So my question is how influential are Adam's wall threads on the market?  Was the settling of the brief uncertainty as to whether we were going to a new thread, to carrying on with the old or both the sign the market needed to have the confidence to start buying in earnest again?  Will Adam's decision to go with the new the sign the market needed to no longer worry about going below $50?

Thank you Adam for rescuing the Bitcoin market

On an (almost) serious note, thanks for flipping over to a new thread and for opening it to off topic too  I hope the new influx of bitcaintalk members (and us lot who may sometimes be prone to just post anything) won't make it impractically unwieldy too quickly.

Just thought I'd add this one.  Apart from the week total volume trades mentioned above I would not have guessed without looking that every single day for the last seven was pink!  However I'd be impressed if the bears managed to turn today pink too.

You've been confusing me - when you say 'out' you mean 'out of your temporary fiat position' is that what you're saying?

My reasoning behind pool or p2p mining as opposed to solo had my ASIC  turned up months ago and had difficulty been low enough would have been:  The odds of mining a block reduces at the same rate as difficulty increases and if this is rapid the cost of belonging to a pool pays for a share of the gains when difficulty is lower and odds are higher.  It's a bigger gamble to go solo because if you're unlucky in the first low-difficulty stage you've missed out on the gain you would had by having yours plugged in before the others who drove the difficulty up.

In the meantime bitcoinity looks cool even if not very helpful, kindly pointing to an ancient bid price

Doh, I didn't even spot that when I posted it till you pointed it out.  Awesome!  That's one long wall!

My preference (as if I what I fancy has any influence at all ) is that the total ask remained high so that people don't get the 'out of the woods' feeling resulting in another bonkers spending spree and its inevitable consequence!

I like loads of bitcoins on the order book as a constant reminder that people will sell if the price is right and could easily sell loads - so don't get carried away with the buying!

I am well aware - and overall as you know although I'm not one to shout it from the rooftops I veer towards super-bullish.  It's just that phrases like 'out of the woods' make me a little nervous - not for the long-term future of bitcoin but for the sake of those who get caught in the crossfire of extreme market fluctuations.

I kinda like the idea of us learning to live with high bid and ask pressure as 'the norm'.  Opening up the steam locomotive up too quickly will release a lot of the steam pressure and the wheels will turn impressively fast but they are just spinning and are hardly pulling the train at all.  Opening up a little less quickly maintains a head of steam whilst effectively transferring the energy to the wheels so that the whole train slowly gains momentum until you've got something pretty heavy hurtling along the tracks at some rate!

This is probably reported somewhere more appropriate but there's a half hour programme 'The Report' on Bitcoin on BBC Radio 4 right now.

Is he not a bull in bear's clothing?

Loving this little dip.  I like the fact the price don't simply dive down and straight back up again as it tended to on the retractions before the big drop from $266.  As many people as there are and as much money as there is to come on board I believe it is much healthier that we don't get the false sense of security of being 'out of the woods'.  My guess is it means people buying are accepting it may drop some after purchase and are more likely to be thinking long term and accepting risks than diving in blindly believing it's a free and easy ride up forever*.

Edit: * then panicking and selling at a loss on a massive drop!

I was about to go look for it myself

Hope you don't mind Adam (and regular Wallites) that I'm jumping in here to flagrantly plug my new blog posting saying why I'm happy that the price of Bitcoin is currently fluctuating as it has been since the 12th.

It's called An healthy uncertainty in the bitcoin marketplace

Edit:  I have just cross posted the link over at Reddit if anyone would like to take a potential discussion on it off this thread...

I just went to check it out for myself - I don't mean actually going outside  myself but drawing the curtains and looking.  It looks really impressive.  I could see people standing outside the church doing something I think they call conversing; likewise people sitting at tables outside the pub with what I think I remember from the old days is called 'a pint of beer'.  Across the road outside Tescos were three members of staff wrestling with someone, trying to take from her a rather full looking wheeled shopping bag (she eventually let the bag go and ran).  In the meantime on the pavement of the junction a child was having a tantrum not wanting to hold his mother's hand to cross the side road.  And all the time lots of people and cars and buses going by.  Two minutes filled with loads of colour and life.

So why is watching some numbers go by and a squiggly line gradually move up or down or sideways - interspersed with reading what people are writing about some numbers and a squiggly line more compelling than going outside and being part of so-called 'real life'?

OK, Does anybody want to take a walk down the volume stairs of the last few days ?



To give this a context, today's has more than half a day to go but even if it stayed where it is it is still an equivalent dollar volume to an average day in January (the top step, the 24th April having been the fourth highest day trading ever).

You're right about the 'ridiculously low volume' today:


But surely if volume is what it takes to make TA 'work' it makes as much sense to use it today as it did to use prior to the first week of February when these kinds of volumes were the norm.  I don't remember hearing TA advocates not bothering to use their tools until the overall volume rose.  Just sayin...

Ask orders appear to be being taken off the table.

There's not a lot of info on their website is - and I can't find any discussion on here about it either.  Have they just come out of the blue?  I sent an SMS to 'signup' about half an hour ago and am awaiting confirmation.  I think the main thing I'd like to know is whether the users' in-the-cloud wallets are accessible by the company or whether they're more like blockchain.info's only accessible by the user.  Not wanting to be a wet blanket but if the former then everybody signing up ought to familiarise themselves with the mybitcoin history!

This is what I'm finding confusing.  Going by the limited information on the site alone it says: To make a transaction simply text your request. ex. "send '555-phon' 10 for beer".

Please bear in mind I may have got this totally wrong because I am not a techie.  But my understanding of that is that you're sending your payment SMS to the service provider not the recipient - in which case isn't it just an on-line wallet service with SMS instruction for payments and SMS notification of receipts?  If so then the private keys of the wallets associated with the phone numbers surely have to be kept on the service provider's side.  In which case, my question is: Are they only accessible via instruction from the phone or does the service provider also have access to them.  Unlike Blockchain.info wallets where the encryption/decryption can be done on the client side I can't see how that could be handled by an sms-only phone.

I'm not saying the service provider is untrustworthy but if my understanding is correct one essential aspect of Bitcoins - i.e. not needing a bank - is absent.  Maybe paywithbits.com is more trustworthy than Barclays or Mpesa?  I don't know but it's a big step away from what in Bitcoin world we're used to and I'm reservedly excited about this as something I'd like to see go viral in developing nations until I understand more.

Just an indication on today's volume to date despite the rally...



Makes a nice wide bottom step doesn't it?  ...  for the time being!

Rather a large announcement really for something which (according to the developer) was hacked together in 24 hours!

notme and I had an exchange about it on this thread this morning.

I love it - a magnificent balance of bulls and bears convinced the market is going to go their way whilst the market alternates between looking like it's going to start a crazy up or a massive drop alternately.

For those who didn't see it over the weekend I wrote a blog piece about why this pleases me.  Be warned it's a bit longer and more convoluted than it needed to be but I think I have a slightly different take than what I have seen around here.  Enjoy

No, it can't kill the coin though it might just kill the incentive for those wanting to jump on board purely as a get-rich-quick scheme.  If it forces people to think a bit harder prior to jumping in then all the better because those who do buy will be more likely to be buying sensibly and with more realistic expectations, a considered accepted risk of loss and most likely a better idea of what they like about bitcoin and why they'd like it to succeed.

It's all very well those jumping on board fearful of missing the boat when we were on that massive rally and wanting nothing but to see the value of their investment going through the roof.  Everyone should feel free to buy for whatever reason they want - but they shouldn't come crying to me when it all goes Pete Tong!

Excellent, it's people with this mentality that we need to see shorting if such confidence in their belief is actually reflected in their positions.  This should help stablise prices as people get caught in a credit squeeze and have to bail out of their positions.

Bring it on

My guess is this is pure troll (and Rampion, I think he's probably referring to Satoshi not Karpeles) but what's interesting about it is that there are people out there who believe so strongly in the simplistic 'gold-backed-or-valueless' thing that when shorting becomes easily available a significant amount of money will be bet against Bitcoin in this manner.

