You mean batshit insane people?

It sure beats selling at the bottom.

Yeah, btcchina is still at $400 while the rest of the world is back at $500... what gives?

If anyone knew that, they'd be buying/selling instead of telling you about it. Sorry. Your guess is as good as mine where this goes.

Most probably won't happen.

Why would you dump when everyone is expecting it? No one would panic. Somebody would just buy your coins and that would be it.

Volumes are so small that you couldn't hope to buy back at a lower price.

The VAT is applicable to trading fees, since that's what the merchant really charges. At least that was the case in Great Britain until the came around last week.

That depends on where you live. Different countries have different rules. Some charge VAT, some don't. The trend that more and more contries will make it clear that it is VAT exempt, if I may venture a guess (especially after the UK decision).

If you charge a fee to make a barter transaction, that fee is seen as providing a professional service, which should carry VAT. Only certain items are exempt from this.


Indeed, if Bitcoin is a currency. If I had to guess, I would guess that it is only a matter if time until this is the case everywhere.,

That's not the case here. These coins are MtGox's. Parts of it come from the transaction where Karpeles proved he owned them.

No idea. I guess that would depend on the circumstances, whether it is your profession etc. Perhaps someone else can chime in?

MtGox's hot wallet used to be split up in roughly 2k chunks. So he's probably running a script that loads a hot wallet from cold storage.

Why? Don't know. It's not a very good way to hide the coins, so my suspicion is that there is going to be payments from MtGox soon. Let's just hope it's to customers. It could be preparations for Gox.com.


Does not make sense. What would you tumble it with? Itself?

That's a dangerous game to play. A bid wall could turn up at any time. There are some decent whales out there.

The last wall game was played well above the 650's. Presumably some of them sold at 700 and are just waiting to see when the best time is to jump back in again.

That is a trusim, but one that does mislead the lesser intelligent.

Because while it is true that one does not know what is best for society, it is often trivial to point out something that is good for society. And that is what matters in practice.

That is indeed interesting.

We know that MtGox had over a million user accounts. Given that you do not register an account if you don't intend to use it, because it is quite useless unless you give up a metric ton of personal information, that tells us that most users did get their money out in time. "Only" 70k accounts got burned in the crash. That is actually better than the numbers speculated on before.

(Full disclosure: I am one of those who did get their money out. I did have some at one point, and then I was lured in again to play the arbitrage in november, but got cold feet and pulled out my last coins early december.)

I have said it before, but the bank situation for MtGox made it pretty difficult for use it to actually buy Bitcoins that way. So it couldn't have attracted many newbies any more. In the end, it was probably an even split between bots and people who wanted to arbitrage from that.


Now that is just pulling numbers out of your ass.

How many accounts that were still active in the end of MtGox has absolutely nothing to do with how many Bitcoin users there are except to establish a lower bound for it. (That said, I do believe 2 million is in the right order of magnitude for completely different reasons. We can not infer from the network how many users carry Bitcoins.)

You're not the first one to notice these patterns to the Bitcoin value. But just because it's behaved that way in the past doesn't necessarily mean it will do the same again ... or does it?

The bounces haven't been totally symmetrical. The slump during summer 2013 was a lot shorter than most people expected.

The fall to 820 was on lower volume. There sell volume has been quite large in the 600s. When do you expect that money to buy back in? Are they cool enough to wait for the 500s? I'm not so sure.

Where do you see this data?

You're so blinded by your ideology so you even have to make stuff up.

In reality, GM went out of business because they made cars nobody wanted to buy.

(My theory here is that it was because they were too late to prioritize fuel economy, in turn because the US has artificially deflated oil prices.)

Their European competitors paid their worker higher wages during the same period and they somehow managed to survive. That does not fit your description at all.

The faster confirmation times is pretty much exactly negated by the fact that you need more confirmations with LTC to be reasonably secure against forks.

"More resistant to ASIC" is just silly seeing that we already have LTC mining ASICs. The only reason we didn't have them earlier was because LTC wasn't valuable enough. So, yeah, a low valuation is resistant to ASICs.

That may be the case, but it would be very weak ground for a value evaluation.


I would be surprised if that was the case. We don't know how long the SHA ASICs were in development, but the hard problem is for the economics to make sense. Anyone who can write Verilog can design one for you, but you need to order tens of thousands in a single run. That requires some serious cash. (You also have to be very very sure it actually works, the heat envelope works in your construction etc.)

