I just lost 2 months salary in 30 minutes.  Of course, I made 3 months salary on the run up from $400...

BTC is a hell of a drug, way too addictive.

Only $660,000 to get back to $640.

BTC is less fun after I finished buying.  Before, I would hope for low prices to get more coins but cheer when my old coins gained value.  Now, I just wince when prices drop.  I wish I was stupid enough to put the last of my fiat in; alas, I am not.

I had better go earn some fiat.

Holy Shit!!  BTC-e is above Bitstamp AND Bitfinex?  Armageddon must be coming.

Anyone want to loan me 100k to buy coins?  This price makes me a shop-aholic.

Objectively, what are our chances of going lower?  I can throw in some fiat and buy some coins, but this is probably the last time I will be buying for 6 months or a year.  Ignoring the trolls, is there a legitimate chance of hitting $500?

The 4 major exchanges were within 98 cents of each other for a minute.  That is rare these days.

I am still sad about that 500btc wall guy that drove Bitstamp down from 685.  Somebody always spoils the party.

I don't know.  I am on vacation in Asia and bought a couple of coins cheap 10 days ago.  Since then, the sellers have either pulled their ads or cut their limits way lo.  To buy 1 btc, I would have to contact the 3 cheapest sellers together.  Or buy from the guy selling at $710.  I think all the sellers are in HODL mode.

I am upset because I haven't spent much on this trip, to save up for a few extra coins, which have been near impossible to get locally.  I will have to wait until I get back home, if the prices haven't skyrocketed before that.

In what year will the price of bitcoin be higher than the page count in this thread?

Any stories of anyone a poster going 2.5X margin long, all in?

I have read threads with guys claiming to 110% or 120% all in because of loans or credit cards.  What is the highest percentage anyone has claimed?

That was great timing.  I had just convinced myself to go margin long at 629, then the ISIS news hit and the price dropped to 616 before I could pull the trigger.

This skittishness is cringe worthy.  There is a hint of FUD, so everyone sells.  There is no thought of whether the story is even important (see the auction for a great example).  BTC traders need to put on their big boy pants and stop being pansies.  Or stop trying to make a living from $5 profits.

We will bubble tomorrow, July 24, September, January or maybe in March.  It will happen when the market is ready.  Until then buy and hold.

Has the Bitfinex Sentiment Index ever NOT been Very Bullish?

What the current price for the long term log trend?

Bitfinex has reduced their margin leverage from 2.5X to 1.5X, effective July 21st.   Officially, this is because the btc used as margin deposit is also volatile.

The July 24th date is 234 days after the previous bubble, which was 234 days after the previous bubble, etc.  There is a guy on Reddit who spent months telling everyone we were going to the moon on exactly that date, not one day earlier, not one day later.

When he started getting laughed at, he made his own subreddit, and moved there.  The last that I read, he turned from superbull to superbear because his prediction was wrong which he thinks proves that the bitcoin bubble trend is dead.

I am expecting the price to jump a few percent on the 23rd or early 24th because he publicized it so much, for so long.

He gave up because there is no sign of a bubble forming, the charts don't look like the pre-bubble November charts, etc, after 2 months of hyping his prediction.  I think, secretly,  he is still holding on to the idea.  He still posts how many days are left until the 24th, and his last post was congratulating someone on their prediction that we are at a very bullish moment. Officially, he calls for a huge drop soon.

I am not surprised by the age distribution.  Not everyone over 60 is a doddering grouch, yelling at kids to get off the lawn.  Picture a retiring dentist, doctor, engineer, or other career with $150-500K per year income and the financial challenges they face with regard to keeping money, passing it on to heirs, or moving it out of the country.  They aren't rich enough to have big league lawyers and accountants, but rich enough to have a lot of money at risk.

There is a huge industry in wealth management, asset management and tax avoidance.  Google "panama private interest foundation" or "offshore IBC".  Set up an offshore corporation or trust, manipulate rules to get assets offshore, ensure that nothing becomes taxable in your home country.  The problem is that it is easy to follow the money.

Wait: follow the money?  How do you follow btc transfers when they are done by professionals?  BTC has a huge future in the wealth management industry.  Unfortunately, none of the facilitators seem to use it YET.

When you picture that old guy, picture someone who has a clue, has significant money, and needs to protect that money from the government.

Edit: if you think you might eventually have a few million, do the Google search.  Some of the sites are very educational and explain everything in detail.

Dear Bitcoin,

You implied a bubble was coming in July.  I have my spreadsheet of all buying and selling during the runup completed.  I have my peak and trough strategy thought out, calculated and in the spreadsheet.  I know my complete strategy (except how I will run a business and sleep for 1 month).

I have even researched my tax minimization strategies for when you make me rich.

Could you get off the couch and bubble, please?

Thanks, your friend,
Sandia

P.S. - XOXOXO

I wouldn't be surprised by that.  A 50 year old doctor probably has a portfolio of $3-4 million.  He is at the age when you start getting serious about financial planning.

Understand, guys like that go to great lengths to protect their money: setting offshore corporation, transferring a large percentage of their assets to it, investing tax free (until the money is repatriated).  To transfer the assets, they usually have to play a game of some kind, like buying an annuity from their offshore company which is paid by a large balloon payment.

Bitcoin, on the other hand, makes it simple.  You can still do the offshore thing, but with near zero hassle: give the wallet to the corporation (left pocket to right pocket), sell using an account in the offshore name, invest profits.  He would only pay taxes when he brings the money back to his home country if it is structured correctly.

People like to talk about btc replacing gold; it is better than that for money management and transferring wealth.  Much, much better.

Amazing that the formation companies don't accept btc, or help customers with btc, isn't it?  BTC is the most beautifully portable money, and fits the niche perfectly.

Post of the day.

There are a lot of traders sitting on fiat, waiting for a clear direction in the market.  If we broke $680, most would buy back in.  Otherwise, agreed, we need a lot of new money to get moving.

The CEX.io exchange is also good news.  They will need to keep coins as a reserve, not dump them all on the other exchanges.

I have cash sitting on an exchange now.  I almost bought, thinking we might see $630 today.  Then I saw the slippage would take us ~$627, which would send all of the traders into a selling frenzy and drop us right back at $618.  I said screw it.

You are right, what they are doing is is rational.  And they are screwing up the market right now, at least until we get higher volume.  I am not a fan of daytraders and hope they get eaten up by the bubble.

It looks like this narrowing range has to end in 30 hours.  Breakout heading up?

That is 1) a great example of making a chart to fit your bias, 2) simply the worst chart I have ever seen.  It is hard to believe DanV has followers.

Wow!  That was an exciting day!  I hope tomorrow bitcoin Hi/Lo range is 7 entire dollars again!

Updates:
-The paint is still a bit sticky in the corners
-The grass grew 1.2mm today in the garden
-The layer of dust on top of the computer display is .1 microns thicker than yesterday
-31 people walked down the street outside my house today, 2 more than yesterday
I can't take this much excitement!!1!11!

With absolutely no evidence, I truly believe the price will jump 10% today or tomorrow.  All those orders just sitting there, not moving, for days.  Something explosive is going to happen.

I went to sleep at $618.99.
I woke up to $618.99.
I came back from breakfast at $619.00.

Bubble confirmed. CCMF.  We will be the new wealthy elite, gentlemen (in about 400 years).

If you need me, I will be keeping an eye on the paint and checking the lengthening of the lawn.

This still looks like a shakeout candle to me.  I will go with a 60% chance we hit 605-610 in the next few hours, 625 tomorrow, with movement upward following.

A little more patience, and I would have made some good money today.  Alas, Babylon.

I don't have a chart, but today's number is $596.  I am predicting today is a shakeout candle (daily action breaks the support/trend line, but finishes the day above the line; i.e. candle body above trend, wick crosses trend).  That would be a very bullish sign, and we would jump back up.

Buyers outnumber sellers 2:1 on Bitstamp.  The price is consolidating a bit.  Take a deep breath and HODL.

Support and trendlines get tested all the time.  What happens when a support is tested, and not fully broken?  Bounce.

My long liquidation price is $252.  We will be at $10k before I get squeezed.

Most of that bitfinex money is loaned out to smart guys, not amateurs.  Check the sizes of positions: $100k, $200k, $350k.  You aren't going to squeeze them.

Anyone else notice the dozens of 0.501 buys on Bitfinex?  Someone is moving us up in stealth mode.

Bitstamp, Bitfinex, OK and Huobi all at/above $600.

I am not a TA guy but I was mostly right.  I do think support and trend lines are real.

Yesterday, I expected a drop to $605 today, then a ramp to $630 or higher.  Once we bounced off the longterm trendine at $596 instead, i expected we would hit $605-610 before days close (12am UTC), and $625 or so tomorrow. All based on support and trend lines.

Ask me why we blew thru the support in the low $600's and I have no idea.

I am turning bearish on this thread.  There is no post volume on this rebound, the tiny posts from Chart buddy are not enough to make it back to ATH at 7777.

One big deletion from a post whale, and we fall back to the 6000's.  Abandon hope.

The bid to ask ratios are incredibly favorable on Bitfinex and Bitstamp.  This is an odd market.

Here we go, almost back to 7777.  Too bad some post whale will slam us back down to 6666.

I obviously like talking to myself, or I am conspiring to get Senior Member status.

