Just saw half million being dumped and price went up by 20.

I have a hard time convincing myself that there aren't big players in the game manipulating the rest of us already.

What a beautiful, beautiful trainwreck. *a single tear drops*

3000 btc ask wall @ ~111 partially eaten, then pulled I think. Gone now, anyway

This wall @110 is making me nervous.... just sitting there, doing nothing... silently judging me... mocking me.

I know what you're up to wall, I'm onto you. You can't fool me, wall. Nobody can fool me. Not after what happened last time.

Just do something already, wall, don't just sit there!!!!

'k. Time to go to bed.

... you're still there, aren't you?

@SlipperySlope:

You keep invoking the 2011 bubble, and how you expect a similar protracted slide downwards in this one as well. I'm not going to take the cheap shot and say "past performance is no guarantee of future results", in fact, I'm not even ruling out that you are right and that we have a correction of about 3 months ahead of us, bringing us all the way down to the 20-50 USD range, but there is one thing you seem to keep ignoring:

The smaller corrections (or capitulations) in 2011 followed a decidedly different pattern than those of the current bubble. What I drew in as "corrections" in 2011 and 2103 (see charts below) is to a degree debatable, but one trend seems to hold: the corrections of 2011 followed a very obvious, steady downward trend, each time reaching a lower high, and, more or less, going to lower lows with each correction.

The 2013 corrections so far however look quite different. True, we didn't reach a new ATH, but at the same time, the low points of the last two corrections are both higher than the lows of the first two corrections. If anything, I would say the corrections so far seem to indicate a (very cautious) consolidation pattern, trying to converge at a price somewhere between 100 and 130, while the 2011 pattern could perhaps be described as "reluctantly going downwards".

I appreciate your insights a lot, and I follow your posts closely, but I'm not buying your by-the-book comparison to the 2011 price decline, if the first month after this crash already looks so much different than the month after the crash two years ago.

Hourly updates.

Agreed. Like I said, I read your posts with a lot of interest, and if the next corrections do indeed point downwards, I'm inclined to agree with you. But for that to be the case we do not only need to stay below the previous highs, we also need to at least seriously retest towards 50 again. We will see.

Thanks.

People complaining about the effects of speculation on, wait for it, the speculation forum. Seriously.

Alright. I see you're being serious, and not trying to troll, so I'm getting out of smartass mode as well:

what you describe ("speculators help stabilize the price by buying at bottoms and selling at tops.") is not speculation, at least not in any established sense of the word. You describe something that could perhaps be called semi-altruistic market participation. There can be no such thing in a (so far) tiny market like bitcoin: if we want to make it big, we have to play by the rules of a real market situation. And the only motive for trading in such a market is, well, self interest. (I'm not using the rather dumb "greed is good" meme here because in many cases, greed actually loses you money).

Anyway, my point is pretty simple: you can be enthusiastic about bitcoin and wish for it to be adopted widely in the future and trade out of no other motive than maximizing your own profits. And in that case, riding every wave (up or down) that promises easy money is simply a given.

That's fucking deep, man.

Also, I tend to agree. What many people seem to forget when they talk about "fundamentals" vs. "market craze" is that, in the real world, there are two possibly outcomes wrt. bitcoin usage (I'm simplifying, in reality there's a near-continuum of outcomes, but follow my line of thought for a second): 1) bitcoin succeeds. 2) bitcoin fails.

If 2), our investment is toast anyway. But if 1), well, then at some point even the most bearish market participants will agree that it's being adopted, and will start buying, thus drivin the price up.

Now, we have no influence on the question if it'll be scenario 1) or 2) (another simplification. the whole thing is a feedback loop, so our market actions do actually influence fundamentals/adoption). So the only question to answer for us is how is the market sentiment now, and in the near future?. And I think you described it accurately: it's not so much that most people think "Damn, we're going down", or even "I hope we're not going down any further", but rather "Even if we go down, my long term conviction is we're going up, so I'm going to load up on coins at the lowest possible price.", or at most something like "I hope we're not going down *too* much, or recovery will take too long."

Let's say that's an accurate description of the market sentiment.  Then the price won't really have a chance to slide down in a slow trajectory like it did in 2011. Hit bottom a few more times? Maybe. Test 50 again? Sure, could happen. But any correction still necessary won't take place at such an indifferent speed like back then.

He trades silver. Gold as well, I think. Oh, and he runs a very profitable chauffeur service, in case you need a limo for a wedding.

I'm going out on a limb here, but it looks like a TV screen cap. Probably some TV station ran an interview with him, or just him for a short insert about trading, and asked him to "show" that he trades in silver. Combine that with Mr. Reptile's megalomania and you get a picture like the above /speculation /offtopic

Let's get back on topic maybe?

Like I wrote in SlipperySlope's thread, I think we're at a critical point where two trendlines are about to collide.



Any relevant movement upwards, crossing 120, is evidence that the post-bubble correction trendline is broken, or at least getting weaker. Any sharp decline, 90 or lower, would be evidence that the mid-January growth trendline is no longer valid or weakened.

No idea where we're going from here, but I believe that whatever direction it is will give us a good idea where we're going in the coming weeks.

mmmmmh... those are by far the *best* wedges.

No decisive movement yet, eh? Alright then, summary time. (sorry for the sloppy style, this is more or less stream of consciousness)

Ignoring the possibility of continuation of the horizontal trend (that'd be boring), what are arguments in favor of continuation of the correction, i.e. downwards trend (red line in my previous chart) vs. continuation of upwards trend (green line)

(1) forum sentiment: cautiously bullish ("I'll buy for sure when we get lower") seems to be quite prevalent

(2) post bubble, volume on the way down was significantly higher than on the way up. suggests selling pressure, but could also mean sellers are running out of ammo.

(3) EMAs: D1, H4 undecided (just crossed over from above), H1 still bearish, but tendency towards crossover from below.

(4) total trading volume (in USD) is maybe on the low end for what is necessary to support the long-term upwards trend. (pointed out by WackyWilly)

(5) re: converging trendlines, as pointed out by 100x, me, and others: post-bubble, bit more evidence for the downward trend (3 vs 2 points of contact)

(6) If supporting trend (green line in my chart) = January 9 long-term expon. trend, then we're a bit ahead, should be hitting 100 only mid-May.

(7) order book (yes, I know, fake walls everywhere): total bid/total ask: 105. average of price if all sold at current prices, all bought at current prices: 120.5

pro bull: 1, 7
pro bear: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

Hmmm... I don't like the way my own summary looks. My gut tells me we should be going up, but my little collection of evidence points to continuation of the correction.

/pseudoscience

re: 6. sure, pretty weak point, only relevant right now where we're a bit ahead.

re: 5. true. but, given current information, I'd say there's slightly more evidence for the downward trend than for the upwards one.

none of the points is really strong individually. I'm as undecided as anyone else here seems to be :/

Apologies for quoting a day old post on a topic that moves as fast as this, but I wanted to say thanks for a very interesting analysis. By all means, keep on posting :)

aaah, yes. that's more like it. :)

I don't need no big bull leading the charge. I went all in about an hour ago. ^___^

Actually, he had about 6 hours to sell it again with a profit. Not saying he did, just that he could have.

Sorry to dig up a slightly older post (posted earlier today, already 4 pages in o_O), but this is a pet peeve of mine:

No, the "January-March trend [...] doubling every 30 days" is not per se, as you say, "unsustainable". What you're doing there is repeating the worn-out mantra "exponential growth is not sustainable". Unless of course when it is, either in finance, or in nature[1].

What you probably should have said would have been something like: "a given exponential growth function, causally connected (however losely) to something of finite quantity, will eventually reach a point at which it drastically outgrows said finite quantity".

This is not just some empty semantic nitpicking. The difference in wording here amounts to the difference between lazy repetition of half-understood claims about the world, and a meaningful statement about the sustainability of growth.

Please note: I am not making any claims about the correctness of the January trendline. I just refuse to let a lazy statement like that slide by, that at face value claims that exponential growth is somehow an oddity, and its usage as a way to model reality ought to be rejected.

If you think that a particular exponential trend is not accurate, present your arguments (for fairness sake, in other threads you have been doing that. Sort of.). But the statement as it stands, in its unconditional form, is not fundamentally different from a perma-bull's battle cry "We'll inevitably reach 300k USD/btc next week". Both claims are devoid of information.

* * *

[1] A common rebuttal to the Apple case is "But now the price comes crashing down! So exponential growth is unsustainable after all". The fallacy here is of course that just because at a certain point exponential growth of a given magnitude must end, does not imply that up to that point the growth was not accurately described by a particular exponential function.

You've missed the point I tried to make. Then again, I have a habit of writing those huge walls of text in which my original point gets lost, so I'll try it again:

There is nothing "unsustainable" per se about the price doubling every 30 days. It is factually what happened for a brief amount of time. Then it stopped. Everyone who was cautious, realizing that such growth cannot possibly go on for long, sold shortly before the crash, and was rewarded.

But actually following the logic of the (unconditional) statement that doubling every 30 days is "unsustainable" would mean you would have sold long before April 10, and would have missed out on a lot of profit.

Point is: any growth, no matter how outlandish it seems, is appropriate for the time during which it occurs (what a delicious tautology). Adding a qualifiying statement, why it probably cannot occur longer than some duration X, for some reason Y, is informative. On the other hand, the unqualified statement "this growth is unsustainable" is similarly fallacious to concluding that nobody can win the lottery from the fact that each individual ticket holder is extremely unlikely to win the lottery.

* * *

I am probably just ignorant of the pragmatics of the word "unsustainable". I blame vague, self-diagnosed "autism". Yeah, that should work.

I really hope this upward breakout didn't come as a huge surprise to anybody. I understand that there is still a lot of - justified - reservation about the question if the post-bubble correction is really over, and users like evolve and slipperyslope certainly like to remind us of that reservation on a daily basis (no offense. I appreciate the posts of you guys), but any serious look at the recent order book totals, the money flow of the past 6 days, or the sentiment on this forum ("I'm gonna buy *so hard* once price hits 90") should have convinced you that, at least short term, the only way was up. What will happen in a longer time frame, next weeks/months, is another question.

(aside: looks like I'm developing a habit to dig up older posts. oh well)

That's the million dollar question, I'd say. Here's a somewhat related observation I made during the last days:

Take the order book. (ignore for a moment the objection that some/many/all of the orders are fake). The last days saw a rather drastic increase of the bid sum/ask sum ratio (visualized nicely on blockchained). There's another calculation I make routinely, seeing how far the price would go in either directions if the entire bid sum or ask sum (or parts of it) were executed as market orders. Don't know if that technique has a fancy name (maybe 'market execution price'?), but it takes into account not only the order totals but also the price distribution.

