Bitcoin Forum

 ???

I go make a cup of coffee, come back, and it's at $9.40? :'(

No no... 9.25.... ???

Those 30,000 BTC we saw earlier?

Obviously pirate selling all his bitcoins and running away...

assumes that this address is yours and so is all

https://blockchain.info/address/1DkyBEKt5S2GDtv7aQw6rQepAvnsRyHoYM.

Man, screw that. I'm committing the cardinal sin, buy high, sell low.. but I'm buying back in a few hours. Another 50k BTC being moved into the exchange? I'm not sticking around for that.

I would LOVE to have that address :)


And I have no cash and no BTC to do any meaningful trades :/

Economy / Speculation / Re: WE HIT $14.00!!!!
Cluster2k:  "I'm surprised by this rally, but then again, I remember June 2011.  Let's hope we're not headed there again."

We're returning to more natural valuations for bitcoin.  50% rally in a few weeks and some people were proclaiming it was inevitable and logical.  Unbelievable.  

If we stop at $7 it'll be good news.  Hopefully people can wait around for the next bout of hubris and profit again.

Now is an extremely good opportunity to buy. I just fear I can't get money into the exchanges fast enough to get in on the really cheap coins.

stop going so far to make your coffee or take an iPad next time

bouncing around $9 even

Seriously?  If this isn't a clear trend reversal, I don't know what is.  Get your money in.  Take your time.  The price isn't going to go back up.  We're headed for $5, and you've got plenty of time to prepare for it.

i think its to early to say this.
2 more lines to fall, then youre right.

At least there's someone sane here on bitcointalk.

$9 is still higher to $10, so some people still keep believing it'll go back up.
There's not much time left for pirate, so pirate willl hit $8 soon to break people's confidence.
When we hit $7-$8, people won't be hesitant anymore to dump to cover loses.
And back on Monday, people will spend 10-25% of their coins that they receive from pirate to dump.

We'll hit $5, whether people will like it or not.

$5? No way!

I dont believe it will go below $7. Or if it does it will be very brief.

This coming from the guy who predicted 7.2 as the high for the year. All rubbish, of course. The price will go as low as whoever's dumping needs for it to go. Maybe, just maybe, there'll be enough of us ready to buy to make it distinctly not worthwhile for him/her.

Nobody is even close to knowing all the variables at play here. On the other hand, with the pitiful amounts being discussed in this forum, it also doesn't really matter one way or another.

+1

sweet I can't wait to buy more bitcoins  ;D

if the value drops down to $5-7 do you think the difficulty will lower ?

"Stocking up" now at $9, then selling them on Monday for $7 isnt a very bright strategy.

I'd say if you look back at the "sustained rally based on fundamentals", there's a very strong corelation between the start of the rally and the start of BCST. Pirate has said he was "in control of the entire market" for the past 9 months, and that appears to be proving true. Now he's shutting down, all those that got coins at $15 sold out at a massive 400% profit, and those that got coins at $9 and had bought in at $3 still get a 200% profit. Not a bad investment if you come out on top. Those that bought into the ponzi late get screwed, naturally, but when the price is back down around $3-$4 Pirate would easily be able to buy back enough coins to pay off anyone remaining. At some point I'm going to need to dig up my old "when will we break below $4 again" thread and see who guessed correctly (closest). Whee!

Disclaimer: I mine for BTC, and do a bit of speculating. At this point, I'm all out and watching the price plummet. Damn but it was nice to actually make $12+ per BTC mined -- well over 3X my electricity costs! Only problem now is difficulty has jumped up with all the old miners coming back online; I wonder how long it will take to go back down (if at all, with the ASICs coming online).

You can only ever be in control of a market that is not worth controlling.

Notice how this was started deliberatly on a Friday, to run over the weeken when there is the least amount of cash available in the exchanges.

This way its possible to start a panic that pushes the price down, to buy back more as cheap as possible.

Since this is so obvious. If the only reason was to cash out and not buy back.
Pirate or whoever would have done so when there where as much money in the exchanges as possible.

This might sound plausible, since it flatters our own ego.

But frankly, that's an deception. We allways tend to give too much meaning to events. Markets follow a semi-natural pattern of oscillations and constrained forces. The individual maket participants are just like statists which happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. Any halfway suitalbe event can serve to trigger a market movement which is iminent.