Over $700K in USD swaps demanded on Bitfinex on the first page alone.  That is 1100 coins, enough to take us to 610 if no one cancels their asks in front of the tidal wave.  

And the dump (and post dump) continues.  Almost back to 592 and 7775.

7778 is the ATH, right?  Time to short the thread.

There is no use in complaining.  The market says the value of this thread is less than 7777.  We are in the process of price discovery.

Don't listen to reason!  Panic, sell, panic, sell again!

When we get to $500, I will sell my gf into slavery in Yemen to get more fiat to buy those sweet, sweet btc...

0%.  Nil.  Zero.  Null.

That is the chance that I would open a short today.  The market is being irrational, but that bid/ask ratio is amazing.

7500 in bids.
1500 in ask.

That could turn nasty for a short very quickly, don't you agree?

The people offering USD for swaps are in the btc market.  When the price starts rising consistently, they will move their money into btc, and leverage will dry up on Bitfinex.  That is the main reason most swap offers are 2 days: if the price skyrockets, they don't want to miss out.

Since I have been watching, USD swaps avaiable have always been 2.5-3.5M.  Today, it is $6M.
There is your bubble.

http://nevergetbusted.com/hot-news/drug-dealers-stop-stash-seized-use-bitcoin/

CCMF!

I think the major criticism was this: incomplete, possibly tampered with, trading records were released by a hacking group.  It was complete with malware installed.

Based on a post by some guy on the internet and what he says are in these hacked records, people claim that there was no bubble without buys from a Gox bot.

We are not exactly talking about a peer-reviewed paper.

Could we just fall quickly to 550, please?  I would prefer not to wait a week of slow slide before buying back in.

I would drop a huge short now, if there wasn't that support wall at $560.
I can't tell if it is real or not.

I chickened out on the big short.  The 560 wall went away, but that 557 wall is still there, so I lost a chance at a small profit.

I am going all in at 551, I think.   If it goes down to $540, that is only a 2% difference in price.  I can't see anything on the charts that says lower.

A 2M margin long opened just before the price started rising. 3500 btc.
It looks like he just threw the last 600 coins at the market at 576.

Unsurprisingly, we are headed back down.

Stair step down to $575 range later, followed by new attempts to breach $590 tomorrow.

On BFX, someone placed hundreds of 0.01 btc buys every cent (585.01, 585.02, etc).  Sell 0.6 btc and watch the bids scroll.

Buyers like that entertain me.

BFX has 445 coins to 595, can't make any progress.
Meanwhile, Huobi broke 595 and BTC-e is only $0.80 lower than BFX.

Limit buys holding at 593, even with price at 596.

That will be our consolidation price on Bitstamp, i think.  BFX will drop lower and have to fight to get back there: coins to 600 = coins to 565.

Anybody have some gasoline?  The fire is getting a little low.

Thanks, guys.  400 btc slammed into BFX support at 695.
That should keep the fire going for a while.

Sorry, shorts.


How many coins would we need to buy to cause a short squeeze?  850 on one exchange, IMHO, since the other exchange would jump on their own once they are $7 behind.

I checked the stats.  Very few shorts being opened, a lot more longs being opened (at least at BFX) in the last 24 hours.
Probably profit taking, or consolidation.

That Huobi wall is the only thing keeping us above 560.  If it gets pulled, we are going down 3%.

There are 10X more leveraged longs than shorts.

http://www.bfxdata.com/sentiment/longshort.php

I am looking at "BTCUSD Price combined with total sum of ACTIVE BTC and USD SWAPS" chart that says there are currently 5300 btc shorted, and 29.9M USD long (over 50k btc).  Pay attention to the axis on the right of the graph.

Yet Another Prediction (for those keeping score, I am 50% right and 50% wrong in my history):

I drew pretty lines on a chart to predict what the TA guys were thinking.  I got a nice triangle on 2hr-12hr charts that is closing in 24 hours or so.  Like at $625, some dumbass will drop a big short on Bitstamp in the next 12 hours and trigger a big drop.

Last time, we dropped right through the 610 support line with no hesitation.  This time we will drop through 560, and bounce off 550.

Don't blame me, blame the short.  Or even better, buy, buy, buy on the sell and bankrupt the short.

550 in the next few days.  People seem determined to sell on any price increase, and panic sell on any 2% drop.  This has been going on since 630. We need volume to break out above those asks piled up to 605.

705 in the next 2 weeks.  When we break out, I expect we will break out big.  The order books thin out above 605.

The distribution will get worse.  It is the little guys who panic sell, take big risks and lose everything, and generally don't understand the market.  They are the ones who will sell GABI and COIN cheap coins and then watch the price quintuple.  When the price is $5k, they will be angry at everyone except themselves.  It is heartbreaking, but we all know it is true and we know it will happen.

For the little guys, buy and hold is a good strategy (but not as good as buy, spend, rebuy).  Selling every time the price drops 5% makes them roadkill.  The price increases, on average, 0.6% per day.  Have some patience while the whales play their silly games.

NB: I admire any early adopters that still have most of the coins after the last 18 months.  I do wish they would do more to help the market though: less manipulation, more supporting the infrastructure around their investment.

I predicted 555 last night, and it is headed in that direction, but I have a bad, bad urge to go all in, max margin long.  Can anyone give me rational reason that doesn't start with the Huobi wall?

When you read the BFX long squeeze posts, read carefully.  They usually claim that there are margin longs holding since the rally to 685, holding for MONTHS, $100+ under water + months of margin interest, and any gust of wind will cause them to collapse the exchange.

Does that make any sense?  Would you hold a losing position for months and keep paying interest, or would you close it long ago at a small loss?  Yeah, me too, I would have closed by 675.  Thee are zero active positions long above $595...I would bet my life on it.

It is FUD.

A short squeeze is more likely in the coming weeks than a long squeeze, IMHO.   There are too many people bewitched by the idea of buying coins at 420 or 480.  It won't happen.

We need a higher market cap, and a smoother distribution of coins.  This silly crap with 1 or 2 people controlling the market has to end.  Everyone has already forgotten the guy who walked the market down from 685, 5 dollars at a time, with his sell walls.  Everyone has forgotten that one short knocked us out of the 620 range, eventually to where we are now.

Currently, one entity is holding the price at Huobi and buying up thousands of coins.  Good or bad for the short term price, one person should not be able to control the entire market.  A higher market cap ensures that most large holders sell the majority of their coins, hopefully to smaller buyers.

Somebody give me a call when the price moves a few percent?
This is mind numbing.


Does anyone have data on how many coins the Huobi guy has bought?  Over 4,000btc, I am guessing?

He has already added more coins to the wall at least TWICE after it was eaten down to a few hundred coins.  He is definitely buying.  I guessed yesterday that he has already bought at least 4k btc without a price increase.  It is probably higher.  He is getting a great price, has no slippage, and isn't chasing the market.  I say well done.

It is sad to watch small owners selling their coins cheap to a fiat whale, but that is their decision.

Another data point:

Watching bids, either there are 2 whales buying or he has his wall plus more smaller bids at slightly higher prices.  I keep seeing identical mid-sized bids near market price.  Right now, there are 4 bids of 16.051 showing.  Last night, there were a series of identical 20.xxx bids.

Bulls still have plenty of money.  They are sitting on the sidelines waiting for either: a) the bottom of this slide, or b) significant upward momentum.  It feels pointless to buy now because there is a 90% chance we will slide another $15 and there is zero chance the price will hit even $600 soon.  Everyone is discouraged.

I did not respond because they were silly and/or pedantic replies.  I have to give 1000:1 odds on Wall Observer prediction?  0% was hyperbole, which given the content of this thread, should be obvious.  Nothing with btc has a literal zero chance including $1M or $1 tomorrow.

I probably would have taken 4:1 or 5:1 on 48 or 72 hours, though.

With that said, that post was 1.5 days ago, I think.  We haven't slid down yet, but I seriously doubt we will see 600 in the next day or so. Worst case, I am down to 43% correct on btc predictions, which is about average here, I think.

So, I am going to be right in the end, yet I will continue taking crap.

Can I have a few dozen more sales at .11354 or .03078 on BFX?

I can't figure out why guys selling 1 or 2 coins are opting to dump in tiny orders.   Currently, you could dump 5 coins with zero slippage.

Over $1M in new long swaps opened in the last 12 hours.

This is a point many people are missing: there is $4M in USD swaps available today.  That money is (largely) not going to be used for leveraged longs during a sustained bubble/surge, the swap providers are going to jump into btc when the price starts a good uptrend.  Sure, they may have to wait for the loan term to expire, but it will go to buying up coins.

It is entirely possible (likely?) that total active longs will decrease during a bubble due to unavailability of USD swaps.

I wonder if providing USD swaps might be a gateway drug for buying btc.

I am not a fan of MP, but that is just brilliant.  As he says, if there are any real investors (not just the insiders), they will buy from him.  If no one buys, there are no real investors.

And the other exchanges are not following Bitstamp.

Yep, what, 4 days later?

Am I right that the Bitstamp ask walls have not been tested?  It is tough to believe that there are 3000 coins to 600.


Edit: looks like we tested yesterday.

If it wasn't so boring, the last 9 days on the daily chart would be hilarious: 9 doji (or near doji)  in a row.