I can't see enough of the bigger picture to tell what how this would affect the market but my guess is they'll have to be borrowing btc from somewhere to short it so if there's a high demand then maybe there'll be profit to be made in lending at a reasonable interest?

I don't know.  I did my usual of going back a page or two from this thread and scrolling through to see if there's anything I should know about only to find this:


...followed by post after post of people banging their heads against a brick wall trying to explain to Coinseeker that virtually all of the premises behind his ludicrous statement are untrue.  I think he's sort-of got most of it by now but it would help if people actually made a little effort (Google is your friend) to understand what they're talking about before just coming out with baseless rubbish.

I'll try Reddit!

wtf are you talking about.  To the extent I was 'bothered' it was disappointment that a thread that has mostly for the 6 months or so I've been following and participating in it had at least something of substantive value in a few pages of posts was dominated by people trying to explain stuff to you you could have found out quite easily yourself by doing a little research.  In the first instance your claim 'Bitcoin is in violation of the laws of nearly every country' illustrates plainly you neither understand bitcoin nor law.

It is not that people don't welcome a difference of opinion.  Did you actually notice how many people who know what they are talking about generously gave explanations far beyond what the initial ignorant statement deserved?  No, you come out with some 'blindly follow internet rhetoric' bs.  wtf?!

Wow, you really don't get it do you?!  Nobody that I could see in the responses given to you was trying to claim 'Bitcoin is immune to governmental intervention' - if I'm mistaken please find and quote - rather patiently trying to explain things to you such as what 'legal tender' is.

And for you, who made the statement about Bitcoin being illegal to accuse others of seeing "only 'facts' they have created in their own minds" is hill-fucking-larious    Intelligence?  If you showed a tiny bit of evidence you have any you wouldn't have to protest so loudly how intelligent you are  

Edit:  looks like I was late with my rant - it appears the rest of you have kissed and made up.  I'll leave this post though because I believe it was deserved even if it does make me out to be the nasty angry one

All transactions that avoid paying applicable taxes are illegal.  What's that got to do with Bitcoin?

From what I understand, whether it gets reported as 'income' or as a 'capital gain' may depend on your jurisdiction.  My accountant's advice in the UK to me is that it becomes taxable as a capital gain only if and when the realised gain is more than £10,000 p/a.  Of course this may change because as Coinseeker correctly says it is still a gray area.

Sorry, I'm in a picky mood today but if a trendline shows what has been how can it be 'invalidated'?  Given that no trendline goes on forever surely the trendline just shows what was going on up until the point the price went outside of it, at which point it no longer applies past that point.

If on the other hand a trendline is being used to predict future then I'm afraid my TA-sceptic stance is that it is invalid even when market prices with time happen to fall within it.  Just my thoughts on the matter

Congratulations Coinseeker, you have just passed with flying colours the rigourous vetting required for membership of my exclusive 'Ignore Club'

Bye!

As long-time wall followers will know I'm a TA sceptic at the best of times but I'd be especially wary for the next few days at least to read too much into the Mtgox data in isolation of the other exchanges.  Where mtgox is too far off the other exchanges the likelihood is it is because people are buying btc to get them out of mtgox and very few have the means to do the arbitrage to even it out.

Long-time wall thread followers will also know I am a very optimistic long-term bull and am virtually always more questioning of anything more than slight bearish predictions than I am of bullish predictions.  However in this instance I think we could see negative repercussions of the Dwolla/mtgox episode rumble on for some time yet.

mtgoxUSD        0.11919918   5,092,881
bitstampUSD     0.11399        774,256
btceUSD         0.109          542,282
cbxUSD          0.10955        124,859

 
These are the bid prices with volumes.

As dominant as the mtgox market is whilst people used to being able to use Dwolla to get USD in and out can only move money from mtgox in Bitcoin I'm not looking at the current mtgox price as reflective of current supply & demand.  I know this thread is about the mtgox walls but the excitement in the last page or so about price 'breakouts' etc. whilst the other exchanges are nowhere near seems short sighted.  I'm simply not trusting the price to give me an impression of sentiment.

One of the service providers was talking about the long process of getting both their bitcoin and dollars out of mtgox and with things as they are it is obvious that arbitrage is simply not happening.  Of course money off of gox trading by other exchanges or otc etc. is good but for now I don't believe we have an operational 'price discovery mechanism' so I don't know what the price 'should be'.  My algorithm, that used by bitpay and mine all come to quite different figures at the moment.

All I'm suggesting is that we don't get carried away by the fact gox is going up right now.  The movement might not be telling you what you think it is!

I believe not.  People getting excited too because ask side orders are thin on the ground.  It could as many appear to believe, be because we're about to hit a nice well-due rise in price.  But how would the ask order side look if people were simply moving their bitcoin off gox?  Mmm!

I'm not saying you're wrong Samson but do you have a better explanation for the unprecedented* difference in price between mtgox and the minor exchanges?  For jaroslaw and co it's just another excuse to cry wolf but that doesn't mean it's necessarily entirely without substance.

* sustained difference since I was an algorithm using more than one exchange to determine price.
 

Don't know about the reasons behind it but I'm somewhat reassured to see mtgox bid price within a stone's throw away from the others:

mtgoxUSD     119.5     2,170,113   73%
bitstampUSD  117.45      444,120   15%
btceUSD        112.51      293,743   10%
cbxUSD         117             74,132   2%

Then again on such tiny volumes maybe there's not too much to be read into anyway

mtgox bid price still out on a limb in relation to others.



mtgoxUSD - bitstampUSD     5.21
mtgoxUSD - btceUSD           8.32
mtgoxUSD - cbxUSD            5.40

I'm posting this here both to warn those who ignore everything other than gox not to get carried away by gox-only movement and also to try and nudge anybody with arbing capabilities to do us all a favour and make some money helping us discover where the price should be right now.

There was a discussion about this yesterday a few pages back.

^ This!

In fact ^this is the reason I don't have enough fiat to risk to on the arbing game.

Thanks to you and others for trying.  I know it was never easy but my guess it's happening even less now is if all the exchanges closing in recent months wasn't enough, the DHS/Dwolla/mtgox was a stark reminder of how risky it is to hold money (whether fiat or bitcoins) on the exchanges.  Arbing for decent money requires shifting large sums and I'm guessing the rewards (after costs and delays of moving money) aren't sufficient to justify the risks involved.

But for now at least it looks like the gap with bitstamp is closing a bit even though overall volumes are pretty dismal so I guess not much to be read into the figures:

In the context of the last few months I guess it could be scary but in the bigger picture we're less than half way through the day (with the US just coming into play) and it's still in the all time top 20 Mondays for USD volume!  It may be a little premature to be getting worried

Given that there's so little going on I'm still pondering on the differences between the rates on the various exchanges - this time with respect to the way BitPay claims to be calculating its own rate:


Looking at the current figures below 'the 2 that are closest together' are bitstamp and btce leaving gox as the one that ought be 'tossed'.



Yet the rate showing on Bitpay's list is mtgox's:



 I'm not saying it 'should' be but I'm guessing their algorithm is a bit more sophisitcated than the explanation implies?

If I may extrapolate on that (with a chart of course)...



...the weekly step-down in volume would be explained by those having had to travel furthest leaving their trading desks on the 2nd week of April to start their trek to the conference, followed by those next-furthest away in the 3rd week of April and so on so that last week's volume drop-off can be explained by the Californians departing for San Jose  Let's see what happens as everyone returns home

On a more serious note I'm fascinated looking at the prices on the same weekly chart, especially the EMA (3)

Look how insignificant by now April's  'crash' was;
Look at the massive contrast between the huge volume drop-off and the virtually unmoving (but slightly upward) price.

Meanwhile the transaction volume (in USD) appears only just to have dropped out of the $20.000.000 - $60,000,000 channel.