Okay, here's the observation: the average of that execution price was rising even more sharply than the bid sum/ask sum ratio lately. Which means not only did more money enter the order book (and/or coins left it), but that order prices appreciated as well.

The conclusion I draw is that a big reason why we saw the current upward breakout is that a) new orders were placed (duh!), and b) buyers adjusted their existing orders after realizing that their overly optimistic price setting for entering the market won't be met anytime soon (less of a duh). And I suspect this trend will continue.

Mine is actually interested. which is even worse:

me: [long-winded explanation that explains why I expect btc market cap to be at least as big as market cap of a company like Paypal in the medium term]

she: but from what you described, btc is a like a currency. then why do you compare it to the market cap of a  company, based on share price?

me: damn woman. why do you ask difficult questions? can't you just cheer me on?

engaging story. thanks

And in a way, it sounds like a slightly unluckier version of my own story. Difference no.1 is that my fiat took a few days longer to arrive, so I saw the 26x bubble pop before I could buy in (and to be honest, I probably would have bought in :/). Difference no.2 is that I had narrowed down the possible exchanges to bitcoin-24, bitcentral and bitstamp. I was lucky to pick the third. (although I am aware that no exchange is really secure)

Not sure if "false" breakout is the best way to describe it, but yes, I expect price to go up somewhat shortly, oscillators say we're pretty oversold.

I'm not buying the doom and gloom ("106/107", "80-90").

Bullshit, I say.

Maybe we're not going to see a major upward breakout over the weekend, but I don't see any real chance for a downward breakout approaching 100 at the moment. Not with an order book filled to the brim, money flow continuing to be positive and 3 different oscillators saying we're oversold.

Sure. But like I said, we're not only oversold, also money flow is positive, and has been for a week now, and the order book totals were getting better each day (not entirely accurate, slightly went down since yesterday). Any of these three facts alone is worthless maybe, but together they look like pretty good evidence to me that we won't see a big slump in the coming days.

Here are the results of my recent (mtgox) order book calculations. As always, to be taken with a large grain of salt, since the order book is of course a primary tool for manipulation.

Apart from the obvious findings (rather big ask wall at 120; significant drop of bid/ask ratio over the weekend, from a peak of ~140 to ~120, now slightly going up again), the average of the 'all orders market execution price' is going up again, after going down about 10 USD over the weekend, indicating more bids/less asks and a better price composition. Finally, price composition in the range of the previous bid/ask totals also improved slightly, prices up about 2% compared to 12h ago.

Looks good to me. Word of caution though: with similar, in fact: even better values at the end of last week (my calculations showed a peak of the above values on the 10th), we barely passed 120, and not for long either. So I'm not exactly holding my breath that we're going to break 125 this week, although I'm not ruling it out either.

On the other hand, as I have posted multiple times now, as long as those metrics (and the related money flow metrics) don't substantially change in the coming days, I really don't see the potential for any sharp decline either.

I gave up on answering that particular question. Too many variables, too much uncertainty. My current lookahead is approximately 1 week, and not much further. And so far, indicators are good that this week will be positive or at least stable. That's good enough for me :)

Why are you people continuing to feed the vast hunger for drama of that guy? Sure, I enjoy his antics as much as anybody, but please tell me you weren't really worried for him. But okay, we're curious beasts...

Google Translate (pretty shitty translation for this language pair, by the way, but better than nothing) gives me the impression that a) they were defrauded or had their private keys stolen by hotel staff, and b) rptiela estimates the damage to be in the range of 100k btc (or, as he helpfully points out, about 9M Euro).

Sounds like quite the successful conference, I must say. /snark

Keep in mind, only supanoadz were invited to the event.

Hey guys. I'm new here, and have a question:

Some guy from Sweden (or maybe it was Iceland? I can never keep those countries apart) just sent me a PM. Says he works in the hotel business. He offered to sell me 100k btc for 0.5 USD per coin.

Is that a good price? Should I take him up on his offer?

It's possible. Only have to beat a 1 in 8.7 * 10^60 chance. Not that unlikely.

Didn't really check the price/news since yesterday noon, only saw it dropped sharply at some point. Now I come back to... this. Not pretty at all.

Then again, some of you ladies seem to get a bit panicky under stress.

"SELL NOW before the DHS/CIA/Gestapo gets you!"

"Double digits, tomorrow morning!!!"

"There's sand in my vagina, how do I get it out... nevermind, just SELL SELL SELL"

I mean, I didn't expect anything else of clowns like 4key, but Coinseeker? what the fuck, ? I mean, no objection to you going short. No objection to you posting about it, once or twice. But reading through the last two pages, judging by the overall tone of panic (not just by you, not my intention to single you out), one could think the price went back to single digits this night.

Moderation, folks, in both directions. Don't lose your shit when price goes up, but don't lose it either when it goes down :/

Okay. Here's a - comparably - positive observation.

The 4 hour charts don't properly show it, but take note for a second that tonight's low was at about 105 USD, and therefore still above the previous "convergence low" [1] on May 7th, which was at 102 USD.

Which is arguably a good sign: the (admittedly) bad news didn't rock the price as hard as the "natural" correction of an overbought state a week earlier.

I'm not ruling out we will test 110 again in the coming days, maybe even 100, but I'm feeling a bit relieved that the market at the moment seems *unsure* how to take in the news, as opposed to the market being *certain* that it is a crippling blow to btc as a whole, in which case we would have seen sub-100 prices immediately.


[1] I believe the post-bubble development can be grouped into the following 3 phases: (1) immediate correction, down to the 60-ish values, ending on April 16th (the phase actually unfolded in 2 steps), (2) sucker's rally and its rejection, ending on May 3rd below 100 (actually in 3 steps), (3) converging trends phase (until now), with the correction downtrend and the long-term uptrend cancelling each other out, leading to relative stability. Well, "stability" until yesterday.

Coinseeker, you went from 'usually interesting to read' to 'ubertroll' in less than 48 hours. That must be a new record.

Thanks. This really needed to be said.

Coinseeker switches between outright trolling (e.g. the "only US matters for bitcoin" comments), and semi-serious discussion (for example his response to your post where he admits you have a point). Unfortunately, the majority of his posts in the last few days fall into the first category :/

I've said it in another thread, I'll say it again: I really appreciate your posts. Initially I suspected you're posting with a bit of a bearish agenda, but I was wrong: you let evidence guide your analysis, not wishful thinking.

btw, I'm not saying you're not bearish anymore, I suspect you still are, mid-term at least, but I respect your opinion a whole lot more than that of others because you genuinely seem to be interested in predicting shit, not in publishing post-hoc reasons for your trading decisions like most of us shlubs are :P

Dear bulls

Not to rain on your parade or poop onto your party, but:

The real breakthrough we have to wait for before declaring motherfucking UPTIME is 125. You know that, right?

120 is great and all, and it means the Dwolla news have been digested and SHAT OUT AGAIN (what's with the feces today?), but it's not yet a confirmation that we're back in the infamous mid-January trend.

Just wanted to point that out.

Now carry on with the party

What just happened there? The order book isn't that thin that such a jump should happen for a 100 btc trade. Mtgox order matching failure, or am I missing something?

I meant "100 btc in a single order". Look at the graph, or the order history: market price jumped from 124.18 to 121.70, after a ~100 btc trade. Don't tell me that's usual?

+1 (as an easy fix)

a better, but also more complicated solution would be one that takes into account (1) changes in the graph (i.e. if nearly no change, don't post) and (2) number of human posts in the thread since last bot post (i.e. don't spam the thread)... probably too much to ask for to program this, especially (2), but one can dream:)

Seriously? We are still doing this silly Google Trends thing?

Alright, if that's how we play it:




Quick, sell every last Euro you own!!!

sorry for the following lazy, cliched response to your post, but:

+1

I'm not claiming to have full technical knowledge of Ripple (but neither do I have that level of knowledge of Bitcoin), but I do know enough about it to believe that the arguments in defense of it all seemed to ignore one basic problem many bitcoin followers have: it's centralized, and there is no indication that this will ever change.

Rampion's post is an excellent summary of why I don't trust, and don't feel like supporting Ripple (I agree with everything except the last paragraph about the founders "cashing out". They will never do such a thing, as it would instaneously destroy their wealth in the process).

If you feel that anyone who's critical of Ripple is just (consciously or not) trying to defend his own get-rich stake in Bitcoin, then I guess I can't really argue any further.

Nobody else worried about the massive drop in CMF since the approach to 135/btc? Not consistently negative yet, but still a drastic reduction. On the other hand, bitstamp looks solid.

To put things into perspective, I personally don't expect the rally that started 4 days ago to be over yet, but I'm wondering if the recent drop in buying pressure (see my CMF post above) could correspond to a short-term dip, perhaps testing 125 again. If nothing else, that would give us the chance to increase our btc stashes :D

don't feed the... you know the drill

Chaikin money flow lackluster on mtgox, and sharply dropping on bitstamp. That, plus weekend lull, makes re-test of 125 a possibility. If that happens, I don't expect this barrier to fall though. jm2c

I missed it, I missed it. Oh boy...

Can somebody please summarize what just happened? How big was the sell, when exactly did it happen, were there any indications... can somebody fill me in on what I missed?

fuck off-topic, thanks for posting this.... *extremely* useful tool, and exactly what I've been asking for in a thread a while ago: something that combines data from different markets, which is increasingly important as the dominance of mtgox is diminishing.

Nice, so you actually didn't pull your prediction out of your ass, but used (polynomial) regression on historical data (not sure if it's wise to exclude bubble data/outliers, though). I respect that.

But do you want to know what is the single biggest assumption you make in your analysis, an assumption that some (including me) would consider completely unfounded, and in fact completely unrealistic?

That there is a single underlying growth function that governed the price of btc over the entire course of the data you looked at, and will continue to govern it.

Sure, you're free to make this assumption. But with that assumption removed, your analysis falls apart.

Dude, you either don't know the math behind what you do, or you're willfully obstinate to make a point: if you run a simple regression analysis like you did, you de facto work from the assumption that there is one and only function underlying those data points. Otherwise, you "identified" jack shit.

You're funny when you try too hard: I didn't suggest any method. I simply formulated the assumption made in sarc's analysis.

And "the result wouldn't differ much"? You're kidding, I hope. Simply (yet unrealistically) assuming that, say, growth was determined by one function up to January 2013, and another one following January 2013, would probably put us into the 500? 5000? (can't be arsed to calculate this now) range right now.