That should be a signal of market indecision.  If we are being held at this range so someone big can stock up on coins, why is it taking so long?

Remember that btc prices rise an average of 0.59% per day.  This ranging is abnormal, and will eventually end.

I was so bored last week that I did that (correctly, though).  Made $100 in 5 trades, over 5 days, bought a piece of a btc.  The exchange made more than I did.

Boredom makes me do stupid things.

Bitstamp H/L range for today is $3.88.

Personally, I thought the Visa comment and the Global Payments announcement were huge news.  No one seems to have cared; a few months ago, it would have caused a huge rally.

New shorts are going in. 600 or 700 new btc swaps just bought in the last 35 minutes.

It's a pseudonymous currency, of course we don't know the number of users or adoption rates.  And we likely never will unless people volunteer to answer surveys or something similar.

We do know that outside corporations seem to believe adoption is growing, or possibly that they wish for it to grow.  The evidence is increasing adoption by businesses.  Why did Visa state that they could incorporate bitcoin into their system?  Why did Global Payments allow bitcoin payments to their clients?  Either a) increased adoption is happening, or b) they want increased adoption to occur.

I think he is talking about the big 30-50% one day dives in November or December, or that 80% drop in March on Bitfinex.  I am sure he is not talking about the measly 2% drop yesterday.  No sane person would call 2% a crash...I hope.

I put in bids at 551, 530, 510, and 490.

I am perma-bull, but I don't believe the walls at Bitstamp will survive the next 12 hours. If people want to sell cheap, I will buy their coins, even if I would rather see a rally.

Just to kill off the long squeeze FUD that is being spread on Reddit, take a look at this chart:
http://www.bfxdata.com/swapstats/usd.php
Click All as the time period.

Eyeballing the chart, it looks like (very conservatively) $1M in longs is opened every 6hr period on average, or $4M per day.
There are about $30M in outstanding longs.  This means the average long stays open 7 days.

Realistically, it is closer to $1.25M, $5M, and less than 6 days.  You might notice that $10M in USD swaps was opened in one 24 hour period.

Anyone waiting for margin calls on guys holding from $685, $650, $630 or even $600 positions is nuts.  30M in longs over the last 3 months DOES NOT mean that the positions have been held 3 months.  It means BFX has a pretty stable equilibrium of longs opening and closing such that 30M is outstanding at any particular time.

For many of us, this will be the trade of the year.

Tweezers on the 30min chart.  Back down.

550 then I will be long again.

Already shorted down, long to 546 (the first time) and short back down $10.  I am tired...but more money for coins.

If you guys would stop arguing with trolls and buy back in, we could see 600 tomorrow.

If the other exchanges don't start backing up Bitstamp, the arb bots are going to drive them back to 645.

400 new shorts just opened on Bitfinex...and BITSTAMP fell $5.  Bfx is only down $1.50.  Weird.

Edit: even weirder, there were more LTC swaps opened in the last hour than USD or BTC. Glitch.

Purely market sentiment.  Everyone was talking about 550, 530, and 480, not about going higher.  All forums I read are very bearish.  You are mocked and downvoted on /r/bitcoinmarkets for saying anything positive.  Suddenly, bitcoin is an idiotic idea that will never catch on.

Or maybe everyone was just bored with sideways.

In general, I think you are right, however:
Everytime I talk to people about btc, their biggest smug smiles comes when they say, "Oh, and it is only half the price it was last year, right?  All those people lost money, right?  Right?"  Well, yeah, they are down 50%.  Yeah, they lost money. Yeah, the price is still dropping.

If Wall Street comes in and crashes the price, it will do serious damage to the future of btc.  They will have to moderate their short term greed in order to make more money later.  I am not sure they know how to moderate their greed, but I hope they learn.

Ascending triangle on the 30 minute charts.  Bullish if we can break thru 550 (or 555, depending on how you draw the lines).

Motherf**er.  Bfx blew past my orders at 490 and 480, but caught my 470?  WTF?

Already closed it out, bought btc.  Volatility, baby!

C'mon, Bitfinex, my orders are ready!  One more spike down, please?

Most bullish sign that you can hope to see: newbie users on Reddit are asking how to short btc. 2 threads on first page of /r/bitcoinmarkets, more scattered in the daily discussion threads.

When the dumb money takes a position, it is reversal time. A leveraged position, no less.

I can smell a short squeeze coming down the road.

The market has conditioned everyone for months to be cautious on a price rise, because someone will slam it right back down with a huge sell.  

After a few big buys move the price up, watch how slow bids fill in to the new price.  I have watched $4-5 spreads last 30 minutes, especially in the 620-630 and 560-590 ranges.  Gun shy.

How did you find out it was there?

I really think we are going back to 450 or 460 again, probably an orchestrated runs at the longs that reopened today, but with a big bounce following.  Yes, I have my money where my mouth is: I have orders from 340 to 490.

I hope to wake up with all orders filled and back to 550.  It won't happen, but I would smile (A LOT).

Long term, the price will do great.  I don't have a solid number, but I believe 3k minimum in the next year or 18 months.  If you believe in manipulation (I certainly do), the manipulators must think there is a large profit to be made from buying cheap coins.  If you believe in fundamentals, btc is doing great, despite the fud.

Medium term, I expect 700 within 3-4 weeks.  Possibly 1 week.  Possibly in 2 days. This just based on watching btc price moves over time.

Short term, I don't care much.  Today or tomorrow, I want $400 to get my low ball bids filled.  I doubt it will happen though.  I want to maximize my holdings before the price jumps.  I have no doubt the price will rise quickly soon, so I want as many coins as I can possibly get.  Sentiment is that coins are ridiculously cheap.

I only ask one thing from the market: no more weeks of sideways.

Agreed.  Even 490 will be hard work.  I wish I had bought more in the 480's.

 
My pretty lines on a chart says solid resistance support at 500, based on trend lines.  My brain says we will hang around 505 for a day or two.  502 might be a good re-entrance point.  I am considering dumping 20% of my long at 514 and picking it back up there.
I am still waiting for Aminorex's monkey's opinion.  I think he will agree that is a risky move.

And that is one way that I choose to ignore posters.  One guy in particular starts nearly every post with a one sentence personal insult, followed by a paragraph which ends with a personal insult.  Amazingly, despite not adding anything substantive (plenty of regurgitation), he manages to not be ignored by most of you.


Looking at his post history, that post pattern seems to be 95% of all of his posts.

About 5500 shorted btc on BFX.  A short squeeze would take us to 625.

Velocity would also depend on the application:
Store of value would have a very small velocity.  My coins have essentially zero real velocity (moving between my wallets or to an exchange should not count).
Remittance companies could theoretically churn through the same coins over and over again, yielding a high velocity.
As a currency, I would expect velocity to be similar to any other currency.

I don't think we will have an answer until btc has much wider adoption.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the idiot sellers who have gifted me multiple btc over the last 3 days. Keep selling low and buying high, please.  Also, keep shorting that price down until you run out of coins and the price bounces back.  I enjoy that.

Keep up the good work, sincerely,
A. Scalper

I have been trading pretty well this week, but I can't even guess which way we are moving for the next couple of hours.  Could be 495, could be 395.  Could sit at 460.  Hell if I can figure it out.

This is a scary market.

Post of the day.

Mt. Gox is also part of the problem.  Most people are unwilling to leave fiat on an exchange, so there is a 4 business day lag before new buying can start.

...watch orders of 37, 63, 52, 48, 41, 59, 100 (exactly 500 btc) get dumped on your head, flip to BFX and see the exact same sells there, realize you just lost $10/btc.  It seems to happen a lot just after it looks like a break out might occur.

Something to think about: BFX said that 7k btc were dumped to create the long squeeze a few days ago.  There are only ~100 people with that many coins.  If you take into account that they would not risk more than half of their entire holdings, there are only ~40 or 50 max.  If you say they are smart enough not to risk more than 20%, there are very few.

So one of the bitcoin big shots is the one who screwed the market and tried to bankrupt the longs.  The 7M USD in coins (probably much more) that he already owned wasn't enough.  

Disappointing, isn't it?

Maybe buying back the 7k coins he dumped a few days ago?

Anybody think he can prevent a drop to 420?  This is actually a turning point, possibly.  I am sure everyone has bids lined up down to 350, and we may actually go up.

Any shorts who haven't noticed what is happening are in serious trouble.  He attacked the longs before (I think, based on volume bought by the hidden wall), now he is going to attack the shorts.

5600 shorts still open.

A HELL of a lot better than that sideways stuff.  Volatility is a hell of a drug.

What is the logic behind that?  Serious question.

My guess is that the price will fall slowly, since he has already eaten 3500 (3k? 4k?) market asks, decreasing sell pressure.  (He may have cut my chances of getting my 380-430 bids filled.)  Note that the upside will still have to eat the same number of coins, since the limit asks look to be the same.

Over 1200 btc dumped onto the heads of the bulls on BFX.

About 7300 total.

On Bitfinex, they have a claim option.  If you buy 10 coins at $100, and the price goes up $20, you have $200 profit (10 coins x 20 USD).
You can sell 8 coins, and use the $200 profit to "claim" the remaining 2 coins at the original $100 price.

This means you don't necessarily have to sell all of the original 10 coins.