We all love being "in control"; it even makes us feel comfortable to imagine that someone else, someone "powerful" is in control

I don't know how I'm "flattering my [our] own ego" -- unless you're talking about Pirate, in which case I totally agree that he's completely egotistical (and likely also a con man). He talked big, got people to believe him, and now the only real question is if he'll actually pay out to most of his investors or just disappear.

Personally, I bought in and sold several times during the rise, making small profits. Then I bought some more at $13.20 just before the rocket up to $15.40, but I thought it might keep going and was asleep during the initial sell off. When I came back we were at $11.20. I expected an ititial rebound but miscalculated and ended up selling at $12.90 or something. Of course, I'm dealing with pitifully small sums here -- less than 50BTC amounts.

Anyway, all I'm saying is Pirate claimed something and the charts appear to back that up. Is he lying? Very possible, but without seeing his books none of us can really know. You're right that these things follow patterns and there's plenty of unpredictability. There's also the "herd mentality" thing, which ties into BCST: he starts it, says it's doing great, people invest and make profits, they get excited, and it all creates a snowball ponzi effect. Then when it hits the inevitable dead end of all ponzis, the herd panics and goes the other way. I wasn't sure it would collapse this badly when the first plunge happened, but now we're at <$8 and apparently in freefall. It's a bubble and a burst bubble now, sure, but was it a Pirate-induced bubble or not? I'm inclined to say he had a substantial impact on the bubble if nothing else.

The Bitcoin market is certainly small enough that large-scale manipulation is entirely possible -- someone with 400K BTC could easily push most other investors/speculators around. All you have to do is watch the big bid/ask walls come and go, often just out of reach, to know people are at least trying to manipulate. If you can successfully get people to fall for manipulation (e.g. large walls at $5 and $5.50, with you selling and buying on a 10% spread), you start with a bunch of coins and come out of it with even more.

The manipulators can try their big money manipulations. There is no guarantee they will make money.

Genuine long term investors have nothing to fear from manipulators. If we stick to our beliefs and buy on dips and hold for the long term, we will do okay.

There's no guarantee, but it's a pretty good bet.

I disagree.

How much did the manipulator have to spend to inflate the price? And how much did he recoup, from crashing the price?

A lot more bitcoins changed hands on the way up, than on the way down. I reckon he had to buy more on the way up than he could sell on the way down.

After this pirate debacle, bitcoin will hopefully mature to something beyond what a single entity with a 2% stake can manipulate to this degree.

Anyone who didn't see this coming - or at least realize it was a distinct possibility - was simply naive or just doesn't understand market dynamics (at all!).

If you hand over all your money to someone with a peg-leg and an eyepatch calling himself a pirate, what can you expect! Welcome to the world of zero-regulation - it bites both ways! lol.

A certain WC Fields quote comes to mind...

After 6 mos of relative stability... this is a huge setback for BTC and most serious (i.e. commercial, non-speculative) bitcoin adopters.

If you count your cash with a scale, this won't deter, but for most legitimate businesses even 10-20% short term fluctuation makes it a non-starter.

well... I am still not convinced.
I still think we're falling for our natural tendency for simple reasons.

Recall, we still don't know who bought the huge chunks on the way up, and we still don't know who dumped.

Especially, it is rather likely, that pirate is just part of the game. It is likely that other mid-scale investors are about to get their money in. Who tell us that what we see is the work of a single person? This would be just to plain simple. Just recall, all this "pirate" gossip is now going on since weeks here in the forum. Then finally the news of the closing arrive, at a point where there is no doubt that the rally is already a bit too hot. And then the price corrects down a bit. What a surprise.
I'd bet that good deal of the more experienced traders have already sold off chunk-wise during the last ride from 12 to 16. That was just a bit too nice to be true, compared to the $5 of the stable time this spring. Maybe, after some oscilations, we'll get now a second try of an up trend, which is a bit more healthy.

Why does everyone assume that the only funds pirate had was the deposits in bst?
Isn't it far more likely he had a lot more than that, and thus is even more capable of "nudging" the market?

Nudging the sheeply masses into a selling frenzy. It takes more than one person for the market to drop, for those that are arguing pirate is solely to blame