The reality is that LTC really doesn't offer anything that BTC doesn't. A proof-of-work based cryptocurrency needs to look a lot like BTC. I think the main reason people buy into LTC is speculation, which so far but there will be a limit how close to Bitcoin's value it can get.

What? Which news?

That means nothing. Your prediction will be wrong from time to time, every time an unexpected whale shows up, and when it is you'll lose.

< 1M USD to 500, > 5M USD to 400.

How people have the nerves to sell is beyond me...

I don't understand. You boast about how you bought your stash at $10, which means you've got hundreds if not a thousand coins, then you trade with leverage. Why would you do that? Especially since you say you have a stash in cold storage. Why not just sell and buy like a regular dude if you've got all this money, and not have to cave in at the whims of the sharks at Bitfinex?

550.0 was the bottom I saw. That was the second drop, the first one bottomed at 550.6 or something. Consider yourself lucky, my order didn't get filled  

edit: fat fingers! 550, not 500...

Do you mean when MtGox folded, or before that? I can't really decide how to calculate volume. The rapid rise in the Chinese exchanges always felt a bit funny.

Yeah, but that was surreal. A bit of an outlier. (And I was a bit too scared to trade then when the market was so obviously f-ed up, quite stupid in retrospect.)

Why do you think that? It's so thin right now ... I have no clue where it will go. If anything, there is a small trickle of new coins for sale.

If that were true, several k dumped on Stamp and several times more on Huobi during the last week, we should have gone much lower. The order books are very shallow everywhere so there is simply no resistance neither up nor down.

I think it's just some regular trading going on, slowly dumping at the upper limits or the (percieved) market and buying at the bottom. If I had a few k at the exchanges I would do that too. It's just slower than usual since the market can't absorb just about anything at all right now.

What about them?

And why do you think they would cause a downward pressure? Shouldn't it attract speculators as well?

China is so strange right now. Fiat transfers are supposed to be banned several times over now, so how would they even get yuan out of them if not via foreign accounts?

EDIT: (to clarify) ... Which should drive Stamp lower than Huobi, not the other way around which is what we've seen during last week.

In 2013 we saw some 5,000% increase. It's a bit unreasonable to expect that every year, don't you think? 

Which means they can still ban it... Again... On the other hand, if they wanted to shut it down, wouldn't they have done it by now? It's been over six months!

*shakes head*

Well, sure, but this semi-legalness of Bitcoin only troubles the legitimate uses. By clamping down on the industry while at the same time leaving lots of back doors open they will hamper the exchanges and indirectly the miners. The bribery and foreign exchange subversion will be unaffected as they can survive just fine on the voucher trade or whatever it is they are doing now. It's a bit mystifying.

A federated inter-exchange arbitrage would have the added benefit as an early warning system for gox:ings.

If an exchange started having trouble honoring its IOUs on time, that would be a signal to move your funds out. No panacea of course and it would still cause a bank run, but at least it would be better than the slow 12 month Gox fiasco where no one knew they were illiquid (except for the ones who got away with it..).

That's trivial to solve. How do you think other institutions in society do it?

The easiest way is that everyone desposits a sum with a trusted third party, which forms the top limit for IOUs. You could also distribute the third party role on several participants (where several needs to collude to cheat the system), if the trust is otherwise hard to build.

But even the easiest notary system would be a giant step up for today's exchanges.

No and no. (There are lots of problems with the current banking system but IOUs for spreading risk is not one of them.)

In fact, Bitcoin markets would be both more secure and more liquid for it. A win-win if I ever saw one.

3000 coins is not dumped on the exchanges daily. Large parts (most?) of the coinbase is hoarded or sold in private.

Also please note that even if we can have short periods of more inflation due to the stepwise increase of the difficulty factor, it will be corrected.

Those factors seem to be completely arbitrary. I think the argument can be made that some of the exchanges fake their order book to inflate their apparent volume, in order to appear more liquid than they are, but that argument could be made for btc-e and a lot of the altcoin exchanges too.

The exchanges that run without fees should be expected to get a much larger volume of all trades, since you can dump large walls and buy back $1 later. So if you've arrived at the same volume for western and eastern exchanges, I think your discount factor is too big.

I'm sure someone more mathematically inclined could at least do a preliminary analysis of the order books so find out how much is "too" random, or if many trades have a common divisor, or other obivous methods. I doubt the cheating is very sophisticated. Has someone done this?