It is gambling, and you can lose everything with 1 bad decision.
If you are at maximum leverage on Bfx, it only takes a 20% drop to wipe you out.

7k in buys would theoretically take us back to 580.

Yeah, apparently no one can login to BFX.  The 2fa is broken on their side.

I am conflicted:
Hang around 500 for a day until we finally stay above; or
Drop to 400, have my lowball bids filled, then come back up.

The only problem I have with a drop is that I want to see a short squeeze.

I am waiting for the retracement.  If there is a good push, I will be in big.

I still want 465, but am starting to doubt we will see it again.  Ever.

I would be happy with a dump. $6 from the top of a fast rise is not a good entry point for me.

Looking at depth, it will be tough to push below $485.  Even if the 7k dumper comes back, we are at $455.

Except once on Monday and once on Tuesday, after the pattern was set, he waited until it went up $5 and everyone bought in, then dumped 500 and 1200 coins on us.  I know because he cost me nearly $200.

I am not a conspiracy guy, I swear on my family's life, but much of the drama over the last week looks like one guy/group.  The 7k dump on Bfx, the big hidden walls to get his coins back, etc.  I would like to blame him for the rise today not stalling at 499, but that is more questionable.

There are still 6800 shorts open.  They have guts, I will give them that.

And anyone with the brain of a cockroach would close before a margin call is triggered.  A margin call means your collateral is gone.

The shorts are waiting for a correction down to minimize losses.  Another 10-20 dollars and they might give up.

Praying for 547.

I wasted the rise from 480 to 505, waiting for the dumper to destroy the rally.  I still can't believe we are above 500 so easily.  Really weird, considering the last week.

$9 more and the real excitement begins.  It will be tough on BFX: 900 coins between 535 and 540.  From 560 up, it is cruise control.

Believe it or not, people are still opening up shorts.

Up $70.
Re-trace $19.
How is that a bull trap?

My only complaint is we gave the shorts $19 back instead of killing them off.

Adam was confused yesterday.
I am confused today.  I am thinking 40% chance of up, 30% chance of down, 30% chance sideways.  Or maybe the other way around.

I am at zero leverage, with no idea how to trade for the next 24 hours.  Anymore monkeys out there with sage advice?

Watching the order books on BFX today, the spread was pretty awful for hours.  It would have cost you $2.70 from the highest bid (not including exchange fees) to buy 1btc.  About $1.70 spread and another buck to gather 1btc from small bids.

What is the strategy if you are doing 100btc or 500btc trades?  In most cases, you are going to lose $2-10 on slippage.  Just sell a few coins at a time as you get close to your exit?  Or only do large trades on big movement?

Except the 485 coin wall just got eaten.  Better wake up!

I am betting on a low of 498.  Someone will dump to to 500.
495 would take too much work: after breaking through 1k coins to 500, they need another 1k to get to 495.
Unlikely.  
The question is whether we bounce or sit around 500 until tomorrow.

It still might drop, but chances of seeing less than 500 just got remote.


I missed the spike, so someone please dump 400 coins so I can get in at a good number.  Please?

...And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from panic buying.


Oh, shit.  I have to go to confession again....

When a whale dumps 1500 coins to break 500 support, it is a valid support break?
But when a whale paints a TA pattern it is invalid?

Seems inconsistent.

Interesting: both shorts and longs are up.

I am probably a normal buyer/trader.  I am not buying until I can figure out what is happening next.

I have been burned 3 times in a week by a big dump (1200, 800 and 1700 coins) within minutes of buying and it has cost me money.  I would be happy if that f***ing whale got harpooned.

Hence the lack of buyers and large spreads.

Hence the f***ing whale wins.  THAT sucks.

i look at it two ways:
1. For trading, the price doesn't matter; only volatility matters.  Everything is just numbers and patterns on a computer monitor.  The future did not drop 60 percent since December, only the market did, probably due to old owners cashing out.
2. Fundamentally, a bitcoin price under 700 is cheap.  Maybe under 1000.  Maybe, realistically based on past prices, 3k is cheap.  Consider how widely it can be used, the future in the remittance market, the ETFs (which I think are over-rated), the use as a store of money and replacement for the $21 TRILLION tax haven industry.

Unfortunately, the price is based on #1.  I own it long term for reason #2, but trade for reason #1.

I don't know.  The other exchanges ignored it, unless that caused a $3 drop on Bfx.  If we go down (which we will in the next 6 hours) it wont be because of BTCChina.  It will be because we could not rebound back to 615.

Oddly, dropping prices give traders a reference point. Ranging confuses everyone.

Looking over the last few hours, it looks like 1-1.50 drop, maybe, if I squint close.  That ain't no drop.

I wish Bitcoin Wisdom had that feature. 

I would enjoy that too.  I have had 4 hours in the last 2 nights.  My style of trading only gives 0-2 chance per day and they seem to come at bed time here.


Just wait for a bubble, when none of us sleep for a month.

Except we been sitting around 504 because of one guy dumping huge earlier and broke 500 support.  The btc market doesn't listen to logic, sadly.  A small minority think Jesse is right; the majority of traders just look at the TA.

+1.  Trends usually work, as long as a whale doesn't choose that moment to do whale things.

My gut says an entrance at 480 can't lose money over the course of a month.
If we hit that number, I will be all in.

I am not an idiot.  Give me a decent upward trend, and I will buy.  Until then, I am betting we see 480-485.

That seems to be a very strong trend line on the 1 hr chart.  The market keeps testing and testing, but can't close a candle over the line.

If it fails again, I might get my price.

I read your chaos theory post.  In general, I agree.  The exceptions are: 1) market psychology is real; and 2) whale do whale things.  Excellent post.

The bottom of this channel is about 485.  I have bids at 490, but I am starting to think they won't get filled.  My best guess for a low is 498 since there was no bounce down from the trend line.

Apparently not.  I am still sitting here with fiat.
I hope to god a troll doesn't beat me...I would have to make a new account because of the shame.

Weren't you just giving me sh*t because I was trying to do a big buy-in near the bottom of the 485-505 channel?  And gloating that we hit 513 and I would buy in higher?  And, now, at 515, you are saying we are going to drop?


You are an equal opportunity bi-polar real troll.

You are sleepy, very sleepy.  Relax and concentrate on the sound of my voice.

You want to sell your coins, you want see the price go down for a while.
Yes, yes, drop a little more.  My first tranche of bids are in sight.  Sell.  Sell!
Now lower, lower still.  More of my tranches for you to dump your coins!
Think how good it will feel not to watch the charts anymore, not to worry about the price anymore. 
Just fill my bids.  Yes, like that.

Remember, when we get to 492, you will wake up refreshed and rebuy all your coins.
514, 513, 512, 511, 510, 509....

I believe this.  To do a 50 coin buy on Bfx 6 or 7 hours ago, you had $6 slippage.  In a $10 range up and down, there were 70 coins available, bid and ask COMBINED.  In between were bots, .1, .5 and an occasional 1 coin entries.  The depth charts looked like a desert for $20.

If sellers were willing to sell, there would not have been a plateau at 607 for hours.

Anyway, except for 2 low ball tranches in the 480s, I got my buys filled.  I think we have already bottomed, had our panic, and will head up (I am not talking my book, that is the reason why I bought in big and stopped trading).  If everyone has forgotten about the 2 crash days, this thread was full of panic.

540 in 48 hours, 600 in a week or so.

When people throw money at you, accept it with a smile.

I expect that nearly everyone here is a long-term bull.  I can't think of a justification for btc being in the 400's, except market malfunction.  Everything in fundamental analysis is golden.  Sentiment analysis changes everyday: moon, hell, moon, hell.  Technical analysis seems to be broken most of the time because this such an emotion-driven market.  After Dell, Global Payments, the Ebay subsidiary, etc., etc., etc., good news after good news after good news, does it make sense that btc is selling for 495 or 500?  I think no.  I stopped trading, bought a long term position and will wait for the top.

Smile, buy coins, be gracious when the price goes back up.

Mostly 1 or 2 order dumps, synchronized within seconds on multiple exchanges.  1 guy.  
That includes the attempts at short long squeezes, which were single sells of 7k on Bfx and (IIRC) 1200 btc on BTC-e.

The short term symmetric triangle will break in the next 7-8 hours.  That should be bullish.

Down we go in 3.....2....1...

The irrationality is amazing.  Where are the sellers going to buy back in?  I can't imagine that we can get to 485, maybe not even 490.  Sell at the bottom?  Wow....

What is the opposite of a bagholder?

I don't see a way.  Even if the 7k dumper came back, he could not push Bfx to 470, and price would jump right back.  My emergency fiat is bidding at 490.

You going to put that last 25% in?

I can't sleep.  I am convinced that the failed dump and failure of shorts to open new positions signals a rally coming.  I was hoping to see 520 before work, but it isn't going to happen.

BTC-e is willing, but the Chinese are sitting on their fiat.

Walls, walls everywhere.
Poor Bfx only started with 520 coins to 510.  After eating 1000 or 1200 in coins, including 125, 384 and 225 in single orders, there are now 570 coins to 510.

If the exchanges make it to 515 (or 510 on Bfx), it should be easier.

Broke it 5 minutes ago on Bfx.
545 wall an 120 wall eaten in 20 seconds.