Given that more than a small part of the transaction volume must be currency trading transactions and that trading transactions have almost died off entirely I'm surprised we are only now seeing the overall transaction volume drop.  Does this mean transactions other than currency trading are going up?

I wonder if the trading volume were to drop off further or stablise at today's levels would the price fall to any significant degree?  I'm suspecting, based on the failure of low volumes to trigger sell-offs that the vast proportion of bitcoins is in strong hands by now.  Whether or not the price is being manipulated I believe the nervous have had plenty of opportunity to close their positions by now and we have also seen buyers come pouring in every time there is a dip.

So if I were to make a prediction it would be that the longer we hang around this price mark the more likely we are to continue to go mainly sideways.  When the market is too calm for day-traders to make anything we get an idea of what currency-trading is required to sustain (non-currency-trading) transaction volumes.  And if that's steady or rising there should be enough liquidity to satisfy their requirements without shifting the price very far either way.

In the meantime if we get another wave of speculators or of long-term savers (hoarders) or if existing speculators/hoarders decide to increase their bitcoin holding then up we go again.

Call me an eternal optimist but I'm failing to see credible downward pressures
 

Careful with those kind of sentiments Hawker

Last time I dared make such a suggestion when religion found its way onto the old wall thread I got asked if I lived in Communist China and accused of trying to suppress free speech!!

On the other hand there was so little going on I clicked 'Unignore' on Coinseeker's post only to find his is the most informative of the bunch!  Wonders never cease

What if it drops $1000 in a day? - oh but wait, it can't!, and though I really do get what crumbcake was getting at invoking Pascal's Wager it is a fact only one side has a limit to its movement in a day.

Again, in principle I see your parallel with inventions lying un-built and unused for millennia yet it takes some stretch of the imagination to put Bitcoin in this category.  I see it as closer to the steam train having been built and refined and tested and is now pulling a long mixed consist of goods and savers and speculators.  We may well have hit a bit of a hill that is a struggle for the engine at this stage of its development but there's a lot of momentum behind it and I doubt this will be its nemesis.  But even if it did fail to make the crest of the hill (or the next) its unmaking is by now impossible.  Whether it's Bitcoin or something else the cat is well and truly out of the bag.  There'll be no languishing for millenia for the idea and technology of stateless decentralised money.

And my last query is regarding fear of permabulls.  OK, I get it was at least partially in jest but my question is how can someone who, based on a decent understanding of the concept and its implications, is as convinced as Its About Sharing is be a threat to Bitcoin?  There's a hard core of believers in this technology who would ride the price down to one cent if that's what happened - providing the technology still does as it ought our net worth loss might smart but the hope in the idea would not be smothered.  Holders like that are surely very healthy for Bitcoin.

There is a danger that those looking for an excuse to believe Bitcoin is a get-rich-quick scheme will feed from such positive writings and we probably should be wary of their affect on the market as they alternate between buying without understanding what they're getting into and disillusioned selling when in disbelief they see price can go down too!  But that's not the fault of the permabulls.

I think you've got it the wrong way round.  For the average Joe to have $20 worth of bitcoins and for it to be accepted in all the places you're saying the price will have had to have increased enormously.  You've probably seen similar calcs before but give you an idea, given 21m bitcoins divided by pop. usa would mean 66.3 mBTC p/p (assuming all mined, none lost, all non-USA citizens sold).  For 66.3 mBTC to be worth $20 1 BTC would be worth $3,316.

This assumes your 'average Joe' holds an average amount.  However, given many worldwide are also interested, given there'll likely be fewer than 3/4th, given that many of those are either put away for posterity or lost and given that a small number are likely to hold a huge quantity, for the 'average Joe' to carry about $20 worth a single bitcoin is likely to be much much higher.

There are many many steps between where we are today and the scenario you describe.  I don't see the benefit of looking at bitcoin as unsatisfactory today simply because those steps have not been taken yet.  More important is that the steps taken so far are leading to the next steps and it is here I believe we have significant momentum.

Another report of no change:  Low volume & diverse bid prices across the exchanges.

 

Anybody know if there's a corresponding (or any significant) increase in off-exchange trades such as on OTC/ LocalBitcoins etc.?

Closer than when at its biggest but it's been closing to under 4 a few times in the last day so I don't know whether this is closing still or whether it's just floating within the same range.



I do think a gap as big as this will act as a brake on any big upward movement on gox - and maybe that's not such a bad thing

That to me looks like more a cynical response than a sceptical one.  Whether or not you believe there is reason to be hopeful for the future of Bitcoin there is plenty of evidence that some people do.  In which case can you not see it would be a reasonable to expect such people to want to meet to talk about what's new and to be in the company of like-minded people?

And regarding your wanting to 'see' what's happening if the price is less of an indicator where are you expecting to be 'seeing' evidence that things are happening?

No, it's just that some of us prefer more a considered use of words than just slapping them around.  The pity is that you actually add quite constructively to the discussion now and then otherwise I'd just have you on ignore all the time but it's a high price to pay to read through this kind of stuff to get to the odd useful bit.

I wasn't at the convention and of course there were people there paying for their service to get noticed and bigging up their own products and services but from what I understand of the videos and write-ups I've seen it was very much about what is happening.  So if someone says 'We added 1,900 in April' what do you want to 'see'?  Their proof?  If someone says 'We have partnered with x and are providing this service' do you actually need to try out the service for yourself before you believe they're doing it?

Can one 'second' a red card?

"What's the tipping point for this thing to really catch on?"

My answer:  For it to be big enough that the media have a wide enough pool of people who can talk competently enough for them not to be calling on Amir all the time!

OK, I'm liking what I'm seeing here this morning.  Even btce bid price is gradually catching up and the balance of volumes between the currencies beginning to look a lot more healthy

First an overview chart I like with weekly weighted moving averages showing the 'massive' spike as a blip we're in the process of healthily recovering from.  At the same time it's showing the spectacular volume drop week on week that appears to have very little bearing on the price.



Next zooming in on the last six days I just like how neat that is...



And finally, the most exciting for me is the change in volume balance and catching up of prices by the three closest exchanges to mtgox, bitstamp in particular currently at over a quarter of the total USD exchange value on bitcoincharts.com



Assuming more than a tiny amount of what was mtgox's volume has gone off exchange altogether to OTC or whatever and that it's currently only 62% of the overall volume the comparative low volume of mtgox from before may not be as drastic as it may first appear.

bitstamp not half mtgox anymore but it's certainly an healthier distribution of activity than we're used to - and those bid prices are still within a stone's throw too

It also means the volume being exchanged at gox represents a much higher volume overall than it used to.

... or any other variation on the theme of manipulators and schemers  On the other hand it could just be volumes beginning to return to what was normal (especially considering a much higher proportion is now trading off gox) who were waiting for movement to trade.  There is no money to be made from a stagnant (stable) market so from a day trader's perspective it's movement that triggers market action.

That's why I'm all in since a good couple of months now!  It was a bit painful to see the massive drop especially as I'd been selling some bitcoin for a friend at £168 but although I could in principle have doubled my bitcoins had my timing been perfect life is a lot less stressful with the decision already made.   And at least I don't get the 'doh, I've missed the boat' feeling at times like this

I'm getting the impression from the level of creative input and discussion regarding p2p exchanges and fiat-to-digital methods that we are getting quite close to a combination of systems that could prove to be the silver bullet on that one.  In particular are an idea from fellowtraveler being provisionally called BMOT and one proposed solution to the fiat -> digital fiat without trust problem even has a 10BTC bounty for anyone who can find fault with it!  It is the brainchild of bytemaster to be found here, having come out of BTCLuke's hot Primer for a P2P Distributed Exchange thread.

The mtgox:bitstamp 24hr USD volume ratio is about the lowest I've seen at the moment at around 2.6.  I know this tends to happen when volumes are low but would be interested to know if there is a chart showing total volume and volume differences over time to see if what looks like a trend to me checking in at irregular intervals is borne out by the facts.  Anyone?