Which is obviously not where we are. Hence: unrealistic assumption as well, as noted above.

eh, sorry. my field (well, of sort) is foundations of mathematics, so I can get worked up over not knowing the (formal) premises of a method one uses.

anyway, I'm not even completely denying your point. I'm extremely cautious right now, and far from ruling out price will drop further. But I still consider it a distinct possibility that the fundamentals and public perception have changed enough for growth to continue from (roughly) where we are now. Time will tell.

Last reply I'm gonna make on this topic. Promised.

Had you bothered to read my post history, you could have noticed that I *consistently* make the point that I don't believe in *the* trendline/growth function/etc governing: price = market behavior = human behavior.

Which is why I don't like it if you accuse me of selectively appllying that rigor only when it is convenient for me. I make this point all the time, when talking about bullish trendlines and bearish ones. Assuming that there is *the* magical growth function that holds once and forever is delusional, therefore any analysis that plots such a line needs to be taken with huge grains of salt. (Note: I'm not saying "should be completely dismissed")

Biology? Bioinformatics?

It actually does. It's just that his historical data spans from the beginning of btc trading to now, while the log charts you see more often begin in January 2013.

Why would I? I'm a mildly formal philosophy person, basically :P

EDIT: sorry for the off topic conversation. it's just that nothing happens right now.

Yes, sorry, completely forgot about that :/

Have to agree with sarc on this one. Whether you use log n or log (n+1) for graphing, as long as you use it consistently it won't matter for the purpose this graph is used for: drawing a straight line to represent an exponential growth function. Depending on the log value you chose, that line (of best fit) will rise more or less sharply, but the actual *function* it depicts stays the same, since the line (of best fit) is based on the data plotted on the same log value.

EDIT: spelling

@prof7bit

Calm down, please. You're going as far as accusing sarc of posting false information on purpose, when all that goes on in reality is a disagreement about the math behind what was posted here.

My take on it (already mentioned above, shortened version to follow):

I don't know exactly what sarc did in his model, but if the dispute between you and him boils down to plotting the data on a chart with a log n y-axis vs. plotting the data on a chart with a log n+1 y-axis, then there is no dispute. The two are, for our purposes, equivalent.

If that's not the point of your dispute, I'm sorry that I missed it.

I never said you should add a constant to the value. I was talking about the equivalence of mapping to a log n and log n+1 chart. And that part is certainly true.

EDIT: I see the problem now. Damn sloppy notation :) you're talking about 'x', and I'm talking about base 'n' in log_(n)(x).

My point was, since the entire discussion between the two was sort of messy and unstructured, I'm not entirely sure what the claims of each party are, and I though at some point the two were arguing whether the above matters.

Anyway, unless we start doing the mathematical part of this discussion in a more systematic fashion, I'm afraid we will keep misunderstanding each others' points.

Let one thing be said, though: whether sarc's graph or method was entirely accurate or not, the prediction "in the range of 30 USD" seems to be the one you get in fact, if you do a simple regression on the entire historical data.

This is not due to some massaging the data by sarc or a mistake in his method, but simply the result of that particular analysis. Whether that type of analysis is actually predictive of the future price is a different matter.

Correction to my own post above:

30 USD is (probably, I didn't calculate it myself) the result of linear regression and, as I understood sarc, removing some outlier data (i.e. the bubbles).

The other charts I've seen that use the entire data have as at around 50 USD, IIRC.

As I wrote in my 'EDIT' already, there is no disagreement between us re: correct use of log, only a confusion of notation (more due to my part, I admit, my way of writing it was highly misleading)

log_(n)(x) and log_(n)(x+1) are of course not the same. If sarc stated that, he was wrong. Funny enough, for his results it shouldn't really matter much, the difference will be minimal I think.

Do you really mean:

log(x+1)

as in

log_(n)(x+1), where x = USD/btc, and n is the base you chose? If so, maybe that's a technique used in statistical modeling, but it certainly is not correct per se.

I know close to nothing about EW analysis. In any case, I don't think we'll fall back to 50, and certainly not sub-30. I can see us going back to 60-80, though, I admit :/

Valid point. I forgot that trading started below 1 USD.

Anyway, to make it a bit more interesting for the general population of this thread, summary time!

(1) sarc's exact modelling techniques aside, the graph he posted is not entirely different from similar results that have been posted before. sarc's regression analysis sees the price below 30 USD right now (correct me I'm wrong, please), while the others had us in the realm of 50 USD (does anybody have a link to one of those?).

(2) regression analysis is a well-founded statistical technique, but by no means guaranteed to accurately predict the future price.

(2) Math is hard. Let's go shopping.

Hey, it was your choice to enter academia, now you gotta deal with peer review.

Forget trend lines. They're bullshit anyway :3

This is what make me cautiously optimistic, for the coming days at least:



Then again, there's this:

[from stockcharts.com]

It's a way to gauge the money flow over some time span (20 periods in the formula, I think 21 in my chart, period is 2h in my case), which means the formula takes into account the (relative) *change of the price* and the corresponding *volume*.

I'm not an expert in reading these, but the way it looks to me is that, on mtgox at least, money flow has been overall positive for the past week(s), and is now recovering from a dip a few days ago (that didn't go into the negative, but was a sharp drop).

Bitstamp on the other hand looks less good, money flow is negative or near zero, for about a week now, and no real sign of reversal yet. However, historically mtgox has led and bitstamp has followed, so it's possible that this will be the case again now.

Frozenlock just gave the answer that ends this discussion. The blockchain has the potential to become so much more than a ledger that stores bitcoin transactions. Bitcoins however are what gives you access to it. Intrinsic value, right there.

I think nerds like to, well, nerd out about the potential of the block chain because it takes a while before you can even wrap your head around what it actually is: a distributed, tamper & attack-proof, eternal, trust-free storage of information.

One idea that I've heard was using the block chain as a way to publish information and at the same time being able to prove that you were the first one to do so. But in reality I think what gets the nerds excited is that we can't really see yet what it might be useful for, just that it feels like it very likely that in the future people will come up with a bunch of ideas we can't even dream of. A bit like how Vint Cerf probably didn't have a clue what the Internet one day would look like, but he seemed to realize the potential that it could become something big one day.

That canard doesn't become truer just by repeating it over and over, y'know.

[off topic]

has everybody seen this one already? Yes? No? http://abstrusegoose.com/509

[/off to... ahahaha, who am I kidding, EVERYTHING in here is off topic.

You mean how he got eaten, from the inside, by an unspecified xenomorph and fossilized sitting in the giant captain's chair of his gargantuan spacecraft?

Right, right, now I remember... he's the guy who has to roll that boulder to the top of that mountain all the time, but then he falls in love with his own mother, right?

don't be silly. it's a musical masterpiece by Razor and the Scummettes

(I feel old now)

oh wow... 1400 btc ask wall @112 just popped up on bitstamp. someone really wants the price to stay down/go down even further

... I'm tempted to buy into it

EDIT: aaaand it's gone again

doom and gloom, everywhere I look.

Stay realistic, people. The current downtrend didn't come completely as a surprise, and I won't pretend to know where exactly it stops.

But 70 isn't gonna happen today, at least not on the current trajectory.

You just started trading, right? I'm not going to pretend that I'm an old hand at this, but at least I learned that you don't simply draw a line through the points of the past 12 hour, expecting it will continue like that for another 12.

When I say "trajectory", I take into consideration the momentum of the current down trend. It might reignite, but right now, it seems we've entered a calmer period. If it continues that way, we'll see spikes of maybe +/- 5 USD around where we are now, but, no, not "70".

You mean:


this morning. Or 2 days ago:


Or maybe the topic I created ~5 days ago, titled


in which I said that people from both sides are way too fast to declare "up uP UP" or "down Down DOWN", and that the next important level to break before talking about 80, or even 50 USD coins would be 100.

Anyway. Do as you please. Just learn to read, maybe.

awww, look at the bears coming out of the woodwork... agreeing with each other how obvious all of this was.

'k. Put your money where your mouth is and make a prediction where this trend takes us, short term. Everything else ("Silk road ... yadda yadda ... Bitcoin economy... wasn't stable in May after all") is just cheap talk.

I'll begin: within the next 24 hours, price won't go significantly below 100. If it falls below 100, it will rebound sharply to a value above 100 shortly afterwards. More likely though, we'll continue trading around 110.

Your turn :)

FTFY

... and it's "putting your money where your mouth is" because I go on record making a prediction based on my opinion, which gives someone else the chance to dig through my post history in a month from now, checking what my track record is.

Think of like that: if you don't make any predictions, you'll never be proven wrong. How boring.

hehehe, nice story. but sorry Rampion, no trend reversal yet IMO. but I don't mind being proven wrong about this

I'm still wondering what the 7.5k btc buy at 1pm CET was all about. I didn't see it when it took place, but I'm pretty sure it was one big order.

Why would a whale buy right into the downtrend? He had a slippage alone of 3 or 4 USD. And why not wait a few hours longer and buy even cheaper.

It's too much volume to be a stabilizing move, in my opinion, but it doesn't make much sense otherwise. I'm puzzled.

He underwent a mind-machine-interface aided fusion with several other supernodes during the Helsinki conference and has since turned into a global, disembodied AI.  currently, he's using his new found powers to watch My Little Pony guro nonstop, 24h.

I'd advise against looking at the mtgox order book alone to draw (long-term) conclusions, such as "are we still correcting the bubble or not".

The order book is a) a prime tool for manipulation by big players, b) doesn't represent the entire fiat/coins in the hand of traders who are willing to trade, and finally c) mtgox is (relatively speaking) becoming less relevant. Yes, they're still the no.1 exchange, but a simple look at the volume numbers over at bitcoincharts will show you that their share has declined.

If you look at indicators that try to capture money flow based on trades, rather than on the order book, the picture looks different. Chaikin money flow, my favorite for this purpose, still points towards a positive flow, when looking at the previous months.

Short term though, I agree. Money is leaving the market. But the question is, is that a trend reversal, or only a short term phenomenon.

ah, yes I forgot, to a simpleton all questions look equally simple.

okay, bullshit aside: if you are able to conclude, after (lemme look) 4 and a half month of almost uninterupted positive money flow, that, based on 5 or so days of negative flow that the trend reversed you must be a wizard. Please, take all my money and invest it for me :D

what makes you think I haven't already? I thought this was the "theorize baselessly about the long-term prospects of bitcoin" thread, not the "explain your short-term trading rationale" thread. at least that's what it increasingly looks like ^__^

it's almost an hour since the last posting of it, so I expect, with bated breath, the return of his log(x+1) ("because it fits the data better") chart .

haha, wait, lemme take off my pants

aaah, yes, you were right. much better

Are you talking about me, you cunt?!?!