...and he will have to buy them back again at some point, if we manage to break through.  And we could get a short squeeze on those 5500 coins.

510 walls got eaten.

It sounds like no effort was made to do real research; it reads like a standard /r/bitcoinmarkets post, not like something a bank should be publishing.

Merchant sales only matter if coins are not being replaced.  Otherwise, it is just another buy/sell at market price.  The standard reply is, 'Oh, early adopters are going to spend all their coins at Expedia!1!"  with no evidence.  Since the large addresses are growing in size, this is unlikely to be true.

Due to its anonymous/pseudonymous nature, adoption numbers are almost impossible to know.  The standard reply is to drag out the same old blockchain chart, because we know how reliable their data is  .  Transactions data mean less and less because so many transactions are made off-chain.  The average transaction size has also been dropping for years (ask the hero posters about 10k coin walls or buying 1k coins at once).

My final point: why are major companies accepting btc if no one owns any and btc is slowly losing the battle?  Maybe, just maybe, they know more than many posters.

Note that JS uses Bitpay figures from last year against today's volume.  Very misleading, since the number of available businesses has gone up by a magnitude or 2 this year.

Also, I have spent $8,000 using btc in the last few months.  As far as I can tell, none of the businesses used Bitpay (Expedia, for example, uses Coinbase).

And 1184 coin wall at 515 on Bfx.

Ah, yeeeaah.

Now, 541 bid wall at 510 on Bfx.

WHALE FACE-OFF!

That sucked.  We had zero slippage buy opportunity, now we have slid 5-10 USD from the walls.
I would have taken a bite.

Yeah, I know I can save $10 per coin, but I would have liked to see the slow drift up continue.  If we had eaten that wall (or caused it to be pulled) it might have generated a rally.

Oh, well, I still have an old order at 502.  Let's see if it gets filled.

The price dropped $5 while I was sleeping, and all the trolls came out.  Entire pages in this thread with only one or 2 comments that are not ignored.

$513 to 508.74 is enough to bring out the trolls?  That has to be bullish with less than a 1% drop is the most they can hope for.

Placing >5k in walls spread across exchanges at the same time is not normal supply and demand.  That IS price manipulation.  Did the seller decide Bitstamp coins are worth 520 and Bfx coins were only worth 515 because of value?  No, he set his walls a few USD above current price on each exchange.  Did the seller who dumped 7k coins in a single order last week do it because of supply and demand?  No, he expected to make money are long margin calls.

Btc IS a highly manipulated market.  I don't expect that to change for years, until the early adopters sell off coins.

Anyone understand the purpose of these flickering walls? 880 bid, then gone. 100 ask at 509, then gone. 654 reappears at 510.
What is the reasoning for doing this?  Entertainment?

Bfx and Stamp: buy or keep running away?  You are almost in a corner already.
Make up your mind.

Exactly.  Creating the walls took too many coins out of higher asks.
Break the wall and we cruise to upper 500's.
I took a small bite at 510, but no one followed.  At this point (505), if someone buys 250 coins to get the ball rolling, I am sure the wall will either will run or get eaten.  505 feels very cheap.

Is it happening?
I think it is happening.

Edit: It ain't happening.

1 trade in 19 minutes on Bfx.

1500 coins to an avalanche.

If he wanted to dump his position, he could have done a market sell at 515 and received a much higher average selling price, including slippage.

He is pushing the market down, into his own buys, to accumulate coins.  Notice how the bid wall has fallen with the price.

Someone estimated a few hours ago that 400 coins had been eaten.
He has probably bought thousands.  Do the math.

What does the weekend have to do with this?  If the weekend had a predictable effect on price, it would be arbitraged away as soon as the pattern appeared; if I know the price drops on Saturday, I will sell on Friday (then Thursday, then Wednesday, etc., etc.).

For reference, no 15 minute candles closed under 500.
The candle wick low was 499.8.
500 is strong.

Bounce!

Let's hope.

Everytime the price moves near the walls on Stamp, volume dies, then a big dump occurs.  A few hours ago, the wall was the next ask, and not one coin was eaten.

Edit: and Stamp runs away again.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/08/28/uk-usa-bitcoin-retailers-analysis-idUKKBN0GS0AQ20140828

Dell, Dish, and Expedia say their bitcoin revenue has exceeded expectations

Fundamental analysis is terrible, isn't it?  Btc is being adopted and succeeding.

"Wow, it is so big up close, I don't think I can handle it."  Cowers away.

Her mother walks in, looks, "I handled one 10 times that size last November."

Bfx ready to touch its wall, too.

If he is really trying to sell (which now seems likely as his walls get attacked but stayed in place), he must be an amateur.  He picked a method  that guaranteed a low selling price.

Since we were on a slow, steady uptrend, why not place limit orders of 20 coins every 1-2 USD rise?  Or drop a 20 coin market order every 20 minutes?  Or even a straight 4000 coin market sell spread across multiple exchanges?  Or better yet, just hold as the price was rising?

He placed the wall, and the price dropped $6.  So he moved his walls down.  And again.  So he is not selling at 516 or 520, he is selling at 506 and 507.  

It was very poor execution, or something more complicated than dumping 2M in btc is happening.

Keep in mind, this is the Wall Observer thread.  It is about minute-by-minute chart watching, not macro market moves.  $5-10 price moves are the subject, not long term trends.

Every (yes, I said every) CCMF post is made tongue in cheek.  I think 90% of the bear posts are also tongue in cheek.  Overall, IMHO the bull/bear thing is more about easy entertainment than reality.

I am a scalper and all profits go into more btc.  On a daily basis, I don't care if it is up or down.  Long-term, YOY,  I am a bull so I am happier with ups than with downs.   Does it make me smile when the market beats a bearish prediction?  Yeah.  But I probably made money either way.

TL;DR: most of the bear/bull stuff is banter.

 

If no one has noticed, Bfx Data (http://www.bfxdata.com/) has re-done their landing page.  Almost everything useful is summarized, including longs/shorts, leverage rates and market data.

Once per week, the market just makes no sense to me.
The price edges slowly up on small buys to 515.  Walls appear, price drops, walls drop, price drops. Predictable.
Walls get eaten, price jumps most of the way back to 515 in minutes.  Predictable.
Instead of eating the minor remaining resistance to 525 or 530, the market drops back to/below the price with walls.  Weird.

BTC markets are tough to figure out.

Maybe the EU will impose more sanctions, that will teach Putin.
Wait, they might send a strongly worded letter.

The Russians will do what they want because Europe is a tiger with no teeth, no fangs.  The US cares, but is too busy.

Conspiracy theory: Russia funds and trains ISIS just to keep the US out of the conflict.

A big hidden ask wall has been selling on Bfx for 6 hours at 500.27.

It was nice of him not to just dump. 

That is hilarious!  Two bots fighting it out?  There were hundreds of trades back and forth between 2 prices in less than a minute..

Note to self: stay the f**k away from BTC-e.

Check BTC-e on bitcoinwisdom.  It looks like 2, maybe 3 or 4, bots battling it out.  Their volume is insane, nearly all in small amounts.  To me, it looks like something went haywire.

The big question: what is connection between BTC-e and the other exchanges?  Any shared order books?  Arb bots?

You are taking all of the fun out of it. 

I don't know anyone who owns a single satoshi anymore.  All 5 of my friends have sold and won't be back when they saw they were down $60-120/coin, somewhere around $50k in investors.  The 2 guys who used to talk to me about btc think I am trying to scam them.  My neighbor used btc to get a discount on a new laptop; he bought them literally at the last possible second so that they price would not drop during the time that they were in his address.

There are 3 main classes of btc owners, IMO:
- the majority with less than 5 coins
- the middle with 5-300 coins
- the bigger guys

These drops are not about btc value.  They are not about price discovery.  It has nothing to do with TA.  It is just the big guys taking money from the smaller guys.  I have spent 7 months staring at the charts and watching buy/sells scroll buy.  Every drop is started by 200, 250, 300, 350 coins market sells, followed by more large sells, then the rest with 1-10 coins trying frantically not to lose money (which of course the always do).  The big guys have their buy orders a few percent off the top, buy back in.  Rinse and repeat day after day, as the price drops day after day, so the big guys can make their easy profits.  And then defend the 7k dump on Bitfinex as natural market movement.  And defend the big dump on BTC-e a few days later as a natural market movement.  And complain that people refuse to buy the price up for your next dump.

We are not in a bear market.  We are in a market where the big guys make more money on dumps than price increases.  And dumps are SO much easier.

The smug big guys in this thread like to say we are in accumulation phase.  No, we aren't.  We are in the "take the newbies' money" stage.  They are also the guys who encourage trading, instead of holding.  See, they don't make money from you when you only hold your coins, they need you on an exchange.  Goldman, etc., are replaced by anyone who holds 1 or 2k coins and can initiate dumps or walls.

Some of the big guys here are talking about $300 coins.  Good luck with that, I hope you achieve it.  Everyone except you will have sold and left btc.  Everyone else will have lost half their money and left the technology for good.  You will likely get $50, $25, $10, $1 coins, too.  A Pyrrhic victory.

This short term thinking drives the price down, hinders new adoption, and drives out anyone who has adopted recently.  Remember that when you see the charts that say btc adoption has stagnated: why would the average person hold coins that have dropped over 20% in the last 2 months and 60% in 9 months, for exactly no reason?  Why would a newbie even CONSIDER buying btc when he is guaranteed to lose money?

