Bitcoin Forum

For most of the day I believed I held the record with my $1337 rate for 17 shares.  It appears that 1 1/2 hours prior, 12 (?) shares sold at $1750/BTC.
The odd data discrepancies now have probable explanations, dealing with a combination of outlier filtering, low market liquidity, and complex OTC rules.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/34vuku/congratulations_bitcoin_on_your_new_ath_133700/ (http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/34vuku/congratulations_bitcoin_on_your_new_ath_133700/)

I congratulate on your sales but a full coin hasn't been bought at this rate yet. If and when that happens on multiple accounts, I believe that will be time for walking on sunshine. It's bullish nonetheless considering premiums for purchasing are like tips at this point. It's so amazing and incomprehensible that people can't get a coinbase wallet w/ 2FA and buy their shit at market price. Either way, rock on!

Some investors might not even know they own bitcoin now.   There portfolio says 10% investment high risk tech stocks.  So there broker is going throw money where they need to.

Maybe, tho I doubt a few share buys is possible to calculate 10% of the portf at this point. Their broker should sit back and observe before they buy change on a first move. I hope this happened for their benefit.

Ya I guess I'm thinking more down the road.

That's a good observation, Alley. Tho this should rally outside this crap price.

It just makes it more obvious that big money is waiting for the right vehicle to get into Bitcoin. It really seems as if the ETF(s) seem to be the right thing for them. Many people around here don't seem to get that, but people really are preferring those investment vehicles over our "beloved" exchanges.

How can anyone not be bullish at this time is beyond me.
Bitcoin shares are trading for the first time in history and the price is fucking climbing!

Wall Street will take us to the moon sooner or later. Yea, I'm serious.

Yeah, this does seem like a huge vote of confidence in the coin when people are already willing to purchase at beyond the ATH price. Likely, these guys are showing everyone where the price will be going if people just hang in there. Granted, we'll need to see more action to make these prices seem legit over just a few speculating.

Yeah I also don't really get this. This could give us an influx of new people over the next couple of days, if people decide to buy BTC directly without waiting for reasonable prices of the ETF. The only thing that concerns me is the fact that this could be a "penny stock" pump and dump, or something, due to the low liquidity (which most likely is already pushing the price up quite a bit!)

Its actually understandable, since coinbase does the whole verification procedure, only after all that to determine honor your buy request or not.

Most people got fed up with them since they failed to do so, or they faced buyers limitations based on their risk assessment plus how they handle their support which seems the main reason as well with those situations.

The spread narrowed, but things have hit a relative standstill at 300 shares traded volume. Yesterday was 762.
The only sellers are
a) New BIT holders releasing their shares, a one time shot, after a 12 month holding period
b) Speculators that bought GBTC on Day 1.

The low volume suggests that at most 3 new sellers have pulled the trigger today, with $55 asks offering a 233% premium.

I have 50 more shares up at $133.7. The GBTC page http://www.otcmarkets.com/stock/GBTC/quote (http://www.otcmarkets.com/stock/GBTC/quote) shows nothing below $175.

I speculate this game of chicken will resolve with volume staying low, positive Bid pressure. Those Bids will eventually pull more sellers out. Then we will have a bootstrap of liquidity - new buyers with varying entry prices. Those respective buyers will then make various decisions and help dial in to a true equilibrium, with a positive price trend.

Even if those sell, I would be holding the final 1/3rd of my shares.

Most people won't like to buy coins using Coinbase. Their system really seems just too cumbersome for people willing to invest large sums in BTC. I think they want a real ETF, or at least exchanges, where they can buy at the price and instant they want.

Highly interesting! It's incredible to see that people really paying this steep markup! I can't really comprehend it, actually. I think the number of people who can sell their shares is too low to make price discovery or an impact on the general BTC price possible for the time being, though.

That's sort of the chicken/egg problem. Nobody wants to participate until they know where the price will settle, no activity, question remains.
Motivating actors to 'beat' you in a market, tightening the spread, is a good first step.

Because of the combination of a stranglehold on new liquidity, unfavorable prices (from their perspective, selling at these prices is a loss), and OTC rules keeping small volume bids and asks from showing up, the effect is magnified. There is a multitude of small Bids and Asks which appear neither in the historical data nor the current quote list.

I expect liquidity to slowly increase. Once a share gets 'into the wild', they are more freely tradable. Those free coins grow at exactly the rate that the BIT holders are compelled to release their funds. The only variable which will shift their desire from HODL to SELL will be reaching a favorable price.

This could resolve by a very long period of dead, no-volume activity - a stalemate.
Or it could resolve by continued upward Bid price pressure.

The volume need only increase to the degree that the common tools used by traders begin providing an accurate and complete picture of the historical price data and current activity.
I view getting to that level of volume as the first step.
Only then will the price differential between GBTC and other markets begin to entangle and affect each other.

Conclusion must be that the group of people that is the target for the fund, regards the fund as more liquid than having coins by themselves. Just use your trading station, done in a second, the back office guys handles the practical side.

For me, I find the current situation quite ok, the time to complete a trade is an hour or two if I want to use the banks (except nights and weekends), and a day or three if I want to use cash.

Well that doesn't sound very convenient, actually. I do get why people want to use an ETF. Using trading stations, etc. just makes more sense if you're in the game already. People don't want to jump through the hoops of "amateur" exchanges in the Bitcoin realm. But I don't see GBTC being liquid at all, and in its current form the price if very impressive and exciting, but it doesn't really provide solid data for a real price discovery aside from regular Bitcoin exchanges!

Owning shares in an ETF is not the same as owning real bitcoin. Don't be mislead by prices quoted for these paper instruments.

A little more volume, and we will see. There are nonrandom differences between the various exchanges, and my thought is, the easier it is to get in/out/trade, the higher the price will be on that exchange.

The difficulty of getting money/BTC in or out of an exchange can influence the price both ways. With gox we saw the price of BTC trade 10% above the rest of the exchanges because there were FIAT withdrawal delays, so people bought BTC at a premium. When Gox was going down for good, the price went down to 1/5 of the other exchanges' price, though.

But the underlying asset is still BTC, and the operators of the ETF are holding real BTC, so these BTC exist and they are "off the market" and thus push down the supply, just like they would if they were bough on any other regular Bitcoin exchange!