I'll scratch your eyeballs out!

hehehe, I asked a similar question a week ago and was told I'm a lazy bastard.

I'll try to answer it:

as far as I can see, there was not a single determining cause that intitiated the current slide down. I think it was influence to some degree by the huge sell of on June 2nd. Since then, nothing come close in volume.

I noticed that the night before the down trend really began, short money flow metrics started looking bad, so I don't think it was the action of one manipulator that led to the trend but rather the market sentiment that [speculation]"We're not going anywhere, and the only big movements are sales"[/speculation], which can only be sustained for so long before people start selling.

With the almost free fall we're in, it becomes more difficult to predict the time frame of short-term targets because of the faster movement, but I don't think "today" (as in: within 24 hours) is likely.

I agree, around 50 will most likely be our target, and we will see if we'll once again bounce off it. But I'd say it takes 48 hours at least, judging by the speed of the past 2 days.

Yeah, you're a weird one. At times you simply seem to be another one of those doomsday prediction generating automata, impossible to talk reason with. But I was never seriously tempted to ignore you, too much good analysis in between what is either trolling, bitcoin related bitterness or a combination of both.

Morning sarc :D

You trying to imply something?

Do I really need to pull pull out the charts to show you I was right (time of writing was June 7, 1 pm CET)?

Now, what happened 15 hours afterwards is another matter, but I do remember saying there's a good chance we'll test 50 again. Time for a new round of predictions+time frame? :)

Sorry to dig up an old post (just 1 day old actually. hah. this thread moves fast), but I really want to respond to this...

Your statement is full of sweeping generalizations and some arguably true descriptions of how the math behind weather forecasts work and how the math behind TA, well, doesn't work. Which makes the argument sound more authoritative than it really is. Here's why:

You're picking the wrong subject to compare TA against (I know, you didn't really pick it, you responded). The more appropriate comparison would be climate science.

Feedback loop: predictions influence behavior influence observations influence predictions? Check. Are the models still considered to give (within the set confidence intervals) accurate predictions? Sure.

Now, I'm not arguing that TA is on same the level of mathematical sophistication as climate models, but I  wanted to point out that you can't really reject TA in its entirety because the possibility of feedback loops exist.

And another point: I personally find it much more accurate to think of "TA" as a subset of "algorithmic trading" (not in the sense that the word is usually used, but based on the pure meaning of a formal algorithm... doesn't matter if it runs on a computer or in your brain). There sure are a lot of terrible algorithms out there (I'm looking at you, Elliot waves and Fibonacci retracements), but you can't dismiss all algorithms based on the existence of a few? many? maybe even most algorithms being not useful.

But what you probably actually have in mind, and what I would agree with, is that where TA means "drawing pretty trend lines", it is almost completely useless.

Why do people have this urge to see the similarities alone in cases where it fits their argument, but ignore the differences that would counter or at least weaken that argument?




CMF, A/D: 2011 vs 2013







Disclaimer: I'm getting a bit sick of having to include this statement every time, but here it goes: I'm not a bull, far from it. No predictions that we'll hit 200 next month from me. I'm not a bear either however, and I'm very much undecided about the question whether the correction/bubble deflation is largely over yet or not.

The A/D is basically just the cumulative version of the CMF (or more precisely: instead of averaging over the money flow like CMF does, A/D sums it). (Someone correct me please if I misremember this, I'm too lazy to look it up now)

But yeah, that is one hell of a difference between 2011 and 2013, and still there are people that claim "it's basically 2011 all over again".

For all I know, we'll drop another 70% from where we are now, I can't rule it out, but if that happens it won't be because we're in the exact same situation as back then.

Fair enough. It's just that I don't look at the indicators (volume based or not) in isolation but try to see how they fit in with what I believe to be the market sentiment.

And the way it looks to me, that sentiment is very different now than it was in 2011. I wasn't around in 2011, but judging by the forum posts here for example, there is substantially more optimism around today than back then. So if this is continuing deflation, it sure looks like it has to overcome some real resistance by the market. But, yes, maybe that's how it'll play out in the end.

I guess you trade quite often/short term then. Probably makes sense in that case. I try to not trade more than once every 2 weeks or so, cause: lazyness. Also, sediment?

I'm on Bitstamp as well, and for obvious reasons I follow the news around the Slovenian banking situation in general and Unicredit Slovenia in particular.

From what I gathered so far (from the news, and through comments by an economist I know who's from Slovenia) Unicredit is uniquely positioned in that they are perhaps the only bank, or at least: the biggest bank in Slovenia to not *directly* be part of the banking crisis. Largely due to the fact that they're a subsidiary of the Italian Unicredit, I guess.

They way I understand it, unless the banking crisis would lead to some sort of *universal* haircut on all bank accounts, including even those of banks that aren't in trouble, the banking crisis is not going to affect Bitstamp operations.

If it's all random, why are you on this forum? It's by definition impossible to meaningfully discuss completely random processes.

today's your lucky day, there are actually several sites like that:

http://mtgox.com/

http://bitstamp.net/

need more?

(you set yourself up for this one :D)

I don't see a trend reversal, not even short term. Only the most fine-grained of the indicators I look at saw a swing in the other direction, everything else indicates we're going down further, or are at least not about to go up rapidly, within the next 24h.

I am however mildly nervous because my gut feeling tells me that recent news (Bitcoin ETF, mtgox press release re: wire transfers) are comparably positive, and we've reached a price level that, say, 4 weeks ago would have had people salivating. In other words, I don't trust this downtrend.

You can turn it any way you want, those *are* good news. Maybe you're sceptical about them, but for those who trade on mtgox, this press release is almost certainly better news than the previous where they announced they'd stop (automatically) processing them.

Similar with the ETF. Sure, might take a while before it becomes reality, maybe it'll never do... that's not the point I made in my post however: I recognized we're in a downtrend, but that I'm somewhat nervous because of the relatively good news recently, and that I recognize the possibility that it might turn around soon. Nitpicking about the *exact* quality of goodness of the news doesn't influence that argument, in my opinion.

You just made it into my list of bookmarked bitcointalk members (the line about the value/risk of derivatives warranted that). Don't you dare stop disclosing your position from now on.

Oh wow. This is brutal.

In the past I've gotten into heated arguments with a few guys in here on how far the downtrend de jour would take us. I remember, about a month ago, when we broke through 100 for the first time after the May consolidation, I was telling off people who were expecting a drop all the way down to 70, 60 within in one day.


Anyway. No such words of caution from me today. I'm not sure there's a hard limit to how far we'll go within the next 24 hours.

EDIT: sp

*cough* volatility squeeze *cough*

*cough cough* looks pretty clear to me what the bias is *cough cough*


I should really get some cough syrup.

What exactly happened to good old fashioned fucking tolerance, huh?

I personally believe (a) astrology is pretty much bullshit, or at least: completely uninteresting for me as a guiding algorithm to go through life, but I also (b) don't get my knickers in a twist when it turns out someone believes it has some merits.

"... should be put on an island"... sheesh. You'd fit right into r/atheism. And that's obviously no compliment.

Oh well, then it's okay of course. I mean, isn't that the textbook definition of tolerance -- "not getting worked up about all kind of shit, except of course the stuff you really disagree with."

In less important, less metaphysical news:

Hellooooo, 100!

To be fair, I don't think Rampion ever made a silly prediction like "never again 100/no 100 in 2013".
Blitz, on the other hand...

Not much TA behind the following statement, but I don't see us going back below 100 and staying there right now. We approached and broke through 100 with quite a bit of volume (compared to the previous week).

No idea if triple digits are here to stay for the near future, but I expect us to cross 100 again within an hour or two.

Not sure if you're ironically quoting others or being serious, but every way you turn it, 100 has been and continues to be an important psychological barrier, both as support and as resistance.

Touching it like we do now won't magically turn this ship around all by itself, but as far as noteworthy signals go, I consider this a (moderately) positive one. Now let's see how long we stay above.

You are proselytizing, not unlike the people you despise so much.

There is a simple test for what you should, no, must tolerate: does it cause quantifiable harm to you or others? If yes, the demand for tolerance doesn't apply. If not, tolerate it.

I already anticipate your answer: But why yes, oda, of course religion causes substantial harm to humanity, and has been doing so for ages!.

The answer to that claim is of course: no, it does not, or at least not universally.

If you would live in, say, Afghanistan and you were a woman being deprived of basic rights, based on religious grounds, you can chose to fight your fight against religions.

If it were your goal to change the above situation in Afghanistan, as an outsider, you would be justified to do so.

But since you most likely live in the kind of circumstances that most of us do ("Western" society, in practice mostly secular, with some vestiges of religious morals still in place), you have no right to be intolerant of those who practice religion, or any other kind of non-empirical belief system, within the bounds of that society. The harm you perceive is too immaterial for you to inflict the amount of harm you do when you chose not to tolerate their beliefs and practices.

Please note that the above does not infringe on your right of freedom of expression: you are very much free to argue (publically) that, for the betterment of the human kind, the influence of religion should decrease even further. But the underlying stance in that discussion has to be that of tolerating the opposing side's views and practices -- something that is very clearly not the case when you (not you, personally) write that religious people would ideally be deported to an island.

Feel free to place me on ignore. This thread is defined more by it's off-topicness than by its actual topic, so I'll continue posting whatever the fuck I feel like.

I do consider it good practice not to spam the entire thread with those tangential discussions, especially if there's something interesting going on on the market, but that was hardly the case here.

A volume-based metric I place some trust in, confirms that: there is substantial buying pressure on bitstamp, even if the price gap somewhat obscures this fact.





First the similarities: daily A/D continued to rise on both bit and mtg, well after the April peak, and throughout the initial correction/bubble deflation. It peaked in mid-June, then gently started sloping downwards. The corresponding price action was the recent downtrend that took us from ~110 to ~70 (mtg prices).

Now for the differences: as of early JuneJuly, A/D stabilized on mtg. Maybe with a weak upwards slope. Contrast this with bit: around the same time, instead of merely stabilizing, A/D is shooting up (in comparison).

It's as if all the btc optimism migrated from mtgox to bitstamp. No guarantee that this lasts however, if mtgox manages to solve its fiat problem in time.

EDIT: corrected mistake

@adamstgBit, vokain

I'm a bit late, previous post on this topic already two pages behind us, but I'd like to add one remark about the Accumulation/Distribution indicator and what to gather from it.