I am thinking about dropping out of trading myself.  I will keep a percentage of my coins in a cold wallet, sell the rest.  This crap happening in the market is unbearable.  I would rather deal with wallet street than bitcoin markets.

And no, I haven't lost coins trading.  That is only because my trades rarely last over an hour.

I think we are losing adoption NOW.  User numbers don't seem to be rising at all, and the main complaint is losing money on their investment.  I literally know no one else who owns coins anymore.  This manufactured drop from $600 is killing the tech. (Tes, exchange rates matter, trolls.)

Note that game theory says the price will trend to zero.  As long as there are hundreds of people with enough coins to play the dump game, one of them will continue doing it to make their extra 20 or 30 coins per day.  If you gave me 3k btc today, I could guarantee I would have 6k in 90 days.  The game is too easy.  

Those posters who say that the only people who care about the price (exchange rate) are get rich quick dreamers are deluded.  If I could buy a laptop with 2 bitcoins 3 months ago, but now need to use 3 btc, there is a serious problem.  And as long as 99.9% of goods require USD to purchase, the exchange rate is important.

I left out one point before: look at how much concentrated effort it took to break through support at 500.  Thousands and thousands and thousands of coins dumped to break support and make the dump game possible again.  How many of the big guys had to help to break through?  I sincerely thought it was impossible to reach 490...forgetting that there are single individuals with 50k coins who could wipe out the entire order book.

Now, explain to me how it is possible to have another bubble.  It will be a race to see who can dump fastest and hardest to make the biggest percentage gain on a thin order book.  IIRC, to cut the price 40% in November only took a 1k dump; stops triggered, margins called, panic selling, huge profit with no risk.  They won't be able to control themselves when the opportunity arises next time .

I will say this with all honesty: I no longer believe btc has any chance of being a serious currency due to its users.  I have always been a short term agnostic and long term bull.  I am full bear now.  I doubt that we will ever see 700 again, and 300's will be here soon.  The big guys are warning everyone everyday that they want lower prices.  Believe them.

Oh, look.  A 2k wall again.
Just a totally natural market action, not another big guy driving the price into the ground to grab more coins.

Edit: As I said in prior posts.  No buying pressure to go up past 482 since buyers have learned they will get smashed back down, packed coins around 470, so no room to make money on dumping.  Put up 2k wall, force support to break, go back to playing the dump game.  Anyone see the pattern yet?  Does anyone see any reason this will end?  It has been over 2 months of this already.

I think 500 btc might have been pulled.  3 orders were static, one order of 500 or 600 coins was being flashed at different prices every few minutes.  I did not see it get bought.

Remember, there were at least 3 attempts to break 500 before it succeeded, and then we fell to 470.  He sold coins expecting to buy them back at 430.  40USD drop...that will be roughly an 8% increase in coins in 24-48 hours if the pattern holds.

There were 11k from 510 to 480 IIRC.  Absolutely massive support, 2-2.5k btc to move the price $5 in places.  I wish I had a screenshot.  

That is why it took 3 or 4 dumps and all those ask walls to break it. 516 to 490 in a couple of hours.

Do you want to hear the scary part?
What would it imply if the big boys are scrambling to make money immediately, while sacrificing all the new adopters to near-term greed?  What does that say about their view of the future of btc?

Now THAT is scary.  And it seems to be happening.

Since the number of users follow the exponential curve, new adopters (less than 6 months or so, for example) should be the majority of owners (although obviously not the owners of a majority of coins).  Those are the people being encouraged to not hodl, but trade instead.  Those are the weak hands that are constantly shaken out.  They are the future of btc..or should have been.

My best guess for the bottom is ~340.  I will explain why if I am right.

Sticky post in the Meta forum.  It is the lesser of the activity number (2 week periods with a post*14) and post count.

People learn and recognize patterns. Spending 20 minutes looking at the 30 minutes charts for the last month should convince anyone.  I wish there was a site that would also show the buy/sell action, order by order, during a specified candle, as well.

Yesterday, we had the 2k wall and only a tiny dump (600 coins?), apparently because no big guys followed his lead.  Everyone remembers what happened nearly every day since June, especially the massacre at 500.  As soon as they buy and the trend is up, 1000 coins are market dropped on the market and they are sitting at a loss.

I suspect that it would take a 5 days to a week with no major dumps before buyers get any confidence that it is safe to buy.  Until that occurs, down we go.

200 and 50 day MA's crossed today.  Last time, we went to 340.

Hold on tight.

On Bfx:
No trades in 25 minutes
4 trades in 42 minutes, 5btc total

Tweezers on the 1hr chart.
If the retracement doesn't go past 50%, there is a chance we will continue up a bit.
Bad news if bigger retracement or yet another big dump.

Now comes the ugly part.


Edit:  And thanks for playing.  At least the market is predictable if you expect the worst.

Pessimism works for me.  It feels like I have some sort of control, even if I am just believing the trend.

I stick with my prediction of a low of 340.  I would hope I was wrong, but hope breaks my heart after what happened at 620, 513 and 500.

Don't you know about the fappening?  I think EVERYONE'S shorts are covered. 

Edit: JLaw
Edit2: Ariana Grande

The only bullish sign that I can find is that shorts seem over-confident.
The normal number of shorts is around 5000 btc.  We are at nearly double that level, with a 711 coin increase in the last 24 hours.

Continuing my pessimism:
this would not be a bad time to open a short, since we are failing in a 2nd push upwards.  The pattern has been a 3-4% fall after failures to rally.

You might want to look at Bfx where the ratio is the inverse.

1800 coins dumped in big orders on Bfx.

40% of the volume this hour  on Bfx is newly opened shorts.

The price rising above the ATH.
Suddenly, 2014 would just look like a long consolidation after the November bubble.  Newbies would be adopting again and the future would look great.

Unfortunately, I can't see a way to get back to the ATH.

More likely, a few days at 460, before a drop to 430-440.

Leverage, maybe?

It is easy to place a buy $20-50 below market price, but that does not mean the order won't be cancelled when the buyer realizes he can probably buy $20 cheaper in a week.  Placing an order is not a contract to buy at that price.

When we were at 510, there were 12k coins to 580.  I estimated less than 50% of those were actually executed.  The rest were cancelled.

Bitstamp, IMHO, is more realistic about orders that will actually happen.

As a personal example, I had a low ball order at 480 in case of a long squeeze (when we were at 510).  I cancelled it when I saw the effort and number of dumps that occurred to break 500, knowing we would not see 500 for a long time.  Now, I have a big order at 425 for the same reason as the 480.

I never believe orders books, bid/ask ratios, etc., more than $10 away.  They are a mirage.

Edit: one more example.  Most of the way from 590 to 530, bids outnumbered asks 1.5-1.8:1.  Price continued dropping constantly.

340.  If it breaks 340, then there is no bottom.

So, 2019 coins to disaster?

Alternate interpretation:  Bitcoin adoption falling, bitcoin usage set back years.

Blame all those guys who dump 1k-5k coins each to break major support levels so they can have 5M USD after the next bubble (which I doubt will happen) instead of only 3M USD.  Blame the guy who put up 2k coin walls when we got to 685 and walked the price down 5 USD at a time, so he could scoop up cheaper coins.  They think they can stop shoving the market down and the price will pop back up; I doubt that, too, as users continue leaving the currency.

During the period when btc VALUE increased most rapidly, the exchange rate crashed and drove out users.  Sad.  A hell of an epitaph.

Do you believe that any of the newbies who bought in the last year and lost 40-60% of their value will ever return?  I don't.  And I don't believe any of their friends or family will adopt, either.

When I see the words despair and capitulation, I see newbies deserting the technology.  I see people (using those words) who are worried about their wallets, not btc succeeding.  Am I wrong?

If you know a TV you want will be on sale next week, you will wait to buy it.
Btc has been getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper for months, so why would the buyers not wait to buy?  Everyone who has bought since April has seen their TV go on sale with minutes after buying.  (It is almost as though fiat was deflationary compared to btc...)

The big change is that there is no FOMO.  No one is scared to sit in fiat.  No one is afraid the price will rocket while they are sleeping.  The last optimism was at 510, which coincided with huge numbers of bids.

The question for the day: is there a price so low that everyone would jump at a chance to buy, even if the price might not be an absolute bottom?  If so, what price is that?  In other words: that TV is so cheap that I don't care if I lose $10 buying today, I am buying it now!


I think it would be fitting if page 8888 coincides with the bottom.  Post dumpers and coin dumpers might run out of ammo at the same time.

And I thought that I was a pessimist.

PayPal news breaks, 435 new shorts open in the last hour.  

Boom! 1024 coin ask wall at 480 on Bfx slams down.
Asks went from 60 to 1360 in 5 seconds.

Selling 9962 coins takes Bfx to 434.
Buying 9962 coins (closing all shorts) would empty the order book.

Now, that is a cool stat.


Edit: Bankrupt the shorts!  Go, go, go!

Things I learned in the last 5 minutes: wide adoption is bad for bitcoin.

I think a few people need time to close their shorts.

Wait a few hours.  I actually have a positive feeling.  This might be the last dump.