I believe I read some representative from Finex somewhere saying "we will begin to slowly cut our ties to Stamp, so I think you are completely right there. They still push a lot of trades onto Stamp's order book. The question is how much.


A bit arbitrary, don't you think?

Those things takes time. It has taken five years for Bitcoin to be where it is now.

Even if something so insanely smart so it is to Bitcoin what Bitcoin was to whatever was before it (e-Gold?), you probably have five years of trading between Bitcoin and the new hotness before it could possibly be "dead" in any way.

And some people are going to be early adopters, trade in their Bitcoins the first few years (and any new cryptocurrency WILL be denominated in Bitcoin the first few years, that is completely and utterly irreversible) and make a fortune. And there will be discussions again how be new currency favors early adopters and is unfair. History will repeat itself in every way.

But before that there's going to be thousands upon thousands of scamcoins which do not improve state of the art in any way and will ultimately be worthless. If you do not realise the new hotness before anyone else and move with the average pack, you will still be able to trade your Bitcoins pretty much 1:1. Roughly.

This is the one future prediction I can and will make of which I believe to be absolutely certain.

But ... I don't want to panic buy !! 

Somebody is dumping at 570 .. 580, 590 and now 600.

How many have they got?

I don't get it..?

If someone really had that amount of money they'd sell it privately, just like FBI did.

A puny buy order of 500 coins or so completely flattened all resistance around $600.

What? Why did the dumps stop? Did the dumper just realize that he/she could earn more by dumping at a higher price? What is this madness?

(And what am I doing with Bitcoin when I am so easily scared?)

Each auctioned block was 3k bitcoins. That's a lot of money, but it's what Bitpay sells in about a week if we are to believe their numbers. I would expect them to be happy to sell to you at a percent or two over spot. I mean, it would be practically free money for them. So I find it completely unreasonable that someone would pay even $800.

Not that I think it matters very much. We already have an inkling about what players are active in the Bitcoin space and what the volumes involved are, at least to an order of magnitude. The only reasonable argument for a post-auction rally would be that any one of the losing players ended up at an exchange instead, seeing as they had already done the due diligence on the deal.

A bubble is not a bubble on a microscopic time scale. It takes months.

But to answer your question: There are always bear traps in a bull market. There are always bull traps in a bear market.

If you think every little swing is a trend reversal you will lose money on every trade.

Increase in what? Second Market had a lot of people who wanted in on their group buy. Good for them, but doesn't really affect the price. Unless the ones who didn't get in on the deal market buys instead. That is pure speculation however.

Are you kidding? It couldn't get farther from the truth. There's been major dips and steep climbs in that time.

$650 seems to be spot on however.

Of course. I'd be surprised if people didn't do it all the time. But it sounds terribly risky to me.

After your dump, the order book is pretty much empty in the range it fell. You couldn't even buy back your dumped coins without paying a premium, unless other people continued your dump.

If your dump is small and scares no one it can get expensive fairly quick.

Hey! I'm happy to sell at 4999  

WTF is this? ".. you know, there are clever entrepeneurs, speeding up the blockchain artificially"...

The stream keeps cutting out so I'm not getting the full picture here.

Have these guys got any clue what they're doing? Did they say what their business plan is?

One big difference to me is that it seems like a lot of people are expecting a bubble soon. That was not the case before and makes everyone a tad bit more on the edge.

Could very well be, but bubbles are all about mass psychology, and if everyone expects us to rise above 3000 then ...

EDIT: What I mean is I have no clue where we're going. Will the next bubble be a short or a record large one? We're certainly destined for one, one way or another.

That's not necessarily true. There's enough moving around that if a few large whales suddenly sat still, markets fluctuations would move the price steadily upwards. It's pretty tense, don't you think?

You jinxed it! 

Which isn't uncalled for. Banks are backed by the nation states, one way or the other, and they have to have bounds for their risk taking.

Nah. Not much panic in there. We've hovered around 635-640 for almost six hours now. Not much to trade on unless you have zero fees.

Bear-bot. I like the sound of that. Sounds like a movie I'd pay good money to see! Godzilla has nothing on Bear-bot!

True, but the order book is pretty empty between 630 and 640. Buy 1 BTC and raise the price $5.

What's happening? Someone's buying like crazy. Weren't we going down?

