Bitcoin Forum

I went to bed last night with a BTC fetching 10.80 or so.

I wake up and it's 14.00 -- then I refresh and it's 14.20!

I think I better install mining software on my 5-year old, 1.6 GHz AMD Turion64 laptop. I might get 1.5 MHash/s -- which in a few hours might be worth it :)

In 2007-2008 the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose rapidly to 13,000-14,000
A few months later it fell to around 6,000

This is what markets look like before a crash, it actually doesn't bode well.

That was actually my point. I'm 34, old enough to remember the Dot-Com bubble of 2000 and I followed *very* closely the housing/stock market crash of 2008. That's why I'm following this with interest.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. There are only so many Bitcoin creations allowed, and even though many people are buying ridiculous levels of mining hardware -- what % of the population are they, really? Just because it seems like "many people" are buying rigs, it's because we all frequent the Mining subforum of the Bitcoin.org forum. A lot of people have difficulty with mining software/hardware (they're not technically-inclined enough) and/or they just want to play games with their gamer rigs.

And what if people buying mining rigs are what will SAVE Bitcoin? I mean, what if we NEED enough bitcoins for new people -- lots of them -- to buy and use bitcoins?  After all, they're not being printed like US Dollars or anything ;)
What if not mining ENOUGH causes bitcoins to rise rapidly in price and/or be unstable in price, which hurts their general use? It would be hard for my business to accept them when the price changes from $10 to $14 in one day.
Every business would have to be a currency exchange, with a real-time ticker showing the MtGox exchange rate :)

Matthew

This is why businesses should just set their own conversion rate, independent of a currency exchange.
When you have a business, who's prices are directly tied to an exchange, it's not the value of the product you're purchasing backing the Bitcoin, but speculation.
We'd be much better off in the long run, if businesses would set their own conversion rates and account for inflation based on difficulty, without necessarily looking at current exchange market values.
I essentially don't want Bitcoins to = Oil/gas

That's like a department store setting their prices according to Forex.
NO ONE does this.

Say wha? Bitcoin generation rate is not tied to mining rate (well, assuming no catastrophic drop off in miners causing a near infinite-length difficulty cycle). There is no need for more bitcoins, as they are divisible to 8 decimal places. People are used to thinking in terms of buying a loaf of bread for an integer value like "3 dollars", but it's not mandatory. You could buy a loaf of bread for .00000003 Bitcoins if the value of a bitcoin was high enough, it's just hard to think that way.

just like all those with bad timing who bought when it jumped over $1 in february.  that was bad timing because it went down to $0.57 after.

https://i.imgur.com/bSH9c.png

and those who bought at $0.50 in november before it dropped to $0.18 after ... i'm sure they are so ticked off right now!

https://i.imgur.com/Y6KOj.png

we have to be careful before making assumptions about the stock market :)
 if you observe more closely, you will see a connection
between dollar's ups and downs and BTC's ups and downs  ;)
this is telling me that serious brokers have been entered the BTC market  and i am afraid we will have to play with their rules, eventually!

I highly doubt any of the "serious brokers" you refer to have entered the market.  If they did, they didn't bring friends.  A small broker could buy the entire BTC market.  Are some "day trading" with risky accounts - perhaps.

Have no doubt, there are some "serious brokers" playing with bitcoin.  They just haven't decided how seriously to take it yet.

Define "serious brokers". The total valuation of the entireity Bitcoins is < 90million USD. That is chump change for wall street.

This. I don't think you guys realize some of the recognizable names that get to remain anonymous on here for free yet have personal techie nerds/geeks buying/selling for them.


Tomorrow the US/Japanese federal gov'ts could confiscate MtGox and instantly add both legitimacy and fear to Bitcoin. Would you feel comfortable mining if you knew the US and Japanese government had confiscated ~300,000 BTC and ~$3 million USD of the single largest exchange for Bitcoin? Would you feel comfortable buying?

"Serious brokers" by any definition still see this for what it is, high risk and high reward.

I'm surprised it hasn't gone back down -- thought it was going to, but it's (surprisingly) finding quite a bit of support...

wait to late friday  ;)

Tomorrow the US/Japanese federal gov'ts could confiscate MtGox and instantly add both legitimacy and fear to Bitcoin. Would you feel comfortable mining if you knew the US and Japanese government had confiscated ~300,000 BTC and ~$3 million USD of the single largest exchange for Bitcoin? Would you feel comfortable buying?

"Serious brokers" by any definition still see this for what it is, high risk and high reward.
[/quote]

I'm not sure how this answers my question. If the US govt seized MtGox that would suck, but it is unlikely so I don't worry myself about it overmuch.

Still, what is a "serious broker"? The volume of trade for mtgox listed on bitcoin charts is $650,000 (50,000 volume). $7million in the past 30 days. Certainly to you or I that's a lot of money, to someone with a lot of money that is nothing. As an example Bank of America Corp  has a trading volume of 50million. This is why I see bitcoin as certainly a place for people to make profit but definitely not something that will necessarily be pulling in brokerage houses by the truckload (yet).

"serious brokers" won't be able to do with Bitcoin what they have historically done with fiat currency: privatize profit and socialize losses (i.e., foist off their losses on the public taxpayers).

they can't.  there's no Bitcoin government to print more Bitcoin to pay them off.

so i don't really care if they want to get involved.  all the credit-default swaps in the world won't change how many Bitcoin there are.

That's the interesting thing about Bitcoin -- it's based on a limited commodity. So the idea has potential. That's why I think it will be interesting to see how this goes down -- even if there are some rough spots (read: drops of $5 or $7 in the BTC/USD price), I wonder who will stick it out. Many probably will.

I watched the market for a good while overnight.

I agree that there are probably a few very knowledgeable investors, if not "serious brokers" in the market.

When BTC/USD was making it's way up from about the $5-7.50 range there were a couple huge run ups then drop offs for a couple days in a row, then level off for a few days then it would happen again.  While it's not a massive market it still takes some serious cash to make some of the swings that were happening. I watched the charts while it was happening and after and there were very noticeable M, V, and W type patterns where the price was swinging wildly. Someone came in and bought up a huge volume of BTC, waited for the price to skyrocket up sometimes climbing $1 or more, then dumping the coins and it came crashing back down. It's pretty hard not to see market manipulation when that happens.

I watched it last night, and luckily took a little bit of advantage of it. I was in the process of selling coins when I saw the run up. I sold at 13.75 when it peaked at 13.8 then pretty quickly declined to 12.5. I bought a small bit again at 12.75 and watched it float between 12.50 and 12.75 for about 10 minutes worried it wasn't going to go back up when the price went from about 12.75 to 13.44 instantly and watched the rest of the market follow all the way up to where I sold at 13.8.

I don't think there's any other market condition that can explain buying enough volume to jump the price $0.70 other than a person or persons colluding to do so. It's pretty much an emerging currency market and because it's so small it's easy to manipulate.

You can deny that it's happening or you can recognize it for what it is and take advantage of it.

its gonna happens soon

it's easy to explain

Gawker made an article (http://gawker.com/5805928/the-underground-website-where-you-can-buy-any-drug-imaginable)
many picked it up
made blog posts
things happened

many now know how to buy drugs with bitcoins, horay! (http://gawker.com/5808314/everyone-wants-bitcoins-after-learning-they-can-buy-drugs-with-them)