Forget the price for a moment.  Daily and weekly price movements are noise.  Everyone who cries about companies adopting btc because it puts pressure on the price needs to get a brain that thinks more than a week in advance.

The big picture is that the future of bitcoin is adoption and usage by more and more people.  Dell, Global Payments, PayPal, etc, are all steps forward in usage.  Remittance actually works in the Philippines, at a total cost of 2% (buying, transmitting, selling, dumping cash into bank account), and other countries will follow.  None of these will have a huge short term impact on price.  But they are necessary and huge successes in the long term, and should be priced in as major stepping stones forward.

The next step is store of value, taking on the tax haven money and gold bugs.  These will have a much larger effect on price, but require more stability in price.

If you only care about the price in 6 months, hate on PayPal adoption.  If you care about the price in 2 years, cheer for PayPal adoption.  More usage, more adoption, demands a higher market cap in the future.

Looking at Bfx only:  it looks like the only thing keeping the price down is the constant increase in shorts.  Shorts have increased by 4k over the past week (currently 10.2k).  It is also 4k coins to 500.  The last 3 dumps came at the same time as sharp increases in shorts.

As I said in an earlier post, there are not 10k coins available to buy on Bfx.  This may get interesting fast, especially if Bfx can decouple from the wall-fest at Bitstamp for a few hours.

Over 10k coins in shorts.
To protect their position and pressure the price lower, they put up huge walls and drop them on each dip.
Someday, bulls will grow balls and attack walls instead of retreating.  Unfortunately, today is not that day.

Keep in mind, many of those longs are the bids at 452 and below; compare the order books at Stamp and Bfx.  Even in this thread, people are talking about reserving 30 day swaps because the rate is so low.  That shows up as long swaps, even if no coins have been purchased.

I really, really, can't imagine anyone opening a new short when they could be squeezed so easily with nowhere to dump their position.  If a squeeze starts, they will be competing with me and everyone else here to buy. 9400 coins to $4800, 10,200 10,314 shorts open....let that sink in.  And then think about the whale that dumped 7k coins last month to squeeze the longs.

So this is clear: I hope no one changes their short position.  This could be unbelievably fun.


Edit: I would think that many stops are hidden behind the walls.  That is where I would set a stop; if there is enough buying pressure to break thru, then I misjudged the market.



So it would take 28-2900 coins in buys to cause a major squeeze.  Anyone have $1.4M?

Bitstamp needs $4.12, Bfx needs $6.31 to get the party rolling.
Someone is dumping into the rally on Stamp, we will see if the bulls have any balls.

We are 2 bucks off the local high.  Wait and see if Bfx makes a run at that wall.  The decision has not been made yet.

205 new shorts opened, and immediately dumped at market.

It means 1/3 of the coins sold on Bfx during this mini-drop came from newly opened shorts.
IMO, the drops have been small for the last 24 hours, indicating the shorts are unsure about their positions.

Set a loose stop, maybe 530.  What's the worst that could happen?  

There are 8964 shorts that have to be closed eventually.
The opening of new shorts is the only thing keeping the price down on Bfx.  100 open, 100 coins sold.

Be patient.  We have cleared out thousands of coins below 500.
The next run will be better, maybe achieve a breakout.

I enjoy trading small amounts on small $10 swings.  If I make a bad call, it is easy to get out even or at a negligible loss.  Anything over 100-200 coins takes a different strategy, much better execution, and is usually higher risk.

Why risk trading?  Except obvious price movements, of course.
1k coins is .5M USD.  Within a year or two, you are likely to have 2M USD, and maybe more.

Remember, most traders lose money.

10X gains = 10X losses.  You misjudge and get hit with 1% move against you? You lost 10% of your collateral.
Trying to buy or sell 10 x 1k coins is nearly impossible due to slippage and liquidity.  Even 1k is very difficult.

I did the math for Bfx once, using the max 3.3X leverage and minimum maintenance requirement.  At an 18% loss, you are liquidated and would be lucky to have anything left.  At 10X margin, it must be 5 or 6%.

Take a look at the daily chart and count all of those 20, 30, 40, 50% spikes down.  Notice that there were several during the November bubble, so even then it wasn't safe to use large margins.

If anyone is interested, you can read the posts for the last x days and:
- find a guy with a LOT of coins (based on account age and his post history)
- with far too high a percentage of his wealth invested (based on magnitude of attitude change when the market moves)
- with far too high a percentage of his wealth invested in shorts (based on direction of attitude change)

Hint: he will always argue that manipulation is natural market action, he will magnify every drop or piece of semi-bad news, and get very, very upset when the market moves against him.  Did I mention hodl is stupid for newbies?  They should be trading with the whales!

It is safe to say that whales ARE in this thread and the sentiment in this thread influences price.  I will definitely say that he is not today's wall guy (at least on Bfx; he might be on Stamp), but he is probably 2k or more of shorts.

Stay happy, (name withheld)!  I pray you drive btc into the ground so you can lose far more than the rest of us!  Those dreams of 50M in hookers and blow will disappear; you really should have settled for 10M. (I am 100% fiat, so let's drop, (name withheld)!)

PS: Figure it out for yourselves.
PPS: 96% serious.

4k at Bfx (750 + 3250) near 475.

Edit: price tanked, 750 wall moved to 470, eaten down to 555, pulled.

Bitstamp wall gone. Bfx 3200 coin wall still intact.  Very odd.

Unless something else happens, they only gained a max of 2% on the exercise.

It might turn into a bit of a bear trap. 259 shorts opened just as the price bounced back up.

I think the best lesson from the last month is to keep a bid open $10-20 below market.  The buyer makes a quick profit on the bounce, and the dumper makes less money on the drop.

Eaten.

Unfortunately, Stamp is wandering around aimlessly and hasn't tried attacking their wall.
2100 coins to 500 on Bfx.
5400 coins to 500 on Stamp.

Bearwhale had better get busy.  Bfx rising, Stamp finally approaching the wall.

...and price pops back up, leaving a long wick on the candle.

Things have improved in the last few weeks..

/r/bitcoinmarkets is the most worthless forum in the btc universe.

Smug.
Self-important 8 year olds telling 7 year olds that they know nothing, and laughing at the 6 year olds in /r/bitcoin.
Cool kids only short, longs (especially hodlers) are deluded idiots.  The number of shorts talking book is astronomical.  Obvious troll accounts are taken seriously; Dump3r and fallllling would be stars.
TA is the only way...I doubt a single person over there looks at buy/sell action, order books, or anything else besides 4 hr-3 day charts.  Pretty lines are everything, and more lines are more sophisticated (10 lines is genius).
Their absolute obsession that miners dump every coin, and that businesses are bad for the price, therefore adoption is bad.

The only reason to read it is random bug reports and announcements.

This may be a barely serious, barely on topic, troll filled, mess of a thread, but it is 1000x better than bitcoinmarkets and much more entertaining.  Thanks, Adam.

I will say it again, and get mocked for it again:

If btc goes below 340-350, there is no future for btc.  We have already lost so many new adopters this year.  Expecting anyone with a buy in from 2014 to stick around for a 40-70% drop in value is ludicrous.  Long-term growth is based on adoption, not short-term greed.  It would be a Pyrrhic victory for the whales who engineered it. (Exponential growth implies exponential adoption, which implies that the vast majority of btc owners are from 2014, amirite?)

Inb4 is btc dead AGAIN, remember 2012, stupid newbie (who has owned coins for 3 years...), there is no such thing as manipulation, this is consolidation, this is is the accumulation stage, etc.

Discussion question: do the vast majority of early adopters believe in btc, or are they trying to get as much money out of the next "bubble" as possible, then run with the fiat?  And the follow up question: does evidence from the market support one side or the other of question #1?  Scary for those who think, tragic for those who feel.

I am going to drink some Chang draft for the next few weeks, and try not to pray for a crash.

Massive walls since we hit 490.
2014 adopters dumping the technology due to the constantly decreasing value.

Overall, business adoption is way up but is wasted due to consumer adoption dropping like a stone in response to the exchange rate.  We may see companies quietly stop accepting btc by the end of the year.  2014 will be the year btc took 3 steps backwards.

Total swaps are about the same as yesterday.  Exited swaps ~= opened swaps.

I would not call 20, 50, 100, 200, or 250 coin sales as small or fractional.  You must have missed a lot of action.

It looks like BTC-e will see 400 tonight.

Better move your bids.
I have been saying 340 for weeks.  Maybe then the big guys will be happy with the multiplier on their coins from selling.

400 shorts opened in the last hour.  I guess the price isn't low enough.

A 1k dump at 417. 

Really, that is all you need to know about the market for the last few months.

It was 1 seller, across 4 consecutive orders.  Too fast to be multiple sellers.

Boom goes Btc-e in 3...2....

Agreed.  Not liquidations, but we will hit stops as soon as 400 is broken.  It will be 20 minute trip to 350 or lower on Bfx.

I can short 100 coins in about 3 seconds, including changing pages in the browser.

....all the way to 403.

I was expecting long stops to be set around 399, but there weren't many.  Longs are actually up 700k for the hour.

No cascade, for now.

  340.

The market and the technology are different things.
I believe in the technology, but the market is suicidal.  The game of dumping the price down lasted $100 too long, and everyone waits for an ever cheaper price instead of buying.  We are conditioned that buying means immediately losing money.  Look how many Hero posters in this thread on still sitting on their fiat, waiting for "cheap" coins.