And even if it weren't there's a whole plethora of more plausible explanations - such as, off the top of my head, it being possible for criminals to see more without artificial light - before we need to start looking to tiny gravitational and magnetic differences as have any likelihood of affecting our behaviour!

It's like the homoeopathy thing.  I won't deny some people who go to homeopaths feel or even get better.  But until experiments can isolate 'water memory' as being the most likely factor there's a long list of probable causes to explore before we can reasonably assume there is anything in it.

Yes, and isn't that fantastic? What's also magnificent is through our discovery, exploration and development of scientific principles and methods we have a means of differentiating between stuff that just seems like it ought to explain something and the times where correlation actually does mean causation.

Having said that I'm tending towards thinking we need the dreamers to come up with really random propositions unhindered by too much knowledge of how things work and how we know stuff - so that the more methodical of us have things to test for!  Even if 99.9999% of them turn out to be baseless every now and again we will come across something that is potentially world-changing - and that has to be worth the price

Apologies if that was a bit deep for this time of day (if you're anywhere in the region of GMT)

Well if the theory of the gox price rising because of an exodus of btc in order to cash-out elsewhere has any merit then I guess people are using localbitcoins or some other service with a gox-linked price (or they're not in a hurry to convert back to USD) because it's certainly not driving the price down at bitstamp or elsewhere at the moment.  The proximity-to-gox is certainly a bigger percentage than average but there is no correlating down as of yet to gox's up.

With volume as low as it is the last 24 hrs the percentage volume mtgox has has dropped immensely in relation to the others.  Below 60% is nice but I think it would need to stay there or lower as volumes increase (or for something drastic to happen to mtgox - or even just for people to believe something drastic is likely to happen to mtgox) for another exchange to have a good chance of taking over as the main trading exchange.

As an aside, with the the price so far ahead of the others my algorithm is currently taking mtgox as an outlier my btc net worth calculation ignores it and works on the basis of the closest two of the other bid prices.   I'm hoping my algorithm is not giving the picture of the 'truer' evaluation but I guess we won't know until the dust settles with the gox withdrawals and prices get closer together.

That first three months of the 6 is only 'millpond flat' on a chart that shows what happened since.  At the time average weekly gains were still substantial, just not ridiculous as it was in the three months that followed.  However I do think including the months in this chart as part of the making of the bubble is a stretch - and looks to me a sign of those wanting to paint the current price as 'too high'.

edit: ...not that I'd mind if it did go substantially lower before turning around.  I don't have as much in my fiat pot as I do in btc but I'm still holding off from going all in again till I'm confident we're past a substantial risk of a large drop for the foreseeable.  Right now doesn't smell right for me still.

The scenario you describe of what's been happening is I'd say not far off the mark.  It is also true to say if this overall effect happened so far there's no reason why it could not continue for some time over some further percentage.  However I'm guessing the value required in order for there to be enough bitcoin liquidity for buying goods and services and for making long-distance transactions is a long way down from where we are.  Not that I'm reckoning we'll get anywhere near there but in theory as long as we're above that level the current price is nothing more than the outcome of our beliefs.  I don't believe anybody's statement of how low it will get is guessing, no matter with how much conviction.

How about this for a baseless totally speculative 'theory':

Could the manipulator with the magic massive disappearing walls over the last few days be a benevolent manipulator who is using the orderbook as his palette to draw the shape of the chart over time so it looks like we've bottomed out?  It would appear the the 'manipulator don't care' when it comes to having some of his walls bitten into so I'm wondering about a possible longer term motive than manipulating just to buy or sell within the timeframe of the daytrading ups and downs.

Given what I was just saying in my last post that the bottom could potentially end up almost anywhere a manipulation of this nature could have a much bigger goal of changing sentiment by 'drawing' the chart of a solid bottom.

Hi guys, been part-time lurking for some time now but finally got something to say

Just a thanks really to all who have been buying bitcoin to stash away right through the downtrend.  I'm not saying the downtrend is necessarily done but I'm not finding the arguments of those reckoning on $20-30 etc. persuasive - largely because they appear to be on the basis of repeating patterns and TA - and I just don't buy either for this unique bitcoin market.  However, I've enjoyed guessing for the fun of it where the price is going to go and when and would have done OK buying fiat to sell again at a profit had I not been primarily a 'buy-and-hold' man myself.

But what I haven't been doing during this period is putting new fiat in and have therefore accumulated a fair bit ready to buy back in when I'm reasonably confident the downtrend is over.  I'm actually enjoying watching the price go up even though I'm not on board (with the new money), fine to let those who are prepared to take the higher risk try and catch the bottom and initial turnaround to get the cheapest prices whilst I stand aside prepared to pay more for additional confidence we've not got (much) further down to go.

So keep up the good work folks and maybe in another couple of weeks if this carries on I'll be ready for 'all in'* again

In the meantime here are the latest from my favourite table and chart:





On the former I'm liking even on a reasonable volume day gox is not commanding much more than 30% of the trade.  On the latter I'm liking this week's USD volume to date is already equal to last week's.  I'm guessing last week will have been the bottom for volume for some time.

L8r

*within reason

Ah, and this is another reason for my not jumping back in yet.  That's a story I've not been following closely.  Is the withdrawal problem still not resolved at gox?  There was a thread that was suggesting gox has been spending depositors' money and doesn't have funds to pay out all withdrawals.  Is this generally considered to be conspiracy theory type paranoia or is there a reasonable chance gox could be in trouble?  Even though I'm using local trades for purchasing for some time because of potential impact on price I'd rather be more confident on this one too prior to putting a chunk more money into bitcoin.

Thanks Blitz.  I was guessing from the percentage differences (look at today's 9-11%+ on my earlier post) that there is significant delay making arbing impractical.  However, that is of lesser concern to me than the risk this may be an indication of gox potentially in big trouble.  What's word-on-the-street about that?

Edit:  just seen your post and link cedivad, thanks

Thanks Blitz (& notme) for your assessment of the situation.  Needless to say my own assessment of the risk is what will have to count with my own decision as to whether and when to come back in but I do appreciate the heads up for those who have been following more closely so that my decision can be that bit more informed

Edit: oh and look, my 'Activity'* score is equal to BTC's ATH

* whatever 'activity' actually means - I don't think I can be bothered to find out but I guess it's an algorithm that helps active newcomers catch up quicker with lazier old-timers or medium-timers such as me

Good choice methinks on the whole - and welcome to the club  Assuming bitcoin isn't on a terminal decline likelihood is the overall direction will continue to be up therefore other than at such times as the recent downward trend when trading can be used to increase btc holding you have to be both very good and very lucky to make more trading than you would by simply holding over the long term.  The reason for this is in an uptrend you need to buy your fiat just before a bitcoin price dip and buy your bitcoins back just before it rises again otherwise you've lost.

This is another aspect of course - the educational one.  If trading is a skill you want to learn, BitVegas, then trading experience (within affordable loss risks) is essential - as is reading up on trade size strategies in relation to your overall bank, record keeping, psychological factors, entry/exit strategies etc.  It is very easy to get the impression from a forum like this that many more are successful than actually are because admitting losses on line as you nobly did is less common than keeping quiet about losses and bragging about our wins.  With bitcoin trading there is the added element of a tendency to mix trading to increase bitcoin holding (i.e. where holding fiat is an 'open trade') with trading to increase fiat holding (where an 'open trade' is having a short-term bitcoin holding).  People not clear on their intent can kid themselves for a long time that they are trading successfully!

Keep up the good work fr33d0miz3r   I am more inclined to be with Adam on this one but we do need the naysaying doom-and-gloomers to be doing their thang here and everywhere to keep people selling and to keep the institutional investors at bay.  The longer they stay out of the game the more widely distributed bitcoin will be by the time some big moves happen.  Personally I know of a lot of musicians and creative people who I'd like to see having a stake before it takes off again and on the whole people need time to absorb what this is about and its potential impact before putting more than a few a token amount in.  I'd also like to see more of it in the hands of innovators and people with big potentially world-changing ideas.  I'd like the institutional investors when eventually they arrive to be empowering these people by increasing their buying power.  Also I'd like to see the first waves of Africans (maybe starting with Kenyans and the m-pesa thing) so that again, the institutional investors, many of whom for years have in cahoots with despotic leaders been ripping the piss out of the people get to inadvertently pay them back.

