[quote author=oda.krell link=topic=178336.msg5385505#msg5385505 date=1393424229
Just a few of those reasons, just from the top of my head: (1) the formerly largest exchange was run amateurishly, and was punished accordingly. (2) cheap mtgox coins that would have otherwise flooded the market are now unavailable to arbitrage down the price. (3) Mtgox investors will look to "replace" their coins (not all of them, of course. But those who *do* want to replace them will have to buy them again.
[/quote]

(1) ... end exposed a real risk to people investing real money: none of the exchanges provide any sort of real security. Investing is much more risky than in any other sort of typical investment.
(2) ... and the other half of the equation: money used to buy the mtgox coins is also unavailable.
(3) ... but given (2), not many investors are likely to be buying back to the same levels.

Until there's certainty around the mtgox situation (and not just the rampant speculation) it will be a drag on the markets.  

If true, it'll be be interesting to see which came first: the shutdown or the subpoena?

Precisely. How much money was deposited into MTgox to buy coins vs. how many coins held there were mined? If $480M had been deposited, MTgox would not be in the situation is is now. The $7B market cap of BTC is based on a small percentage of coins having been purchased. Certainly $7B wasn't spent to buy the coins.

Assuming it wasn't a dump of stolen coins.

I doubt there's been half a billion invested in BTC yet (i.e., most coins are mined and untraded). Price is based on relatively thin trading vs. the total number of coins in circulation, which means anyone trying to liquidate 850K coins, can't.

Based on?

My sense is that nobody has a clue what's going to happen, and that looking at the same set of facts most predictions will tend to align with the wishes of the person making the prediction.

What's fantastical about the observation that predictions align with wishes? Unless you've got a fantastical crystal ball you can't know what's going to happen. I'm merely pointing out that a set of facts or rumour will be interpreted many ways, and people on these message boards will usually interpret them to support their wants.  The MTGox news is the just the latest example: bulls see it as bullish in the long run, bears see it as bearish.

It's not fantasy, it's just observing the bias we all have.

Where's the $21M?

Assets - Liabilities = -$22.57M, hence the need for declaring bankruptcy.

Coins aren't included - it states fiat assets.

Other creditors will be paid ahead of customers.  MTGox filed for a "similar to chapter 11" bankruptcy, so the business isn't being wound up. It's premature to talk about assets being distributed and, as the original poster predicted, reinvested into BTC.

Theories based on an influx of money to buy lost coins are wishful thinking at best.

Where does the money $75M for the 150K coins come from? People don't re-buy lost investments like that - the money invested is gone. Add in the likelihood that most of the stolen coins were mined, not bought, which even more unlikely to be re-bought.

The reality is people far underestimate their own biases in their thinking. People may be informed, but how they use the information will be affected by their biases. We all filter information, and tend to dismiss or undervalue information that doesn't support our theories, and overvalue information that does. It's human nature.

The force is strong in this one...

Nah, just more fanciful "goxxed people will re-buy the BTC they lost" thinking.

Average isn't a homogenous group, it's representative of the net effect of what all do.

Exactly!

What was the max ask quantity seen on GOX? 35K, 40K, 50k? Certainly much less than 10% of what was held there. Better still, what was the max FIAT bid? $15M or so? So that's perhaps 25K coins to be rebought, assuming all the cash lost can easily be replaced and the holders would want to reinvest in BTC. More importantly most coins were mined, and mined coins aren't going to be replaced by buying.

There may be good reason for BTC to rise in value, but gox loss replacement isn't one of them.  It's simplistic thinking.

Are you referring the herd inside the BTC community?

Your outright dismissal of the article is exactly the type of cultish behaviour the author is talking about - dismiss anything that doesn't fit the faith view.

What concrete contributions has bitcoin made? It certainly hasn't changed the world yet, and it's highly unlikely it will without some drastic change to the limited exchange problem. The killer app for BTC could be transferring money online, but that only works if it can be easily converted to local currency.

 

Absolutely. Slow and steady I can see.  It's the hype that's nutty - predictions of a 10x increase in value again with little to drive it. It's the hype that the author is talking about.