I would be very careful looking at it in absolute terms. It's almost useless in that respect, in my opinion. So looking at the difference in absolute value between bit and mtg doesn't say much, other than (as chodpaba already said) that historically, volume was higher on mtg and thus the absolute value of A/D is higher.

Similarly for absolute peaks and absolute lows of A/D. I don't think they can be really used for predicting anything.

What I find somewhat useful is to contrast A/D with it's volume-based brethren PVT and OBV, that are all, in one way or another, trying to estimate the "actual" capital entering/leaving the market, as opposed to the relatively uninformative market cap method of multiplying coins with current price.

The difference, in my understanding, between PVT and OBV on the one hand, and CMF, A/D on the other is that the former are closer to an attempt to estimate the net volume *in* the market, while the latter is more concerned with a series of *trends* of how money enters/leaves the market.

The obvious example is that the way CMF and A/D (basically the cumulative version of CMF) are calculated, they can be *positive* even if closing price is lower than opening price for a given period, as long as the closing price is above the middle point of high and low of that period.

That might look like a problem (one which PVT and OBV don't have, btw), and it also seems to be common to file it under "criticism" of the method, but I see it slightly differently: it's a way to combine minor, individual price/volume trends as a series, to get a feeling if the market is more "optimistic" or rather "pessimistic".

Sorry for the vague terminology :/ It's simply that I can't describe it much better right now. The way I interpret the A/D graphs I posted is that we're in a phase of (mild) consolidation/optimism after the last long slide down, and that the optimism/buying pressure is somewhat greater on bit than on mtg, because of the rate at which A/D is growing currently on bit vs. its (near) stagnation on mtg.

Which to me becomes *really* surprising considering that we would expect selling pressure to dominate bit, given the "buy on mtg, sell on bit, to escape the mtg fiat trap" hypothesis that most people on here seem to follow.

Drama. And not the bitcoin kind. I want to chime in as well.

I agree with shroomskit to a (very small) degree, Blitz can be a pain in the ass, especially during downtrends. Right now, he's all reasonable ("we all make wrong predictions, what's the big deal"), but when price is going down, there's a lot of self-righteous gloating that rubs me the wrong way too.

That said, that's no excuse for the shitty attitude of shroomskit.

I'm wondering where some of you are getting the idea that the trend is about to reverse. Because of the 5 USD retracement we just saw? Or maybe I'm missing something that the candle watchers can see but I cannot.

The way I see it, it's not entirely clear if, in the short term (24-48h) we'll continue to go up or will stabilize at this level, but I see very little indication that we're going down right now.

Yeah, guess I should have been more explicit. Our time frames are very different I rarely if ever look at something that long. My point was, in the past 7 days we went from 95 to 110/111, now back to ~106. I don't even want to look ahead 7 days, but for the coming day or two, I don't see the current uptrend fizzling out just yet.

Not being snarky, but honestly wondering: That H+S pattern didn't materialize, right? Or is there something like a double right shoulder?!

I see. Another TA denier :P

@prof7bit

I guess you're asking Traktion, since he suggested the pattern, but even though I didn't agree with him, your "find in less than 2 minutes" criterion is a bit unfair. Depending on how well trained you are, it could take you 30 seconds or 20 minutes to find a pattern, irrespective of whether it is really there or not.

When Traktion first posted, he also had a 15 min view. I'm not experienced in determining candlestick patterns, but I *could* see how (on the 15 min view) a left shoulder and a head had materialized, and a right shoulder was possibly forming.

I mainly disagreed because of the volume acting atypical.

I'm using different methods and indicators, and I don't place much emphasis on support levels, but my overall interpretation is probably quite similar: since early July we are in phase that could potentially reverse the overall downtrend since the April peak.

I'm a bit more cautious than you, perhaps. We've had such potential reversals before, and they didn't last in the end, but for now, I would see the price staying above 100, or even slightly below, as a relatively strong signal that the early July trend persists, that could take us out of the larger downtrend.

We're about to enter a (short-term, at least, but tradeable IMO) trend reversal, downwards, judging by what I look at. Still avoidable though if price picks up, to 104, 105 maybe.

Interestingly, mtg and bit are decoupled to a degree right now, with bit looking slightly more positive. The two exchanges are still strongly linked of course, but I noticed that there's at least some instances in the past 2 months were bit actually lead mtg. Not the norm though, usually still the other way round.

I don't think we talk about the same thing. I'm not talking about the fundamental situation, the general buying/selling situation on either of the exchanges.

I'm talking about short-term *tradeable* (by my metric) dips or upswings. Like those that happen all the time. Like the on that just happened two days ago, where (theoretically) you could have sold at 110 and bought back at 101 (on mtg).

Anyway, like I said, not fully crystallized yet in my opinion, but I'm holding my finger on the trigger, so to speak.

ooooh, looking good... To da MOON!

Maybe. ("Swindon, I'm nearly at the moon. Have you got more ladder?")

That part would make me extremely suspicious. ("The great and wise benevolent leader blogger has concluded that price now must go up uP UP.") Nevermind, confused him with 796. Apologies to S3052.

That we're about to go down. But I had mistaken him for another guy, ignore.

Is it just for me, or is the mtgox order book on bitcoinity all wrong. According to them, the wall at 105 is still there.

Let's not ignore psychological barriers completely. This is well on the way to become a proper re-test of 100 (mtgox, obviously. given the latest developments, it's time to start qualifying statements like that )

looks good, but seems like it *only* shows mtgox orderbook and price chart. so doesn't really replace bitcoinity for me.

looks good to me. thanks.

this thread never was about mtgox or walls exclusively. oh no, it so much more... animated memes, Finish madness on open display, bears ridiculing bulls, bulls running around with their dicks hanging out, wait what.

chance #2 to re-test 100. not going to break right now though. bit later, perhaps

Aaaaah, the eternal chartbuddy discussion on the wall thread....

You know what, I vote to *keep* CB just so that the *discussion* about CB never goes away ^__^

(but seriously, it's the same deal each time, the same arguments on all sides, but in the end it runs down to: there's a group of people who like CB, and there are those who don't. those who like him *need* the posts, while those who don't want him can 'ignore' him, which is a nearly perfect way to solve the problem. conclusion: following a utilitarian approach, we keep CB)

In my mind, I read that in the enthusiastic voice of a shopping network presenter...

We go up? That's bullish! We go down? That's bullish too. We stay where we are? That's ULTRA-bullish!

I love you too.

War of the Competing Walls, finally also on bitstamp.

Can't we combine the two discussions somehow? Doesn't make much sense IMO to have two threads to do live discussions of trades & walls, when they really need to be looked at together.

That's why I appreciate your posts here. You are one of the bigger traders/investors that I largely "trust" when they talk about their decisions. Not that I tend to follow your buy/sell advice, but I believe you when you say you did X or Y :P

EDIT: jsut to clarify, you usually don't give advice in the strict sense anyway. just that when you were pretty bearish in the last month or so, I took that into account, but decided otherwise myself.

I wrote a longer answer to the 51% network attack over on r/bitcoin. The way I see it, the attack is almost trivially easy to pull of for a large motivated entity, such as, say,  the US government.

There are two layers of protection against this happening, imo:

one, at the moment the price is low (300 to 400M USD), but *interest* to attack btc directly is also comparably low. That might chance as btc becomes more established, but then the *price* will also be higher.

two, network composition. if any large group suddenly enters the scene, outcomputing everyone else, that will most likely be noticed, and investigated by the community. I don't believe it would be easy, even for a government with loads of money, to pretend to be several thousand individuals forming a mining pool.

Actually, no. I try to keep track of the clear cut cases, if for no other reason that I trade on bitstamp, and by my count this is the 3rd time a major movement took place on bitstamp before mtgox since July.

Gentlemen. Let's play a game. 'Call the bottom'. Is it just a minor swing downward? Is it this the end of our beautiful July uptrend? Doesn't matter, just tell us what you think the bottom will be.

Guess I'll have to go first. I'm afraid we'll see a few more red candles, but we might have seen the bottom already at 130. The worst I can see is testing 125.

Who's next?

I don't know about that. There was quite a bit of volume on bitstamp. And even on mtgox, just not spread evenly but in the form of a few big buys.

If this would have been upwards manipulation, i.e. pump and dump, it would have failed pretty badly. more likely the rally was real, just not based on broad support but on a few big buyers.

Hey guys!!! I just got a call from a place called "White House", from a guy called Baraque, or something like that. He says he plans to buy btc worth 2 trillion (!) USD, as soon as his money arrives on mtgox. That's mega good news, right?

*sigh*

Are there any bibcoin beliebers other than me that don't actually think the world economy is about to collapse, fiat is just a ponzi scheme and that Bernanke is about to reveal that he's just a  space lizard being remote controlled by a geostationary Illuminati satellite?

Anyway:

WWI. WWII. Oil crisis.

Not that we don't have our own set of crises now, but we would probably be able to see runaway inflation coming. Not years in advance maybe, but not being completely taken by surprise either.

Both yes and no to that. Who knows what they're capable of doing. 20 years from now, that generation's geeks will probably sneer at the naivety in which we conducted our Interwebbing.

But I don't believe for one second that they or anyone else "broke" strong encryption in any meaningful mathematical sense. Backdoors galore, supersecretmathematicalbreakthroughsomethingquantum... nore?

That gives me some comfort.

Also, up we go on bitstamp. Mtgox will surely follow :D

But the lizard thing is fundamental to the space jews plan to recalcify our precious bodily fluids!

If that would be true, the pumper-slash-dumper would be one broke motherfucker. Volume on the way down so far is just a fraction of what the whale put into the 'pump' part, and we're already getting near the point where it all started. No profit in that.

No, sorry to disappoint, but whoever drove the price up might or might not come back, but pump and dump 't was not.

There's another, maybe simpler, explanation for why it's different for Bitcoin (yeah, yeah, bears I know. It's never different). Let's make the simplifying assumption that there is, at a give time, a fair but unknown evaluation of a commodity, and that the market attempts to discover it (pretty standard, right).

If our current ideas about the eventual importance of Bitcoin are even remotely right, then the current evaluation is still several orders of magnitude below that eventually "fair" evaluation. Note: it's okay that this is the case, markets take their time, and there's obviously a lot of risk.

Anyway, the argument in favor of double exponential growth is that because the gap is so huge between current evaluation and (what I stipulated as ) the eventually fair evaluation, any shift in market perception must result in huge growth, whether it corrects back afterwards or not.

If in some other, more mature, market the evaluation goes from, say, 95% of the fair value to 99% of the fair value, it can do so at more reasonable pace. Double exponential growth in those cases probably is a sign that a correction will happen.