So please those of you insisting it's heading down and posting ridiculously irrelevant cartoon charts, keep up the good work

Haven't posted one of these (nor anything come to think of it) for some time so...

I'm liking the convergence since yesterday of the exchange prices and I always enjoy when gox is in the 5x% range



Also, not that I want to stoke any potential bubble but I do like how this chart is looking, especially given the usd volume at peak would be equivalent to a third less now had the volume been distributed as it is these days.  (in case it is of interest I bought substantially with long-term in mind for the first time in a long while on Sunday).

It does indeed.  But how long does one wait, having stopped buying regularly since mid April, and with the belief that there's a reasonable chance bitcoin could increase in value enormously in the medium term, before resuming with my purchasing (or as in my case, buying with the money I would have been buying with had I continued)?  Because as far as I understand it there is no way until after the event of telling whether an upward trajectory was a bull trap or a recovery.  I don't believe looking at old patterns will help.  Although there is almost certainly some manipulation going on I don't subscribe to the manipulator conspiracy theories circulating.  I may be wrong but that's what risk taking is about.  Not only must manipulators also take risks (and may lose out if enough people ignore them and get on with what they were planning to anyway) but some 'manipulators' may also want the very same of Bitcoin as I do.

Truth is it fits the exact premise of any number of patterns but neither you nor I can say what it is - only in a month or two what it is likely to have been!

Can someone please help me with an affliction?  Whenever I read the words 'Elliot wave' my head drops forward and before I know it I am snoring with my head on the desk having to be awoken by my colleagues!  Does anyone have a cure?

Double whammy for gox: less than 50% of the market and equal to Bitstamp today

Putting aside the possibility this buy was on 'insider knowledge' (it's not that rare to see buying of this nature on this scale) I'm not persuaded by the suggestion this is someone new entering the market (why the dickens would they want to buy at gox prices?).  If it is money that was already on gox likelihood is it is money that came from the sale of bitcoins sometime in the last four months.  I'm guessing I was not alone upon seeing the first drop deciding simply not to buy until I was reasonably confident the downtrend had finished.  I recommenced buying ten days ago.  I certainly wasn't the bravest nor the first but I'm also guessing I'm far from the last.

Remember a huge amount of USD was taken out of bitcoins in late April/May, some of it for good but much more I suspect on the wait-and-see principle.  Now it's looking less likely by the day that something disastrous is going to happen to the currency itself (a gox collapse excepted) so deciding just to go for it one night/morning (depending where these few buyers are) doesn't seem so unreasonable a behaviour.

Granted if they wanted to get the most bitcoins for their money they could have spent some time watching the walls and trading as many here do but not everybody has the time nor the interest to be playing that game.  On the bigger scale of things if they got out at a fair price to protect their assets with view to getting back in after the downtrend and are expecting this thing to resume exponential growth losing a few percentage points on slippage getting back in is not a big deal.

Of course I could be totally wrong and this may be the 'hammer' as I'm sure someone will be only to happy to remind us...

But this is how my preferred long-term wma weekly is currently looking:

I'm sure this must have been posted before but the sensationalist and water-muddying articles in the mainstream press of late keep concerning people so...

http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/09/black-budget-what-exactly-are-the-nsas-cryptanalytic-capabilities/

Aren't you jumping to conclusions here?  These are only allegations atm.  The BBC even says '...the court documents note that Canadian law enforcers have said there was no record of a homicide taking place in White Rock, British Columbia at the time.'  There are many possible explanations for what we see (including the authorities planting stuff on his servers, desperate that he doesn't become a martyr for the libertarian cause).  Time may tell, but we may never know for sure.

Even if they take all the preparatory steps and design this perfect law to criminalise Bitcoin's use for legit businesses if things keep going as they are they will not dare take the step of implementing it for fear of losing out to the rest of the world which appears to be in the process of reaping the rewards of crypto's agility in facilitating commerce.  As I said on the Baidu thread, fear of losing power to other nations is a massive motivator for the US - even more I think than losing power to its own citizens - which is what Bitcoin has the potential to empower.

Wouldn't $169 on Gox as 'market cap' be even less meaningful than before due to Gox's premium existing due only to choked fiat?

Not wanting to piss on your parade but with the gox price becoming less relevant by the day (considering total CNY vol and bitstamp) 'gox hitting $200' is thankfully MUCH less of a big deal than last time.  I'm hoping the fact of this rise happening over multiple exchanges and currencies makes it less likely that speculation gets too carried away than before simply on the basis of a nice round number on one exchange.

I'd much rather see the price chill out and correct around here or a bit lower for a few weeks at least.  However, with the bottom chart as one of my trend indicators I'm not intending to volunteer my bitcoins to sell to take the heat out of the buying frenzy any time soon so we'll just have to wait and see

$200 within ten minutes or a correction?

Looking at these rally angles on the same chart as above (but for gox over its history) every time was in different circumstances and though they may look similar there are so many different factors at play, whilst we can convince ourselves we 'know' how this is going to turn out I think we're largely kidding ourselves (pretty TA charts or not).  I really don't know where this is going nor for how long other than that there appears to be a momentum up right now and I would tend to agree it's more likely to continue for the time being (with minor corrections) than not.

Nice thought, nice pic

Thank you.  You just eloquently described what I've been thinking for months now.  Trying to compare bitcoin price to technology adoption curves is flawed for the very reason you point out.  If we take an extreme weighted weekly average (below for example WMA 60) it's a fairly smooth line but as you say, with price more closely aligned with confidence than with adoption, fits and starts and crazy rallies followed by sharp corrections are I would venture almost inevitable.

I suspect the potential rise in value of Bitcoin is a primary if not the only reason for many jumping on board in the first place but jumping on board requires learning something and that something that is learned in my experience and in that of many I've spoken to, tends to increase confidence that this thing has a future.

I also suspect the mentality of those who were interested last time round but did not participate are not the light/wishful-thinking/ignorant hands that bought with expectation of an easy return then panicked and sold.  Even from the little information we have here to make an assessment of the potential impact of these people I'd guess they're more impressed, not by the fact it went up so far last time but that it didn't crash and burn afterwards and that after a few months of relatively stable recovery, looks like it is going up again.

Personally, I am a lot more confident now than at the April rally that the serious downside risk i.e. price close to zero is dissipating by the day.  Where it goes in the meantime is anyone's guess - my guess for the time being being up!

I'm thinking you've got a rather polar viewpoint there.  The world isn't split into two neat groups, one of which is geeks who know all about bitcoin and are already involved to the extent they will be and the other is 'mom and pop' who understand nothing and would not touch it.  

Of the geeks who may well understand enough of the underlying technology to understand how it works many I suspect would not get involved, or not with much money for some time because they don't understand the economics or potential economics of it and don't know whether it is a fad that will fade with everybody who is left's money in it.  This thing takes time to get to understand enough for an increase in confidence that it has at least a chance of going somewhere long term.  And this increase in understanding/confidence takes time and the tendency and amount to get involved with it increases incrementally.

Of the mom and pops, I talk a fair bit about bitcoins to non-geeks who, as time goes by, as Silk Road doesn't crash it, as the 'last bubble' turns out not to have popped at all but just to have partially deflated for a while, are interested and may be more inclined to get involved - or to get more involved.

I am not saying some whales may just come along and take the heat out of this but they also risk being out-whaled.  I'm not saying this growth or where we've got to today is sustainable nor that as a consequence of what I'm saying that it won't but I would not be surprised, with things having stayed relatively stable for some time, that we do some 'catch-up increase for some time before it becomes a frenzy proper.  I'm actually hoping it won't and that some whales will at some point do their sacrificial selling to calm the buying down.  Time alone will tell

Of course it is Mah, of course it is!  ... and Ripple is going to the moon right?!!