That same argument could be used by any belief system dismissing an article pointing out the behaviour.

And the faithful will stay in their echo chambers shouting down or dismissing the unbelievers, while saying the rest of the world will eventually see the light.

Cryptocurrencies need to overcome limitations to become more widely accessible and useful. Those within the community may be better suited to see limitations if they can remove the blinders.

What's been logically proven to be wrong in the article being discussed?

Billions of dollars? Really? That's hype on a whole new level.

In other words, little if anything has been.

BTC price has outpaced any sort of reasonable standard, which is not to say it has zero value (obvious, since there are people willing to trade dollars for BTC).  But it's purely a speculation play at this point.

The value ascribed to BTC innovations is overstated because those innovations are really what cryptocurrencies bring - they aren't available to just  BTC.

Is this an attempt to run off one of the unfaithful?

I'm here for the same reason any of us: talk about BTC.  That doesn't mean I have to be part of the echo chamber though. Once in a while it's handy to have an unbeliever in the midst, just in case the emperor really is naked.

Like most here, I'm a BTC speculator - I do hold some, and even lost some when GOX collapsed. My investment in BTC infrastructure is limited to the few bucks I've paid in exchange fees though. I've been pleasantly surprised by the price increase since the spring of 2011, but I don't believe the price accurately represents any underlying value yet. The price thus far has been determined by limited investment of money, so the market cap is on paper only. Total investment divided by total coins available would be a much smaller number.

In other news: somebody set up us the bomb.

That's certainly the theory, but practice shows it's viewed as a store of value with a price set in terms of its power to purchase other currency.

By meaningful do you mean "agreeable only"? Certainly that's what it looks like. And that's the cultist attitude that's so vehemently denied: shouting down all those who refuse toe the party line. Nutty conspiracy theories suggesting those not 100% in agreement are from a big bank to undermine bitcoin don't help with the image.

There's far more to be gained by having open conversation.

Awesome!

Most aren't even aware that everyone is biased.

But Jorge is at least up front about his - check his signature.

Surely we can agree that a one paragraph statement is not at all equivalent to an audit report? All it shows is they did an exercise to prove there's a certain number of BTC held at Bitstamp, which is arguably far more than most exchanges provide, but it's far short of an audit report.

At a minimum it'd be nice to see report attached to a balance sheet listing customer assets and liabilities (BTC and fiat) stating the auditors have verified it is correct.

We all know bitcoin evolved. Only the cultist wing-nuts believe it was created.

Only the true believers can see the secret message: he's telling us BTC will be worth 10 billion-gazillions by the end of the year!  BUY, BUY, BUY!

They sure do: the balance sheet will show deposits under liabilities.

WTF, aminorex?!?!

No dinosaurs. No lines. No analysis predicting $20,000 or $0.20 within days. Hardly the calibre of material expected on this thread.

Aminorex is not Dorian Nakamoto.

That can only he mean he's Satoshi Nakamoto.  Now I just need to fit the lines to the data and draw a dinosaur, and I'll have definitive proof.

What supports this theory? What do the banks gain buy getting into BTC?

Unlikely they're buying anything right now.  The total dollar value in play on the exchanges is so small any activity on their part would change the market. 
It's the same reason big investment blocks don't play with penny stocks.  There just isn't money to made on the scale a bank would be interested in

Add to that the fact that the exchanges at this point are unreliable. Banks aren't about to put money into something they can't easily get it back out of.

Likely because of where this thread started - regulation. Banks are heavily regulated, and can't operate outside that.

DO YOU HAVE A MACRO TO CAPITALIZE 'not' EVERY TIME YOU TYPE IT?

It doesn't help with non-existent ambiguity (not and NOT mean the same thing), but it certainly breaks up the flow when reading.

My 0.00001BTC

That line clearly shows a looming CCMF to the moon uptick: a double bottom cross with a side of bear trap showing billions in pent up demand for bitcoin to be triggered by the re-buy of lost MTGox coins.  It's definitely or bullish, or bearish - we won't know until you complete your homework and add the mandatory dinosaurs.

A+ and a star for you, lad!