That's actually quite a level headed gamble. It would have worked in your favour a couple of times now (... and one day it won't of course, and then you lose big, but you knew that).

Myself, I'll go all in again the second it touches under $600.

Volume is actually much better now than before the previous big dumps. Not great, but not abysmal either.

It usually doesn't go that deep when people except it to. I want to be on the safe side of the dip.

So you really think we'll see something much worse than the Mtgox crash in 2014 with a probability of over 50%?

Is that realistic?  Do you have something specific in mind?

Also; joke.

Walls are decreasing on both sides.

Someone's buying the dumps. Buys are fewer in between but larger. Total volume is shrinking.

It could go go direction now. Time to go all in?

Well.. we did visit the 400s, if only briefly.

Does that mean we're free from margin calls now until 450-something? I wonder what could make us take that particular plunge again..?

One second it looks like a weekend pump, the next it looks for we're being set up for another dump.

Makes me want to pull whatever hair I have left out. I'm going to change all my passwords and lock them away for the weekend, otherwise I'll just end up losing on this. What do you guys do? Do you choose a path and stick to it?

WARNING that Bitcoinity doesn't show even 10% of the Bitstamp order book, and hasn't done in months.

Sometimes the book looks completely flat in some direction but when you look at the official page there are some decent walls instead.

Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. Don't rely on it for trading!

(I didn't realise this a couple of months ago ... and it cost me.)

255 coins should barely register. So it means that volume is insanely low. It's not that people are dumping.

My guess is that we'll keep sliding down a while, until panic buying sets in. So there could still be a few bucks to be made.

I don't think 90% is lying. But most buying is of course from people who sold earlier, so it's not all new fiat.

What was the previous ATH before we went on a spike to 1k?

What do you people make of this? Will it make Mexicans look for alternative ways for remittances?

http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/25/news/economy/mexico-remittances-trump/

It's supposed to work that way. Not just "Core 1MB", but any miner can set any blocksize at any time, and if that miner has guessed right and enough of the network accepts it then that will be everyone's new setting. Otherwise that whole chain will be orphaned. It doesn't matter if the blocksize goes up or down. That's what "emergent consensus" means.

Depending on what you signal, you could trick your fellow miners to mine chains that will have a low chance of survival. The more hash power and nodes you control the more you can potentially gain, but it's all subject to the usual variance to there is an element of chance to it.

Nobody really knows how that would play out, since nobody has taken it seriously enough to study it in detail and run any realistic simulations or testnets. How many confirmations will it take to protect against double spends? Nobody knows. The chain you're on can potentially be invalidated at any time. How large blocks will we end up with? Nobody knows. They'll probably get both larger and smaller.

Mind blown. Do you think this theory holds water? What signs would point to miners taking out big shorts?

The Chinese exchanges always had an enormous amount of leveraged trades, which the miners potentially could have been a big part of. But wasn't leveraged trading stopped as part of PBoC sanctions? And it doesn't look like those trades moved to Finex, they mostly disappeared. Or do you think that they still do it, but under the table?

Who knows, we might even thank PBoC one day for softening the blow? 

But if it's true that miners hold enormous shorts, I don't want to be a fiat-holder when they get closed ...

In what way were they "rescued"? I wouldn't want to have had any open shorts on the Chinese exchanges at the time of the last PBoC intervention.

Would anyone seriously preparing a 51% attack tell everyone about it beforehand? Or is this just scare tactics?

No no, that was Buttcoin.

Sorry, I'll show myself out ...

Nice little 3k wall on Finex now .. I had almost forgotten what they looked like.

It's getting harder and harder to trade the dips. A $50 dip is just 2.5% now. I miss the 500s.

Tell me about it. I have a $400 t-shirt apparently. It isn't even a good size for me.

It's probably Whalepool...

Perhaps the miners have decided to stop trolling us and have gone long on bitcoin ...

Volume is pretty healthy. That scares me. I wanted to short Shillberts fake consensus. Guess I'm a coward.

You understand it wrong. Ripple the software may in theory be of interest to banks (although it is dubious), but XRP most certainly is not. You don't need XRP to use Ripple. No one uses the currency Ripple.

Of course it can rise far anyway, as long as it is kept rising and greater fools come along. This is helped by the fact that Ripple the company controls pretty much all Ripple the currency, so they can just keep it off the market until said fools arrive. They can siphon them off in a controllled manner, and please keep in mind that you are competing with them if you plan on getting rich by selling off your tokens in time.