As I posted before, game theory says someone will always keep dumping to make a profit on driving other people out of the market.

340 is just my make or break number.  If it goes below 340, it will go off a cliff. We are down to 395 now.

1400 coin dump.
Freefall.

The price increase seems to be shorts closing, not normal buying, at least on Bfx.

The price would still be based on exchange prices.  The problem is that it seems exchanges are much smaller volume than off-exchange, making manipulation profitable.

edit: rationally, that would mean off-exchange sellers are idiots, selling below real value at a manipulated price.  That is hard to reconcile, except we have been seeing it on exchanges for months.

Anything that has not been parroted since 620?

What is your opinion that 685 was the bubble, but was aborted early?  Walls, big dumps, etc.
Serious question.

Shorts AND longs both dropping on Bfx.  Odd.  Very odd.

A spike is probably incoming, but which direction?

I f**king pray to god we have a representative market in a few weeks/months/years.

The same for larger market orders.  Part of the circuit breaker system, I guess.

KYC applies to fiat deposits, to ensure that the account actually belongs to the depositor.
If it is more difficult to put money in, fiat has higher value, hence lower btc prices.

More likely, it is money shifting from alts to btc in expectation of a rally.

Small 193 coin wall appears, the small guys all dump, wall disappears.  Still no confidence in the market.

I am saying bull trap until the guys who dumped us down 400 USD start buying.  If I start seeing 1-2k coin buys, I will believe.  This is organic buying, but organic buying doesn't control the market.

That is believable.  They are running into a central issue though: if the price falls too far, it takes too many coins to move money.  Forget free equipment and free power, if they are escaping currency regulation: to move a USD, it would take 3x more coins today than in November.  Since they apparently can't repurchase from exchanges, they can only sell a coin once.

In their own interests, I would expect there is a high price that allows them to both gain coins from mining and have enough coins to move a significant amount of money out of China.

You are assuming their customers can wait 6 mo-2 years to move money out of China.  I don't know the right kind of people, but I would assume they would not want anyone to know that far in advance that they were breaking the law.

One flaw with the story: even if exchanges are monitored, it should still be possible to buy btc using an intermediary (family, friends, etc., as is normal for Chinese doing this).  It would be so much simpler than cornering the mining market to generate virgin coins.

Interest on btc swaps is 10X higher than for USD swaps.   Back up to 9100 shorts.

Edit: the only thing keeping the price up is 1800 coin wall at 2400 on Huobi.

Edit: 10k shorts.

Just a personal comment:  I used to trade the way that you do.  Be careful with the size of your trades and set your stops.  I got hit 3 times with whale dumps out of the blue.  You are trading on the short term patterns; whales see the same patterns, wait for the minnows to get positions, then drop you 20-30 USD with minnow sales as the extra fuel.  1 dump will wipe out your profits from 4 or 5 previous trades.

Interest rate for longs and shorts is about equal, which is very rare.  Shorts are usually very, very cheap.
The number of shorts is huge.  If the price rises significantly, they will be closed (buying btc) which will accelerate a rise.

I think you are off track.
BTC is supposed to be a currency.  As a personal example, I travel to Thailand once or twice per year for business.  I don't mind keeping a few hundred USD in Thai baht when I leave, since the value is reasonably stable against the dollar (usually rising, in fact).

Now, btc, as a currency, has devalued by 60 or 70% in 10 months.  Price = exchange rate.  It takes 3 btc to buy the same Dell laptop that cost 1 btc last year.

I won't even mention store of value, which is my intended use.  
And, a greater market cap (or whatever term you want to use) allows btc to be used for many more applications.

To pretend the price/exchange rate/value is unimportant is insane.  If it is supposed to be a currency, then it definitely matters.

That will be tough.  It is 20k coins down to 349 on Bfx alone.  It is possible, but would take a lot of time and real effort.

I have been predicting 340 for a month, but I am beginning to doubt it.

I may be pessimistic, but that guy is lame.  Could, might, maybe.....well, yeah.  Take care of your wallet, simple.

It is not the greatest scam of all time, but it is easy to lose money if you don't understand addresses and wallets.

Give me $20, a copy of the daily chart, send me back in time 3 years and I would be a billionaire.  (5 years would be too easy.)

The hard part is the present: will be break up or down?  Later, everyone will say they wish they had position x at this time.  But right now, it is impossible to know what to do.

Oil?
110 to 17 to 139 usd.

IIRC, DigitalBTC also dumped coins in mid-June, causing the drop from 620 to 591.
Quite a coincidence.

All 11,055 shorts still intact.

F*ck Bfx.
I just lost 2k USD to their circuit breaker system.  It took 5 minutes for my market buy, 10 minutes for my market sell.

The sell was a stop order, which converts to market order when triggered.
Apparently stops are fairly worthless on Bfx.

The only interesting thing about this is that it is requiring bigger pumps to get buyers to buy before the dump.
That is a mid-term bullish sign.

Yes.  The question is whether we will be above 375 in 6 hours.
It has only been a week since the 50 USD rise, has everyone forgotten?  That is how we got to 365.

Look at the order sizes.  Big buys, then medium buys, then the minnow buy...just as sells start hitting the market.  Everytime.

No confidence in the market.  The big fish want down, so we go down.  99.9% of us have no control over the market.

The better question is why do we keep buying to make them a profit with our losses?

As usual, bids move up with the rise.  Then there are big sells into the asks, followed by medium and small sells, so the big fish can buy back cheap later.  Rinse and repeat twice or 3 times per week.

I hope 340 is low enough for them.

IMO, they are collecting coins from the amateur traders.  Instead of putting in fiat, they are playing games to get small fish to buy and sell for the big fish benefit.  This started at 685; if they get to 340, they double their coins plus trading profits.  If there were ever to be another big rise, their profits would double with their btc.

I agree that there is a bottom where this strategy is self-defeating due to the long-term damage to btc.  I think we passed that point at 500.  They apparently think the point is much lower.

I don't short, ever.  But I gave up on the market at 480.  It would take a lot to convince me that the market is truly rising after what has happened in the last few months.


Edit: to paraphrase a poster here "the flies will come back to the shit if the price rises."

No.

A week ago, everyone said we had a new bottom at 420 after the PayPal rise: "we have successfully tested it 3 times, seems like a very solid base."  A few hours later, we were at 410.

Be patient.  The big fish aren't making much money at this anymore because the market is so skeptical.  At some point, they will stop pushing down and reverse the market.  340? 320? 260?  My bet has been 340 for months.

He left out the 2k walls that the guy put up to stall the rally.  Every time the price dipped below the next 5USD level, he moved his walls down.

With no evidence, I have always believed the guy killed off either a bubble or a rise to a "normal" level of 800USD.  Instead, we have seriously damaged the reputation of btc by crashing down to the 300's.

Edit: I see no reason to read /r/bitcoinmarkets.  Short trolls and book talking dominate the subreddit.  This thread has several of the major whales in it (please don't delete my post again, you know it is true) and I am entertained  reading what they say about price changes.

Just a piece of advice: as long as there are people in this thread defending again the idea of manipulation or giving Ayn Randish justifications, don't buy.  It means we are still too high for their liking, and they have more market power than the rest of us put together.

Patience.  They need the market to go up eventually to get their profits out.

Make or break today.

I just set a massive buy order at 250, in case of a flash crash.  I will probably lose money on it if it is triggered.  I was convinced for months that we could not break 340.

I should stay in cash, buy at $1 and sell at a $10 rally.

Is 12,076 shorts a record?

Moved my buy to 200, from 250, out of paranoia.

Check any darknet market.  They accept btc.
You might want to consider shorting or selling instead of killing, however.

Any, seller handles it. BUT....Sell now, buy in at the clear reversal. Make money back on rise.  If you sell now, you might get 10-99% more coins later and more than recoup losses.
Or we are both wrong, and it rallies at this point.

The market sucks, but stick it out.

Heroic effort by the buyers to move the price from 325 to 340.  I will congratulate them on that, even if it failed.


What's the next marker? 266?

I am waiting on 2 people to defend the price in this thread.  Didn't happen yet, so the odds are good we keep going down.

If they did, I would move my buy price up.

.

In your dreams.

Everyone waiting to see if the Huobi wall at 2000 holds.
Hint: it won't.

Down from 4k to 2.5k in last 60 minutes.

Edit: 600 left.

And, poof, it is gone.

Pure FUD.  Not a shred of evidence.

Bubbles are ending when the price starts going up >8-10% per day.
Think of this as a bear bubble.

Bounce to 320, then a test of 300?

Waiting for the 27k wall to return.

Anyone volunteer to check/watch the blockchain to see if he has taken it off the exchange?

Shall we guess how long until he pulls the wall?  Over or under 1 hour?
He is doing a shitty job of accumulating this time.

Do you honestly think he will leave it there until it is eaten?
He has pulled the wall twice already, 3 times if you include his bid walls.



I was called a bear earlier for saying the Huobi wall at 2000 wouldn't survive (and couldn't even accept the 60 btc bet before the wall was gone...literally 5 minutes), then I get called a bulltard for wondering how long the whale would leave his wall in place this time.  Ever hear of pragmatism, people?