In our case, if we're at 1% of the eventual evaluation, and try to go to, say, 50%, it has to be a at a breakneck pace. Sure, usually double exponential growth means correction in our little market as well, but the way it seems to go is a frantic race that increases price 10-fold, then corrects back to half of that, or maybe a third. So what's left of the initial growth is still pretty impressive.

I really don't think it is healthy to get angry about jaroslaw or any of his permutations. He has the low-effort trolling perfected to a T.

+1

Also, A/D is a tricky beast. On mtgox, it continued to go up all the way from April to July, and only started falling (!) right before the July reversal. Since then, it mostly flatlined, with a slight downward tendency, while price went from 70 to 140.

On bitstamp, on the other hand, it has been going up almost without interruption ever since July. I simply don't see how an unfiltered reading of A/D is helpful at the moment... gox fiat problems might have to do with that divergence.

I have that line, embroidered and framed, hanging right over my bed.

Hardly. 2 months ago, mtgox taking the lead during surges meant twice or more the volume of the next biggest exchange. These days it means about 50% more.

It's too early to declare the mtgox era entirely over. But it's getting closer.

I must be the only person on earth right now who contemplates beginning to trade on/sending fiat to mtgox

I'm not looking to long-term hold, so the premium isn't really an issue. It's the godawful slippage on bitstamp for anything bigger than tiny amounts.

The only thing that prevents me from signing up is, well, that it'd be idiotic to do so, I guess.

I'll be that guy and say it:

That's still surprisingly little money.

If seen in context, I mean. So they earned something north of 10M, and we know about a 10M gap. Doesn't mean there aren't other debts ramped up (lawyers for the coinlab lawsuit, for example).

What happened to your hypothesis of a "sustained buying program by uber-whale, carefully controlling price without pushing it too far in either direction"? Doesn't that count?

awww, aggro kitty is totes adorbs!!!

Price is stable. Eerily stable, no? current price ≃ 24h average ≃ 30d average, on both mtgox and bitstamp.

What does that tells us? I'm not sure, to be honest. Looking at the historical precedence, I would expect a solid upward break out. But my intuition says it won't be that easy.

Actually, no, I'm only in this since April (I know, I know). But that's the period I meant by "historical precedence" for upward breakout.

Pretty nice rebound so far. But personally, I don't trust it. Yet.

Awww, but we love you.

Btw, how's that cloud computing thing working out so far?

*runs*

Where do you get the "5 month high" from? Price weighted by volume? In terms of pure price extrema, 31st August was still higher @135.

Sorry to hear that.

I'm kind of nervous myself. I'm holding, all of it, waiting for the last moment to sell. I'd love to say "it looks like it's about to turn around", but in reality, I don't see any signs for that (likely to happen eventually) correction yet. Neither on stamp nor on gox. So, I'm holding.

I don't like this binary mentality some here seem to follow, that it's either "buy & hold forever" or "daytrade the tiniest of price swings". Non surprisingly, there is a middle ground.

Conservatively estimated, since (and including) the April 10 crash/correction, by my count there were about 8 opportunities to lock in a (btc) profit without having to watch each minimal fluctuation. What I mean is: there was ample opportunity to watch the price on a daily basis, and if you made the right call, profit a few days (or in some cases: weeks) later.

You can say that it's not worth the risk, that it's "safer" to just hold. However, that's a rather strange argument considering that absolutely everyone of us who invested in this experiment is participating in something extremely risky. The real question is, do you believe you can, profitably, trade the bigger swings, or do you think you're better of holding and trusting the long-term uptrend.

Both strategies are viable options, and I don't think there is an unconditional advice that can be given -- at the very least, the advice has to be made conditional on the risk profile of the market participant, the desired profits in relation to the starting capital, and, well, the trading "talent" of him or her.

You know, when you put effort into your analysis, your posts are actually worth reading. I'm not a great believer in Fibonacci mysticismanalysis, but the conclusions you arrive at are plausible, in my opinion.

tl;dr I like your current style a lot better than your pink RR period

Hey, I don't know why you're doing that, but can you please stop posting empty posts? I only see your username and then nothing else. kthxbye

He was joking (or so he said in a longer, actually pretty thoughtful, post a bit later).

Woohooo! Thread name change! End of an era! Beginning of a new one! The world became a better place! Let's all hold hands and dance and sing!

_{(just a tiny problem, volume on bitstamp right now is almost as low as on mtgox)}

The situation is a bit more complicated these days than "mtgox still leading" or "gox is dead".

In the past weeks, several rallies were lead by exchanges other than gox. On most days, gox volume is actually lower than that on bitstamp, for example. But once in a while, like now, when a big move starts, gox is still at the center of attention: they do have the market depth (and deep pockets and experience of traders on the exchange) that no other exchange matches so far.

See what I mean? Gox is almost certainly not the only relevant exchange these days. Ignoring what bitstamp or btc china does will cost you money. But on the other hand, gox is still in a unique position, and it is not wrong to say that, more often than not, you're well advised to watch what is going on there.

One more remark: I got the impression that, in the recent past, gox did in fact lead several *rallies*, but bitstamp was quite successful in *stopping* them (i.e. when gox price went too far ahead, and bitstamp was only reluctant to follow, it went down  again on gox)

Forgive me for quoting myself. But here's a nice example of the effect I described above:

Mtgox reaches today's high at 15:35. Bitstamp takes another hour before it reaches its own daily high, at 16:45.

Ergo, mtgox still "leads".

Same time, 16:45, bitstamp iniates downwards correction, 225.5 --> 224, then 223. At this point, mtgox trades sideways. Takes another ~15 min before the correction gathers speed on mtgox as well.

Ergo, bitstamp "leads" as well.

'typical price' is similar to 'median price' in that it takes the middle value between the extrema of the period (highest price, lowest price), only difference: 'typcial' throws in closing price as well, which is IMO pretty arbitrary, so median is usually more informative.

but, yeah, I noted it as well and made a post yesterday: we've surpassed the previous daily median price ATH, on mtgox and bitstamp. didn't check btc china, but I'll guess there as well

What the hell did I miss... bitstamp higher than mtgox?! o_O

Sorry for the clueless question, but does coinbase act as an exchange? If so, at which volume compared to the others?

Re: bitstamp higher atm than mtgox (not anymore, by the way). Anyone with two eyes in his head could have seen the mounting buying pressure on bitstamp over the past week or so. Reading from the order book is never straighforward, manipulation etc., but normalized bid/ask ratio went from ~1 4 days ago to 3 today. Not sure why, not sure how long it'll last, but right now, the pressure is on.

hehehe, interesting to watch. almost as if the market is unsure if the correction should continue or not. re-testing 270 is still a real possibility, IMO. If we'd go there, we'll see what is stronger, hunger for more coins, or fear. however right now it looks like bitstamp has enough buying pressure to stop it from going further (that'd be a new development, bitstamp *stopping* a correction, instead of initiating it oO)

Probably partially due to the fact that order book depth is still a bit shallow on stamp -- got much better lately, but still not that great. I expect similar buying pressure on stamp to drive price up higher therefore, at least for a while, since it doesn't need to break through equally many walls as on gox. /2cents

No, of course they didn't.

Bitstamp is registered as a limited company in Reading, UK. I'd be surprised if there's anything more than a PO box with their name on it in that place.

Forget it, Taxidermista seems to be going full retard at the moment.

It's really pretty simple. Based on publicly available information, Bitstamp Ltd. is:

a) a limited company registered in the UK

b) with, as far as I can tell, all or nearly all of their operations based in Slovenia

c) with a bank account at UniCredit Slovenia.


Conclusion: They are *formally* a UK company, but don't get your hopes up that UK law will help you much if, for some reason, their operations should go belly up. They are *de facto* a Slovenian company.

Disclosure: I do most of my trading at bitstamp.

*sigh* Pointless to argue with him, there's a reason why coinseeker is on my (rather small) ignore list.

Anyway, Price alone isn't enough to say where the impulse came from, IMO, volume factors in as well.

15 min weighted close paints a slightly more differentiated picture:

the current run up started minimally earlier on mtgox, yesterday evening.

then the first *real* push (price and volume) happened around midnight on bitstamp.

mtgox actually retracted quite a bit in the morning, bitstamp didn't give a shit and continued the climb, then mtgox made up their mind and shot up.

All in all, nobody clearly "leading" this one, but if any exchange put slightly more weight behind the move, it was bitstamp, not gox.

Problem is still determining the top. In your example, say you set your stop order at 100 ahead of time and your rebuys accordingly lower, but price continues to climb significantly higher before it corrects, there is a chance it will never fall deep enough to trigger any of those rebuys. In other words, you missed out on profit (because you sold to early), and you're not getting your coins back. What I'm trying to say is, you would have to constantly re-adjust your stop order and the rebuy levels, depending on how the trend progresses.

Huh? I just logged in, and bitcoinwisdom also shows executed orders within the last 20min.

Oh come on, Bernie, at least pretend to put up a fight.

"[...] Bernanke said in a Sept. 6 letter to the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs released on Monday."

But you're right of course, I'm sure it's already priced in. /s

Nice try bitstamp. Already up 50$ again

See, there's one thing I (grudgingly) have to pay respect for to the US: not matter what fascist foreign policy acting out, dysfunctional electorate system based upon, puppet-president led Koch-Brothers' dick sucking political elite led clown show they put up all year, when push comes to shove, they do know when not to miss out on a great business opportunity. Someone's gotta pay for all those burgers and burger-related heart surgery, after all.

You know, I personally think you're one of the less uninformed bears :D

I personally think there's a critical jump from ~10B to ~100B. The former is something that the regular investment types still sneer at (just read an article by some Stanford kid a few days ago, "explaining" why Bitcoin isn't really interesting for the field of economics yet), 100B is respectable, getting close to the market cap of a global company (like, say, Apple).

What to take from that I don't know exactly: it both means (in my opinion) it will be harder to cross the next order of magnitude, and it might actually require an additional step up in btc infrastructure, merchant adoption, mainstream acceptance (something that wasn't that vital up to now, IMO), but it also means that once we cross that level of 100B, a whole new array of people and institutions will take note of this little gamble we have going here.

Don't feed the trolls.

Of course his tx would have gone through faster had he put in a fee higher than zero :D

every damn time. what happened to good old "lurk moar"? here's your answer: the (highly secure) blockchain is most likely not the ideal medium for micro transfers, and probably not even for small-ish transactions like paying for your coffee. That doesn't mean Bitcoin will fail, it only means there will be ways to perform smaller transaction off the chain.

