we learn in modelling is to ask, "what are your modelling assumptions?", and depending on these, it is easy enough to make predictions that will say anything we want to say, like e.g. just throw the historical price data into an exponential model and you end up with $10k per million doges or BTC. Here the math all checks out but is that useful predictions? Not sure. In fact, model selection and over/under-fitting the training data are the big challenges in the field of 'data science' (such buzzword, wow).

So, the following are the assumptions that you seem to make in the posts above, leading to the conclusions in the main post:

• Crypto currencies will be more popular in the future. --> possible, but by no means certain
  
• We have reached a tipping point. --> nobody knows?
  
• They will only grow more popular. -> not sure
  
• Dogecoins have exceeded a critical adoption threshold -> again nobody knows, and like I said above, this community is slowing down.
  
• the next bubble is inevitable, the big explosion next year -> I sure want this to happen, but again we don't know. Doge might be like e.g. peercoin which is silently floating around in the background for years without much actions.
  
  I guess I'm saying, granted we are not constructing a predictive model here (in the mathematical sense) in this post, but we are implicitly doing that in our mind when we are guessing the chances of BTC/doge going to the moon -- and it pays to be aware of how the modelling assumption and our prior belief will influence the prediction outcome. Here's a good book for the layshibes interested in this subject:
  
  http://www.amazon.co.uk/Thinking-Statistically-Uri-Bram-ebook/dp/B005YOL2Z4