At first consideration I can't see how money out of circulation can 'cause speculative boom and bust cycles'.  Are you suggesting fear of hoarders dumping feeds busts?  Surely if these nasty hoarders/long-term-speculators/savers selflessly did something with their coin so that they are in circulation, after the adjustment in price we'd be subject to the same cyclic upward and downward pressures - and we would be forever fearing someone new isn't going to come in and hoard loads (thus exposing us to the same supposed problems).

Can't we just accept it is going to go up and down quite drastically for some time because it is very small and someone with a reasonable amount of money can move the market quite significantly?  That's just the way it is until 'market cap' is much much higher - and in order to get there the value has to rise - and due to human nature it IS NOT going to rise nice and smoothly to provide the ideal adoption-for-transactions circumstances you desire.  It is simply what it is!

Though not an economist I'm not convinced what you are describing is called a liquidity trap, nor can I see how a limited available amount of bitcoins in circulation diminishes the 'network effect'.  Would you care to elaborate?
 

I've had mine (one 60 and one 30) for a couple of weeks now but the fans are so loud I have nowhere to put them so they've just been sitting in a corner at work awaiting an appropriate location as the difficulty sweeps up.  Do you seriously think you have a chance of getting your money back by now?  I was thinking I'd be lucky to get the value of my import tax back but overall I'm glad my money wasn't with the one that went under and I do have some nifty bits of kit that I can plug in and participate in the bitcoin underlying network - which was mainly what I was excited about in the first place /off topic

Funny  Though if you're serious and that fickle you are probably better off out of this market.  I always saw you as smarter than that - a permabull based on the sound principles of Bitcoin.  What happened to 'Even if it is only me and a few friends that have them whilst the rest of the world abandon Bitcoins and they are worth fractions of cents we'll keep them so we can use them as poker chips'?  Yet on the basis of a pretty pattern on a chart at 'the right scale' you have the confidence to sell all??!

Or maybe you're just spreading FUD to give you time to acquire more fiat to buy more cheaper?

Ah well, each to his own...

Edit:  OK, Now I see you played troll for lols   It's funny, when someone does something I consider to be very out of character I question most of all my ability to be a judge of character.  I am pleased in this instance at least I was not that wrong!

Is your challenge to see how many ignores you can acquire?  Well let me help you out with one more

Seriously, what do you think you are contributing to the conversation by just repeating yourself with a number you've plucked out of thin air irrespective of what the market does or what anyone says?  You may as well not be reading any posts (ah, I guess you're not), just replying to some at random with the same 120 message!  Well done

They may just be hiding behind a hedge ready to jump out and gloat if this recovery isn't the last of it!  More a spectator myself than a speculator (being generally a buy, sell/spend small occasionally and do nothing on the wild swings man) the volume and size of this morning's drop is such that I'm not convinced it is the end.

However, although I'm watching the value of my holding go up and down by crazy numbers I'm more entertained by the show than concerned

If anything, given that they can't do anything with them, surely the value of our holdings are 'safer' now because the risk of that lump of bitcoins hitting the exchanges has been eliminated for some time!

It will be interesting to see if they change the rules (the old rulebook has already been taken off their website  http://www.justice.gov/criminal/afmls/pubs/pdf/policy-manual-2013.pdf‎) so that they can keep their haul for the longer term.  My preference is that they'd dump them in one hit tomorrow though that's not going to happen!  I'm not that comfortable with that lot holding so many of our beloved coins!

We don't know that.  Some are saying key-logger monitoring since May is a more likely explanation.  I don't know but it's too early to say for sure.

Not that what I like counts for anything but I like that scenario   The idea that there's a big news splurge whereby many people get to hear about it (again) then get distracted by other stuff and holidays or don't want to 'invest' money just before the holidays and forget about it for now is great   If it piques their interest but not enough to act then next time they hear about it they may understand a bit more.  The better people understand the less naive money comes into Bitcoin which in turn reduces the risk of an overheated market and the inevitable consequence.

I don't know but it's fun isn't it

The market movements appear to be getting more and more unpredictable to me, especially seeing as we have a much healthier balance of exchange volumes where any one of them could be taking the lead on a move.  I therefore find it harder even to correlate a movement with news/new service events let alone to assign causation.  So I do find it amusing that some here insist with such certainty what is the cause of what

Not trying to teach my grandmother to suck eggs rpietila but did you ever see the quirky BBC tv programme called QI with Stephen Fry?  They put in some questions to which there is no known answer - and if somebody spots it the screen shows a massive:


....and the big booming voice says:


I think of this often these days when someone asks why a market move is happening

Edit:  I just realised after posting you're asking not why the market is moving as it is but why the wikipedia hit explosion! Ah well.   My answer therefore does not refer to your post at all but I'll leave it there because I like it

It kinda looks like it on first impression but if you look at it closely, from an anatomical perspective by going onto the ball of his right foot  the hip joint is free to rotate, turning the whole leg with no lateral movement required of the knee joint, which is what would cause damage, it only being able to move in the sagital plane

Where gox does 'lead' it appears to me to lead like a dog on a retracting leash these days!  It might run on (or suddenly double back) enthusiastically but will soon be pulled up and has to look round to see if the others are following.  And the aggregate of the others appear not to be blindly following.  Often they will follow but sometimes they'll just say 'neh' so gox just wags its tail, forgets where it thought it wanted to go a minute ago and bounds off again in another (or the same) direction

I find it so funny when people only see what they want to see (check out the number of posts in the last couple of pages of this thread saying it is about to crash)!

 

I am also amused when someone goes off on a rant on the basis of something that was neither said nor implied

Where in the above post or elsewhere do you see me saying this upward trend will continue and for how long/to what price?
Where in the above post or elsewhere do you see me saying there will not soon, at a given time or price will there not be a major correction?
Where in the above post or elsewhere do you see me saying anything that could lead one to reasonably deduce I was following something/someone unthinkingly as per a sheep?
What indication have I given in the above post or elsewhere that I would be surprised if the Bitcoin market plummeted (or went through the roof) tomorrow or at any point in the future?

You suggest I use my mind?  I suggest you may consider using this little exchange as an excuse to start actually reading what is in front of you and form your reply on the basis of what is written rather than on some fantasy based on unfounded assumptions.


Now....as you were...  

PS, as if my previous post needed a tl;dr my comment was drawing attention to wobber's apparent failure to notice the 'buy buy buy' posts are countered by a significant number of 'crash crash crash' posts.  It's just what happens here.  

Granted I don't see as many of the bear posts as I used to because some latter day bears are on Ignore due to my failure to see much of substance in their 'contributions'.  I kinda miss the eloquent and intelligent - if persistently (except once!) misguided - contributions of the perma-bears of lore such as Proudhon.

Possibly

'Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.'

This may also be true

Is he our man to dj the Frankfurt $1000 party?   That reminds me I still haven't put my name down...

Apparently just music!!  btw. anyone remember where the thread about the $1000/btc celebration party thread is?

By what stretch of the imagination is this tanking?!  I'm not saying it won't, nor even that this may be the beginning of it but right now, this is not tanking!

Edit:  OK, now maybe it is

Is anyone else relieved we're getting this pull back/'crash'/correction/'bubble-burst' (or whatever this is) or am I just weird

What's also strange is as we're beginning to see predictions of how low it will go etc. not only am I happy to have no idea nor expectation at all but I don't appear to care either.  I 'should' because it could have a significant impact on my net worth but I really don't!

Thanks Goat  Just put my name down

It's here for anyone who hasn't seen it yet:  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=285771

Edit:  ...and thanks molecular

Gox still appears to be the favourite dumping ground - so much so gox vol is close to catching up with Stamp now...