Guys, you heard it from [Date Registered: November 15, 2013, 01:22:48 PM], show's over. See you at the next Ponzi.

I love the smell of failed whale schemes in the morning.

8 year olds, dude. 8 year olds.

I didn't say which whale failed. One of them will, though

Huh? NBC reports on Bitcoin price, really?

k, funny But seriously, do you know if btc price coverage is part of their "routine" financial program, or just a irregular feature if we hit another ATH?

Dude, I like your posts. Between admitting buying back in at a loss and saying (a few pages earlier) that absolute rules re: investing by taking a loan are useless, you make a lot of sense to me. /nohomo!ballsdidn'ttouch

Better analogy: when you're in a hole, get some explosives. They might blow you to pieces, but maybe real world physics = FPS engine physis and you can rocket jump out of that hole

seriously though, I don't see a difference in principle between not investing more than you can afford and not taking a loan higher than you can afford. If he knows he can repay the loan within tolerable living conditions in case his investment fails, it's not necessarily an irrational choice.

Hey there partner. We don't like your superexponential kind 'round here, y'know. Too many bad memories. *twitch*

Thanks.

I don't know how this idea got started, but the graph posted by justusranvier is decidedly not a sigmoid function, it appears to be an exponential function when mapped on a log chart, which would make it a super-exponential function.

fucking saved :D

Actually, no. Do you?

The largest I could find was a ~50k dump on the afternoon of April 10.

Preceded, by a few hours, by a ~50k buy

Done.

And with that last buy, I've concluded my month long buying program.

Now let's see some irrational rally followed by a sharp correction, so I can embiggen my stash further :D

Not for me.

Okay, Bitstamp is starting a lot to look like mtgox.

I can log in, but the site is slowed down a crawl.

I really wish there would be a viable alternative.

I'm getting seriously fed up with Bitstamp.


And I'm under the impression I'm not the only one.


So, if you're a Bitstamp user yourself, feel free to add your opinion to my thread in the marketplace forum


I haven't given up hope entirely yet. They don't *need* to end up like mtgox :/

Why yes, I can.

Read my thread if you want. I'm not blaming them for things that aren't under their control (masses of new users, or DDoS), but I blame them for the things they can control: first and foremost, their pathetic communication with users. No regular updates, no answers to pressing questions. That's exactly what pissed people off about mtgox, and why should the standard be different for stamp?

Aah, the cozy warmth of indifference mistaken for cynicism.

They don't have to end up like gox because what they have to change can be rather easily changed: their communication with users, their attitude towards them.

Don't believe they're capable of that? Maybe. At least worth trying to give them a kick though, in my opinion.


EDIT: so which exchange are you using these days, I you don't mind the question?

Shameless plug for my 'Let Bitstamp know they're starting to suck as bad as mtgox' thread.

Unsatisfied Bitstamp users, add your opinion, if you can spare a minute.

Hurr durr, algo trades!


I don't believe for one second that you have anything even remotely related to a technical understanding of the words you use.


I looked at the charts as well, by the way, and I can clearly tell current trading is dominated by horny geishas and class of 2012 Westpoint graduates. Don't ask me how I know, I just can tell, from looking at it real good.

There's another way to look at it, a better one IMO: dynamically/as change over time.


In that view, bid/ask depth ratio (price normalized in the charts below) on bitstamp and btcchina has been largely stable for the past week, with a very weak decline until yesterday, and a slight upwards slope since today, while the ratio went trough the roof on mtgox.


I take that as a pretty positive sign. Doesn't mean I'm sure we're going up, further consolidation is still quite likely, but I don't see many bearish signs on the order book.

I like your way of thinking.


Be easy on us with the gloating when the inevitable correction comes :D

Just posting to show off my new sig.

I don't think I've ever been this bearish. This video is seriously depressing.

It ain't over till the fat lady sells.

What's the deal with this "gold parity" fallacy? I can understand why the media is picking it up, it sure sounds catchy, but it's completely meaningless except for that rather shallow psychological reasons (I'm not dismissing psychological reasoning altogether, just pointing out that this one is really rather dumb and easy to see through). If we ever reach parity with tradeable gold market cap, now that would be news. But I'm pretty sure it's a long way til we get there, if ever.

Well, in defense of the idea: There's no arguing with market participant's psychology, is there. If enough people somehow feel it is a milestone, then it is a milestone.

In fact, there's also no particularly deep reason behind the powers of 10 price steps (10, 100, 1000), and yet they act as major support/resistance points.

Good point. On the other hand, the same could have been said (in fact: was said) about the Silk Road takedown ("good news long term, but for now: bear market").


Remember how long that one kept us down?

Oh well. We had a good run (since early July, to be precise).

First time in quite a while I reduced my btc position substantially. I'm still in, never go full fiat :D, and I consider consolidation still slightly more likely than a major crash, but I also believe the chance of a sudden breakout upwards is somewhat lower than a similarly powerful breakout downwards, so there you go.

Guess I'm putting the old adage "...be greedy when others are fearful" to a test.


EDIT: not because of Baidu, by the way. Fuck Baidu :P

Welp. I'm testing it from the other side

What I meant it: the forum is pretty fearful right now, it seems. And I'm not going against that by being greedy.

Excellent observation. I better restrain myself not to pull a rpietila and try to talk price down ^_^

Nope. Changed my mind:



My analysis has show we're going down hard. SELL SELL SELL!




:P

Why? I'm still planning on doing exactly that. Doesn't matter if the btc you give to your sister is worth 1000 USD or 800. (okay. maybe matters a little )

Never quite understood the mentality of bashing the "weak hands". If it weren't for them, you (and I) would have never gotten our coins in the first place (unless you're a miner). Trading is necessary. Everything else (price swings, bearish vs bullish sentiment, trigger happy traders vs. "strong hand" traders) follows as a direct consequence of the previous.

Added to my gloat list. Started it a while ago, contains articles that are full of the smug "ha, you idiots, how could you ever think this would work" sentiment. Kind of like the quote by the then IBM chairman "'I think there is a world market for about five computers.".

I'm not only keeping this list updated to gloat when btc turns out to invalidate them, but more importantly, to know when these guys (and more importantly: publications) will start back pedaling, pretending "they always knew it would change the world".

Example: Business Insider's Joel Weisenthal. Calling Bitcoin a clown currency, now slowly changing his mind. I'll give him credit, he's still relatively quick to change his opinion.

The publications that *really* piss me off, because they *should* know better are Wired and the NYT. Say what you want about either of them, but they both have a talented pool of writers: it is (IMO) mainly an editorial choice to make the "voice of the publication" so strongly BTC negative.

They will eventually come around. And then, I will have my gloat list

Well, I posted when I sold 2 days ago, so now (without any good reason :D) I'm going to post I'm back in. I don't know if the correction is over yet, or will continue on Monday, but I see a slightly higher chance for continuing some kind of rally on Monday than another drastic drop *without any further warning signs*, so it seems wiser to buy back now (at a nice healthy 30% profit :D) than take the risk to buy back at a (coin) loss. I'll say however that I'm prepared to sell off again if it turns out that what looks like consolidation now doesn't hold tonight/on Monday.

Depends on who successful you are with it, and how much nerves it costs you. I also suspect the two points are related :D

Hahaha, very nice to see something I do myself put into a crude pic

But really, I have a similar line of thought in my trading. It's a balance... on the one hand, I believe we are now in the "land grab" phase. Forgot who called it that first. But for land grab to be useful, land must have max value in the long run, i.e. BTC must succeed (where "succeed" is somewhat complicated to define... I'll just say I don't believe in the binary model many here seem to follow, where BTC is either 0 or 1 trillion per coin).

So the hedge against land grab being useless (because BTC fails) is to secure fiat profits if there's indications that we're going down for reals this time. And since all of this is based in a purely probabilistic setting, all actions are based on mixed strategies, in game theory terminology.

So a) I try to trade swings profitably, b) avoid swings if I can't trade them profitably (because I missed the inflection point), and c) in violation of a) and b), trade swings *at a btc loss* if I have reasons to believe it is a necessary hedge against total fiat loss.

True. But his approach is still the most profitable one depending on how high you place the chance for total/near total failure of BTC. Don't tell me you're 100% sure BTC will make it?!

Not sure I know what you want to see. Expected values of the two strategies compared? I'm only half in on the details of your SSS (I get the gist, I think: regular cash outs at likely inflection points, right ), but how do you calculate EV for your theory? Based on a simple price projection over time? If so, the comparison will fail:

a) ghandibit's method is based on the non-zero possibility of a (near) total failure of BTC (if I understand him right). As in: the chance to "rescue" at least a substantial part of your fiat profits if BTC ever really really tanks. So to compare his and your method, you both need to quantify the likelihood of prices over time, not just a single 'most-likely price'.

b) more generally, his approach is still not completely spelled out: his graph shows buying back at a loss, but in his explanation he calls it "crash insurance", so the idea is probably that there are indeed conditions where you either never buy back (BTC failure), or actually manage to buy back at a btc profit (a very deep price well). So he would need to specify those conditions before it can be formally modeled and compared.

*head explodes*

Fuck, I'm not even kidding, I never thought of this possibility.

Like most here, I gently smile when I read one of those many mainstream articles claiming "Bitcoin could take off, but they really need to implement reversible transactions". It's a feature, bitch, not a bug.

But I *am* aware that reversible transactions are not per se bad. In fact, in many cases you might want something like that. Enter Paypal.

I have no idea if they're smart and nimble enough to see this huge opportunity, but if I were them, I'd at least have a small internal team dedicated to the possibility of setting something up like this, exploring the legal framework necessary to pull it off, etc.

Great insight, thezerg!

How, huh? What?

I like to think I'm usually informed about European politics (EU uber alles! jk.), but what is this about? How can anyone "ban" commuting? Or are they cutting commuting subsidies?

Care to explain? (I have friends in Greece I could ask, but I'm too lazy to write )

Yeah... I'd probably be wise to avoid this discussion, it's a hornet's nest.

But when I read alexeft's comment "Greek government/EU is banning commuting" I already had a hunch they're not doing anything like it. I'm going to guess they're cutting funding for commuting subsidies, which, I'm sure, will make life of the average Greek even harder than it already is, but it's hardly the same as "banning".

However, this way of phrasing things (subsidies being cut <--> "they're banning our freedom") is one of those things I see a bit too often coming from a subset of Greeks :/ Please note: a *subset*. I know plenty Greek people that take a different stance -- they're not exactly happy with their government or the EU, but they're by and large aware that the budget situation of Greece hardly allows for much spending right now.