I think the last thing on peoples minds in Crimea is buying bitcoins. (FTFY)

Outside the small group of people that look at these forums, the statement holds true.

Finally an appropriate post. We'd gotten sidetracked with the ideology banter and forgotten the true purpose of the forum: unfounded and baseless predictions, and pretty pictures with scribbles on them.

Oh, and dinosaurs.

Bravo on bringing us back on track.

But add some dinosaurs or other animals, and it's totally legit. Or showing a double bottom cup and handle with a pennant breakout works, too.  Graphs with these scribbles have been shown to be 100% accurate 110% of the time at showing future price (+/- $1000).  If you can work in a CCMF to the moon into your analysis accuracy improves 120% of the time.

All we need is some bajillions invested, probably coming from MTGOX rebuys, mixed in with Wall Street hedge funds looking to diversify into more risky investments.

Finally, some more the of high quality analysis we've learned to demand on these forums.

Yes, expel the unbeliever!

Heh. To loosely paraphrase some guy from ages ago: "never ascribe to brilliant strategy what's best attributed to pure bungling".

A living example of a strawman setup by the original poster

The post I responded to, which you later edited, simply responded "Don't bother" to Zapffe.

You missed my point completely. I replied to your original post before you'd edited it, hence the strawman. Perhaps I should have said moving target. Either way I simply meant my response was meaningless when set against the edits.

That said, who defines "contributing"? Those holding BTC and not wanting to hear anything that suggests money might be lost? Those looking to short? Bears? Bulls? Dinosaurs? Trolls (aka, anyone holding a viewpoint different than one's own)? Everything said is a contribution in this cesspool - at least any lurker probably thinks so.

The simplest explanation is some mysterious government agency cares about BTC? And does so enough that it went looking for someone to engage in counterattacks? And found Jorge? And now pays him to troll?  That's the simplest?

You must have read that on the internet. I read that everything on the internet is true.

BTC? It is not that store. 

Look at how easily the value is "stolen" by bad news, or poorly managed exchanges collapsing, or arbitrary rules put in place by government, exchanges, banks, etc.  BTC needs a far more established and reliable support infrastructure before it's considered a safe store of value by the general public. For now BTC is known within a relatively small community, and is understood to be a gamble by most within it.

Unsolicited Pro tips backed by BS stories and BS miss-attributed quotes reveal how bright you are. No need to state the obvious.

I read earlier in this thread that you're paid to troll by a secret government agency that's interested in BTC (just like video game companies do). It was on the internet, therefore it's true.

Just because it costs more to produce something doesn't automatically mean buyers are willing to pay more. Imagine the price of anything else if the seller was the sole determiner of "value".

Right: housing prices may rise, but builders also stop building when buyers aren't willing to cover costs. Both sides adjust to their own perceived value. One side doesn't unilaterally set price.

But money spent does not mean there's value.

Yay, we agree!

I think we can agree that if I spent terajoules digging sand instead of gold I wouldn't have something as valuable as the idiots you refer too.

Well there's some circular logic.

Money spent does not mean a valuable good has been produced because cost of production alone doesn't determine value. If it did, production levels wouldn't fluctuate with price.

Dammit, upon further inspection it appears this paper is indeed ivory, and not white. According to the Theory of Colors, that explains things.

Wait, are you saying that someplace out there in the wide world there's a place where I can buy cuddly from baby for BTC? Is it like a Silk Road 3 or something, because it'll surely attract government attention, and government interest means Wall Street will pay attention. That means the price is going to the moon! But with the constricted supply of BTC now that the halving is over, we'll likely see a reduction in the hash rate of baby production, which means cuddly prices will boom, too, and the cuddly buying power of BTC will deflate.

Oh, and FWIW, a mattress stuffed with papery fiat goodness is kind of cuddly, too. You could double your pleasure getting cuddly from baby on such a mattress.

Quickly is probably overstating things. You can send BTC easily enough, but the process for converting to a locally usable currency is still pretty awful.

As far as being a store of value it's not a very good one right now. Storing value implies value can be predicted over time, and with BTC that isn't the case, yet.q