One scenario I'd be quite happy with would be if enough holders went 'actually, you know what, I might just sell a little' to supply a reduced demand from prospective buyers who are going 'I'd like to hang out a while, risk not getting the best price in order to reduce the risk of buying before another fall'.  The consequence would be we hang out here a while.  I could happily live with that

I'm just wondering what the ddosers might be attempting to accomplish.

One possibility is they're wanting to sell OTC and have an agreement that the price be the highest 24hr volume usd exchange price so they might be trying to prevent trading on stamp till gox catches up?  But I may just as easily be making shit up!

'course you are!  Be my guest, dump away

FTFY

I seem to recollect bears have a habit in this kind of market of hiding behind the bushes letting the bulls stampede past.  If it keeps going like this at some point there is very likely to be a massive bear ambush.  However I am a wimp when it comes to even hazarding a guess as to where this will be nor how far it will fall back.  As for my own strategy I'm holding irrespective of what the market does

312! ... and another!

Gox led this time though.  China appears to have calmed down.  Are those buying on gox sticking their necks out for the axe?

China, Stamp, btc-e - none of them are playing ball atm, very reluctantly following up but at a safe distance.  In the meantime gox is seriously drunk!

It's only in the last couple of hours that gox took the lead.  Up to a certain point China, gox and stamp were pretty much headed up together (with China ahead on price).  Since then gox has stuck its neck out and it is understandable that someone waking up to it now would think this was gox-led therefore unlikely to be sustainable.  But after a certain point China Stamp and btc-e put the brakes on and when that happens it looks like gox is on a retractable leash whereas it can run off ahead enthusiastically barking and only if the others decide to follow will we go in that direction, otherwise it will get pulled back!

Man, after the stories you have been telling I can't believe you're still playing that game!  Unless you're good at it why bother when buy & hold does so well?

good luck with that!

If it's around this level in a week I'll consider it consolidated.  However, even if this is a ledge on the cliff face to take a breather I'm all for it - better that than to climb full speed upwards without looking only to find there's not a nice level top but a sheer drop the other side!

Methinks, EM, that you are being deliberately obtuse! 'Headless' implies lack of direction, 'zooming out' lets us see the chicken has or had direction.  Neither is a claim about the future.

Edit:  I see Holliday corrected you already

You may not have seen a running headless chicken but I can assure you it is all over the place - including on its side with its moving legs getting it nowhere (which is how the idiom came about).  Repeated automatic nerve signals to the muscles do not result in an animal going in an overall consistent direction without a means of input so it knows which direction it is moving plus some fine tuning in the output signals to ensure the overall direction is as intended.  Your apparent attempt to wangle out of this one is I'm afraid failing!

No other exchanges following suit yet....

I'd guess the more crazy the rise in China the more suspicious people get that the 0% comission market is being seriously played.  A nice little flash crash on Bitstamp may help pour some cold water on this.  Something needs to!

If that was scary may I suggest maybe you have too much at stake?!

Sorry to hear that molecular.  Hope no paper wallets were damaged or any substantial sums (mind you 15 btc is now a substantial sum)!

As for the hearing I would highly recommend listening to the whole thing.  I have yet to see a summary of it that does not say more about the paradigm through which the listener was hearing it than the things that were actually said!

An overrated squiggly line that has already on numerous occasions been discussed to death.

Either because you're lucky or because at some level you know it makes sense not to risk your bitcoins on trading hunches.  You may well have been correct in this instance and might even have got away with selling higher to buy back lower but that may well have given you confidence to trade more and sooner or later the chances are you will have ended up with fewer bitcoins than you now have in your paper wallet.

Be pleased you were thinking sensibly at the time you put your coins out of hunch's reach!

You mean 'who' is AnonyMint?

He is someone whose name might better be AnnoyMint, AnnoyingMint, AnnoyedMint, AngryMint, PatronisingMint, ConspicicistMint?
His long-winded posts mainly consist of repeating 'bitCON is a ponzi and you're all going to end up in jail!'*

...which is a pity because for those patient enough to wade through his multiple-cross-posted-self-referring-posts there are actually some interesting points in there worthy of consideration.  I take my hat off to rpietila for finding value in AM's posts and trust that he or others will quote or present in a more digestable format anything of note the wider community should be considering.  I'm afraid I gave up after a few attempts reading/responding and he is now on my ignore list (AM, not rpietila)!

*  - which is also why he won't touch bitcoin with a barge pole and is supposedly in the process of developing a killer alt coin.

Love it Thanks

It still surprises me, for someone with such insight and the math as you have, that you're seeing an inevitability to the future based on what has been.  You talk of the 'long-term trend' as if we know what it will be.  We only know what it has been to date and looking at the 'S-curved chart' as described so beautifully by James G. Angelo in what both you and he (and I) see as the early days it is volatile and there is much random unpredictable noise such that the formula defining the curve is very difficult to ascertain - especially with the gradient of the curve being so shallow at this juncture (yes, even at current growth in comparison with potential).  Surely we will only be able to give the S-curve its formula after the event?  Whilst your current calculations and projections may after the removal of noise turn out to be 100% correct I would venture it is a lot more likely to be incorrect, possibly by quite a lot.  There is a danger in having the understanding you do of math that you get to believe what is to come will nicely follow your formula.

Always remember:  This is Bitcoin - there is no inevitability!!!

For different reasons than Rampion I also see this as bullish news even if not immediately.  For the many who believe the powers that be a warning from them that it is unsafe to invest too much is to say it's OK to invest not too much!  I would prefer people didn't invest 'too much' too - especially coupled with the belief we're constantly on the way to the moon.  That is a recipe for disaster I would call bearish much more than people investing cautiously.

Because not everyone believes the market is going to behave as you believe it will.  It is 'pretty damn easy' for as long as the market stays approximately where it is or moves up.  Despite your (and my) belief that it is most likely to go up from here (even if it goes down significantly first) there is a possibility this is the highest it will ever get(or the highest it will get for the timescale during which the seller needs to or wants to recover some fiat), in which case this dude selling as he is is taking a rational action.

Excuse my rant and wish for the extremely unlikely but I would so like if people learned to step out of their own paradigms and stop namecalling everyone who does not see the world as they do!

True, apologies.

You'll need a parachute or land at Cardiff or Bristol!

Currently fourth most popular article on BBC news!

...aaaaand it's gone!

Please issue Alex Jones warning when posting such links!

No but if anyone here ever got the impression we were a bunch of nutters, a 5 minute visit to his would soon give you the impression bitcointalk is full of the wisest and most intellectual people on the planet!

Seems like a reasonable assessment (I am no expert on India so I'm not really qualified to endorse or counter it) and I agree there is unlikely to be the same kind of proportion of middle class Indians as have been Chinese buying in as a speculative investment.  Where India does I think have greater shorter term promise is in remittances and as the cellphone revolution continues, as mobile money such as M-Pesa is doing in Kenya.

Just like I anticipate the David Woo comments yesterday are more likely to have a bigger impact on businesses considering adaption than on price I anticipate India in the shorter term to have a bigger impact on adoption than price - though there is a limit, especially with the latter, as to how much adaption can go on without impacting price.

I will repeat, as much as it may sound like I know what I'm talking about remember this is a speculation forum...

Remind me of the 'bad news/uncertainty' again?  I think I'm doing OK keeping up with the news but I must either be missing something or filtering out what others are calling bad news.  China just clarified matters, Greenspan ... well, bless, imagine my surprise, he can't see beyond 'intrinsic value', we have another economist trapped in the economists' paradigm, and fresh calls for 'bubble', 'tulips'.  What am I missing please?

I'm not keeping up with all news so this bullish news may already be known but it's the first I heard of it - my brother, as a subscriber to the magazine, sent it me

And the steeper and higher the steep bit of the S-Curve goes, the bigger will be the necessity to zoom in on the chart as it shows today to see how far off we were in retrospect.  As much respect as I have for rpietila I think his belief that the curve showing in these early days is a reasonable indicator of the future is misguided.  If it becomes true it will either be luck or because enough people believe that will be the pattern that we collectively draw it as such with our trades!