Anyway.... flames incoming in 3 ... 2 ... 1

Not sure about that (the "unsafe fiat", that is). Not saying the thought isn't crossing my mind either, but here's a number of reasons why I'm not that worried about the banking situation of Bitstamp:

1) Slovenia =/= Cyprus. Seriously, it's a worthwhile discussion to go through the details, but for several reasons I don't see Slovenia at a real risk for a "bail in". To name a few: bigger country, higher risk of domino effect. less foreign account holders than cyprus to my knowledge. EU already made an example of Cyprus.

2) even in cyprus, there was no "all banks bail in", I hope people know that. In particular this means that Unicredit Slovenia, a subsidiary of the Italian Unicredit, is nowhere near the level of risk of the Slovenian *state banks*, that are the main cause of the problem the Slovenian banking landscape faces.

That said, if you want to be safe, convert to btc. If you want to be really safe, withdraw those coins. Personally, I don't think it's necessary though.

That one is starting to look a bit less likely, isn't it?

Also, I'm not gloating, and I'm not a perma-bear, but I have to say I don't think we'll resume our usual (upwards) program quite as soon as some of you guys seem to think.

Yes. The market


Seriously though, I don't think we'll hit 600 today, and if we do, we wouldn't stay there for long, but looking a bit further ahead, I kind of can see ~600 as the resting point of this correction/bubble pop/whatever you call it.

I like your posts adam, but don't try to retcon what so far appeared to be your sentiment about this post-peak period.

Sure, there's lots of profit to be had in times like this, not matter what the bigger movement is, but it's pretty obvious to me you firmly belong in the "Soon, very soon, we're back on track to da moon" crowd (I should be a singer/songwriter ). Now it sounds your view is changing. Am I right about that?

Here's a pretty simple call, anyone feel free to join:


Will 1 day VWAP or weighted close or similar reach 1000 USD again this year? Yes/No.


I'm asking because I think it's okay to shout all we want in the troll box that is this thread as long as it's entertaining, but we could at least try to do something semi-informative here as well, and standing behind what you say is kind of a prerequisite for that.


P.S. My answer is: most likely, no. (but extremely good news can turn things around quickly, so it's not impossible. just unlikely given the current trajectory.)

In defense of Heineken: Those who think it's "total shit" obviously never drank a really bad beer.

It's bland. Not really great. Bit watery. But far from completely shit, I would say.

Nah, the  Belgians only *think* their  beer is that great. Know what their  problem is? They don't know what a good, mellow tasting Pilsner is. All of those Trappist quadruple-malty-thick-as-molasses beers can suck my ass

That's exactly what I meant when I said "Heineken is a decent"... It's a decent beer in its category. And I'm not surprised to hear the beer snobs fags go all like "Oh noez! Belgian beer = only good beer".

Sure, if you like your beer the consistency and taste of raw sewage, you like Belgian. If you are, like the great nation of Germany, first and foremost a lover of greatly balanced Pilsners, you'll pass

Troll-y enough?

I know (and completely agree). I was just trolling the ale crowd that seems to think *any* beer needs to be "rich in taste".... that's (IMO) beer snobbery in its worst form. Sometimes, nothing is wrong with a good, balanced Pils (and calling it watery just shows your taste buds were ruined by too much raw sewage trappist )

*must not be a troll*

*must not be a troll*

Aaah, what the hell. Everyone else is, so why not me:

Feels good to be (mostly) fiat since ~900 (bitstamp prices)

PSA: the crash of today might end soon. But the downtrend is far from over.

Dude! I like Jupiler (and to a degree, Stella). But claiming Heineken is shit, while Jupiler is great is just... painful.

The real question you have to ask yourself is:

Are we going to touch the December 07 bottom again today or tomorrow? (~580 @mtgox)

I don't know... you didn't have to be a genius to see this drop coming, no?

Oh boy, if I didn't know that he most certainly isn't into Bitcoin, I'd say you sound like my girlfriend's father and his ale fawning.

No, wait, he's also Dutch, not a Belgian kiddie fiddler!

I like you. If you weren't on the wrong side of the Dutch language area, I'd invite you over for a beer haha (Brand, to be precise. My current favorite)

Probably not advisable. Sell into the rebound, then wait for the next leg down

Not to be a dick, but do you really think we're done with this correction? Not today, I mean, but in the coming weeks?

I call bullshit on the "Chinese are copiers, American's are innovators". That's exactly what Europe said about the US ~100 years ago. Took a while, then the US became an innovator itself. Will be exactly the same with China, only faster IMO.

Anyway, let's be realistic about China's influence on price, and what it all means for us:

I don't buy the narrative that the entire wave up from 125 USD (bitstamp) was due to the Chinese miracle, but it was a large factor.

So realistically, anything above the April's ATH of ~250 is a gift. And I don't even see us going that low quite yet (although 500 is a real option, I'd say)

Blitz, you're an annoying trollbearcunt most of the time, but that picture is priceless and completely accurate Thanks.

I can already see him zooming across the island in his tacky beautiful lambo

What's wrong with selling.

Don't tell me you're one of those people that don't understand how markets work -- if it weren't for someone selling at some point, you would have exactly zero coins. (Unless you're a miner, in which case you still need people selling otherwise your coins are worthless as well)

It's only panic selling if you didn't conclude price will continue to fall and you sell anyway.

I see more and more evidence that this correction is far from over.

Hence my recommendation: wait for a moderate rebound (tonight? tomorrow maybe?), take a long, hard look at the charts and the tools of your choice, and then decide if it's time to sell some.

Which monthly charts did you have in mind? The one from Q3/4 2011, or the one from Q2 this year?







In reality, I get your point of course. But do you get mine as well?

aaaah, the smell of denial.

And here I was, thinking this downtrend might be over already... but there you are, guys, coming up with all kinds of explanations why "price is kept down artificially".

Funny, because there's much less conspiracy around when the price is going up, huh?

anyway....

I've said it before, but it bears (nudge, nudge) repeating: I'm not too happy about it, but I don't see a real chance that we're just going to continue our previous rally right now. We'll consolidate first for a while, or go down deeper. At least that's the most likely scenario I see for now.

Oh boy...

Guys?

If loaded himself gets nervous, begging the market to "stop", you know it's far from over.

Aaand  here we go again.

New low this time?

The bitfinex statistics page is terrible (one of the reasons I stopped trading there).

a) it's not at all transparent how their bullish/bearish "index" works, but presumably something about the ratio and composition of BTC loans vs USD loans
b) it always seems to be lagging by at least a day or two... so it's kind of useless IMO

We'll see about that. There's a real chance we're going to cross 770/780 (mtgox) in the next 24-48 hours. If that happens, you will most likely have to wait a while for your cheaper coins. They might still manifest, but until then you'll be nervously watching the charts all the time, wondering if you missed the train :D

What do you want to be commented on?

The exchange is run by one very friendly, extremely competent engineer, and one asshat (who unfortunately is in charge of their PR).

They have lots of potential, but their biggest problem is reliability: if you plan on trading large-ish amount, I'd recommend trading on bitstamp (their "attached" exchange) directly.

Raphael is the, allow me to quote myself, "very friendly, extremely competent engineer". I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader who the asshat is





Reliability issues, as I've encountered them, include the ability to use leveraged trading (which has a habit of "breaking" when things move fast, i.e. during a crash) ("breaking" meaning for example, that they have in the past turned it off entirely when they thought markets were overheating -- a huge fauxpas, IMO), and perhaps more importantly, their link to Bitstamp can be problematic: during a rally it happens regularly that they run out of USD on Bitstamp... they're aware of it, they regularly send fresh money there, I'm not accusing them of being amateurs... I just have to point that it is a fact that, regularly, trades can't be executed on Bitstamp when the market moves fast (up, usually).

My recommendation would be: if you have relatively *little* capital, trade on Bitfinex. The ability to use leveraged trading can be helpful then, if you know what you're doing (if you don't, you'll be bankrupt soon.)

If you trade amounts in the range of 100 BTC upwards, I would personally recommend Bitstamp. You lose the ability to use leverage, but then again, slippage is already bas as it is with larger trades, so unless you really *want* to see your order eating through the entire order book, you don't want to use leverage anyway.

Only one way to find out:

Yo, loaded! Nice try to freeload on Zuckerberg. When exactly did that seem like a good idea?


(see, if he gets defensive, he's a Winklevoss. I'm *great* at psychology, I tell you.)

Yes, and no.

See, information on the Internet is a bit like quantum superposition: loaded both did board an airplane with a suitcase full of sweet, sweet cash hidden somewhere in the fuse box with the help of the airplane mechanic of his private jet, and he is actually a 32 year old male virgin living in the basement of his parents, living vicariously the life of an international Bitcoin jetsetter-slash-business magnate while furiously masturbating to MLP ero guro.

But that's just: The Internet -- What a Magic Place! ™

Nah, wasn't meant all that serious. I think loaded is for real as well. But I do think it's a good principle to keep in mind on the Internet: take any information with a large grain of salt.

I present: The Pietila-Noobs learning cycle.


stage 1: "Wow, this guy has sooo much money. And he sounds so smart. Let me read all his old post and follow his advice."

[a week later]

stage 2: "Hm, now he's starting to sound a bit crazy. Better take his words with a grain of salt."

[another week later]

stage 3: "What a clown! I have to warn the newbies not to trust him!"

Quoted for future reference.

Best summary of the man so far, warts and all.

(also, I kinda like him. a bit like you like that drunken uncle at your family gatherings though, the one nobody takes really serious )

Ftfy

+1

When Blitz is the voice of reason, you just know post quality is in the shitter

I know, I'm late to the party, just I just got a chance to watch the video now. It think it's fantastic, including the point that "Bitcoin isn't better than the USD (for now)".

It's the truth, for a substantial portion of the population and you should realize it.

On this forum it's taken as self evident that bitcoin > any fiat, but in reality, most people out there only care on a peripheral level about monetary policy, inflation, restrictions on transfer of wealth etc., as long as they're in a nice stable country. And you can go rant as long as you want, but practically living in one of the, say, G7 countries *does* mean you live in fucking stable circumstances.

In other words, if you're one of the lucky people in an ultra stable economic region and you're politically disinterested, it's spot on: you won't immediately think "Bitcoin is better".

So I really appreciate the point Antonopoulos made: it doesn't matter that BTC isn't "better" than the USD... Because right now, BTC is already better than a vast majority of other currencies, and it's probably only a matter of time before it becomes competitive with even the most widely accepted currency/currencies.

That's the point as I understood it. Bashing him for blasphemy because he doesn't spread the gospel of how Bitcoin is better than the Dollar and one million blowjobs is completely missing the point.





Found her