No, Ripple tokens are not used for that. The Ripple network can exchange IOU tokens, and these tokens may represent dollars, yen, or XRP. If two banks were to use Ripple to exchange dollars, at no point would they touch XRP and it would not affect its value. I don't know if anyone told you that to sell you XRP, but it might be wise to know the basics of whatever tokens you trade. The use of XRP is more like a demonstration of the technology.

Ripple says banks could use XRP to lend to each other. Yeah, they could, but in the unlikely case Ripple becomes big with banks they would use it to transfer dollars. Ripple says XRP will be used to pay transaction fees. Sure, but to Ripple the company. Ripple the company can create as many XRP as they deem necessary. If you choose to trade it you must know these things.


At no point did I call Ripple a scam. But it is important to correct false ideas what Ripple is used for, so people don't buy under false pretenses.

Absolutely. I don't know why people are comparing it to november 2013. That bubble wasn't a quick rise and successive fall, it was several in succession where the last was the biggest. Otherwise it wouldn't have been so epic. It took the better part of a year, and if we're going to have a bubble in 2017 I don't see why it would be much different. If it is so, then we've only seen the first two selloffs of the runup. This could go far still.

Many thousands of coins are dumped over the past hours, but the price moved just 10%. There might still be life in the overarching trend a while longer.

Never? It's one of the standard arguments that is being trotted out again. Ver/Wu/Wright have some sort of onholy alliance where they recycle the same tired old stuff over and over again. But you mostly see it on Twitter and Reddit where social media presence companies can work their magic.


This is true of all anyone-can-spend softforks. It is true that it is a risk, but this risk is already there with p2sh. And I think pretty much all the big exchanges use that for their wallets, so a successful attack would be a big deal.

When you actually look at the attack, it's kind of hard in practice. It's doubtful that 51% would be enough to sustain it given the variance of mining. But it is certainly possible. It's one of the risks that Bitcoin lives with. The standard six confirmations already go a very long way into mitigating the whole range of possible hashpower majority attacks.

No. They signal their intent to signal for segwit2x.

(And segwit2x users are supposed to signal for segwit. Let's hope they follow through.)

A bit nitpicky perhaps, but at this point it's kind of imporant to be particular about it, since most of the concern regards stalling the upgrade.

Why do people bother posting these things?

It's not like Bitcoin is hurt by people buying other coins as well. The people buying shitcoins might be hurt by it but Bitcoin will not. After all, it started on 100% "dominance" so the only way is down. Why make up some controversy here?

The also the fact that "market dominance" is completely made up. It is based on "market cap" which is a real word but completely irrelevant to Bitcoin. People don't speak about the market cap of the US dollar or even of gold. Because it would be irrelevant.

Then there's also the fact that the majority of altcoins aren't even traded at any remotely reputable exchange. People sell a token for a dollar, then make another million tokens which nobody wants to buy and somehow that counts as a million dollar "market cap". Which somehow would unseat Bitcoin "dominance factor". It's ridicolous on the face of it and it's really tiresome when people pretend to take it seriously in some misguided attempt to pumpt altcoins.

Sure, suppose the ICO craze spreads even further. It carries the ETH price to a thousand bucks. Or several. Whatever. Something extreme.

What exactly have shifted? Will your BTC be worthless? No. Will the companies and services go away? No. Or consider the other way around, there is a new DAO and now it's worth fifty cents. BTC doesn't care.

For a something supposedly declared obsolete, altcoin shills sure have a fixation with Bitcoin...

There's also the fact that every time Ethereum comes close to Bitcoin in the number of transactions processed, exchanges needs to shut down ETH processing completely and wait for it to blow over.

Imagine if Bitcoin was like that. "No, I can't pay you right now because Bitcoin is down."

I think people are catching on to the fact that if Bitcoin doesn't scale then Ethereum really, really doesn't scale.

The reason exchanges have to turn off Ethereum time and time again is probably just shoddy code. The software doesn't really behave well under load.

But the reason scaling is problematic is the nature of the scripting engine. It's supposed to do everything for everone, so the number of corner cases with exponential validation is unknown. The transaction fee system on top of that is centrally managed, not in theory but in practice. That doesn't adapt fast enough for rapid load changes.


Oh dear, the images in my head.