My train of thought went:
Japanese tv?  No, wrong colour arse!
Australian, US...

....hold on a minute...

that's a UK registration plate. OK, I admit it, it's a 'fellow' Brit!

FTFY

This is one of the beauties of the Bitcoin experiment.  With time we will get to know whether a deflationary currency is good for or bad for 'an economy', rather its participants.  Start with the assumption that 'deflation is bad' and it doesn't matter how you predict the future of bitcoin you have to conclude it will not end well.  Many here believe just as strongly that a deflationary currency is fantastic.  But after millenia of theorising and arguing we don't have to any more.  We can just wait and see (and participate in the experiment or decline to, as we wish).

JorgeStolfi, I know you like to think you are coming up with new innovative reasons why bitcoin is definitely going to fail but really?  What you are describing is the greater fool theory.  You are not the first to discover this phenomenon, and if you had spent any time reading up on bitcoins you would see it is one of the most common criticisms made of it - usually by those who do not understand it.

To claim that bitcoin value will fall to zero because of the greater fool phenomenon is to claim that all those who say they have bought bitcoins with the intention of holding them until either they fall to zero or until I can use them to buy my everyday goods and services and make my everyday financial transactions is a liar!

The thinking behind the 'bitcoin is nothing but an implementation of the greater fool theory' appears to go like this:

I don't understand what value there is in bitcoin
therefore there can not be value in bitcoin
therefore the only reason I would buy bitcoin is if I thought I could sell it for more
therefore the only reason anyone is and has ever bought bitcoin is because they believe they can sell it for more
therefore bitcoin is an implementation of the greater fool theory
therefore the value of bitcoin will fall to zero with everybody losing out other than implementers/early adopters.

Jorge, please take a look at this.  Can you see where there may be a flaw or two in this reasoning process?

You can see that people have bought bitcoins, that people have sold bitcoins and how much for.  You can not irrespective of the numbers bought at what price deduce why they bought them and what plans they have for them.  Please stop kidding yourself otherwise.

Let me get this right.  You say you can't afford to lose a penny (because your future plans depend on zero loss) yet you trade Bitcoins??!!  If you mean what you say I would highly recommend getting out of Bitcoins totally today, working and saving until you have some money upon which your future does not depend then buying and hodling that amount.  Personally I think you're nuts if you're playing trading with money you can't afford to lose!  But that's just my take

Go ahead.  Feel free... ;

(I'm saying it's open source so you have as much right to do it as the next.  You'll just need to persuade enough to agree with you.  Good luck!)

+1

Just thinking the same myself  I'm impressed.  Looks like they have the makings of a good service there ... or maybe not!!

I've heard rumour it's now possible to get yen into gox within an hour.  If this is the case I would guess we'd start seeing some equalisation between gox and bitcoinbuilder?  Or am I missing something?

The chart in the logo representing goxbux history is a nice touch - from zero up down up higher back down to zero!

"Visa, Mastercard, we know what they are...."

He's saying he doesn't know what bitcoin is.  So the fault is not his, it's the network for not asking the question when asking him on.  Do you know what Bitcoins is?!!

Robert Peston's take is quite interesting though... http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-26335547

Just talking hypothetically here but if there were some coins and fiat in there assuming no more in and no more out and people are trading numbers on a database, slowly but surely the fees would reduce the amount being traded till it was the amount they had.

However in practice this depends on having enough for people to withdraw which means people not to know what is going!

I hope you lose - not because I wish you badly, in fact I wish you well - but because if it does as you predict you will likely consider yourself clever rather than lucky and as a consequence are more likely to make further ill-thought risky trades that may lose you a lot more money in the long run.

Good luck

The above exchange may have been resolved in the last couple of pages but just seeing this exchange made me smile because it is a beautiful illustration of someone trapped by their own paradigm failing to see what the other is trying to say.  Sorry CoinDox, kkaspar but if you didn't figure it out in the correspondence since:

If Bitcoin is what is valued for what it is (irrespective of how it is valued by others against other measures) then what Holliday says is simply and undeniably true.

It is not unreasonable to question whether it is a good idea to value something on the basis of it being able to be stored and transferred securely without a third party even if one day it may be valued so little by others that a massive stash could not buy your next meal, but that's not your argument.  And if I recollect from way back I believe Holliday claims to hold PM as assets as well as fiat.  Unlike you however, I don't believe he uses his fiat as the means of valuing those assets (nor, I would guess, is his fiat valued in gold troy ounces etc), rather that the asset is valued for what it is (and what it isn't).  The market value of each only tells us how others value each relative to one another and is interesting (and necessary for tax reasons) but that's not the same thing.

Don't worry CoinDox, kkaspar if the penny hasn't dropped yet.  Constructive struggle, cognitive dissonance may feel frustrating but it is an healthy educational process.  I do not mean to be condescending but keep up the good work

Seriously?  If you're wanting to establish the long-term trend of bitcoin, it doesn't matter how many hundreds of this thread you read you won't find it here!  The hourly and daily, even weekly or monthly price fluctuations are a side show - and the commenting here a side-show on the side-show (fun though it may be.  I hung out here and absorbed, posting less frequently with time for the best part of a year).  I would suggest using a different means of establishing what is worth reading to come to a decision on the odds you want to give the success of Bitcoin as a technology, then bitcoin as a currency.  Once you know how that translates into the total you are prepared to risk, assuming it is not zero, decide if you're not all in and hodling, what proportion of that money you want to play with to see if you can increase your bitcoin holding.

I would warn if you were serious with your 'why should I miss out on the swings?' comment you are showing how you have failed to grasp in 400 pages of this that trading is a zero sum game.  You have apparently gotten the impression from all this reading that most people here, or most people trading are doing well.  You would do well to really question that assumption!  Fear of missing out on what you think looks like an easy way of making money is likely to make you an unsuccessful trader.

As a side note I am one who has bought and hodled and the cost of this, especially when I was a regular on this thread, was that I had to live with not knowing the answer to whether I would have been a good trader or not.  Could I have increased my bitcoin holding substantially by actually playing the trading game all that time I was reading?  I kinda think I could have but at some level I know the odds say I would have ended up with fewer bitcoins than I have.

tl/dr Don't think most who daytrade end up winning and that it is easy for you to do likewise.  If you do decide to play the trading game don't do it till you have decided where you stand on bitcoin's long-term future and if you're in, don't trade with anywhere the whole of your holding!

falling/realcrash/Ongel,

Have you got a script to keep opening new accounts?  Is the game to see how long it takes people to spot it's still you? 

We're a loooong way to me being convinced the trend has reversed though I can't help but wonder.  My favourite conservative trend reversal parameters chart indicated once over the winter holidays that it had turned (though I didn't believe it) and then again through most of May - that I admit I did begin to believe - but turned out not to be the case.  It's not even showing a blip on yesterday and today's!

Of course, technically speaking if in April 2015 we are a cent above April 2014 we can call the last year to have been reversal - as would we if it's a cent below, providing it's not broken Nov 13's record, be able to say the downward trend from Nov 13 continues.  All this of course in retrospect.  In the meantime all we can do is give it our best guess using the tools available.  If I believe there be a fair likelihood that it go below April's low within weeks then it is not unreasonable to consider this to be the downward trend still.  On the other hand, if the chart with my favourite parameters is giving me sustainable growth over a number of weeks - or something so fast upwards that it drags the weekly average upwards with it - then I'm inclined to think maybe we have finally reversed* - though as I mentioned above, I may be wrong.    

*If I'd need a spirit level against the chart on my monitor (or more sophisticated tool to accomplish the same ) to tell whether yesterday or April was lower then I don't think it unreasonable not to conclude we are already in a long-term upward trend.

Anyone know (or have links to) discussion about why Bitfinex price, after for so long with fiat payment troubles causing an above-market exchange rate, is now lower than Stamp's?