Bitcoin Forum

What might have caused the imbalance of bid/ask in MtGox's market depth?

http://img51.imageshack.us/img51/2797/20130129103139.jpg

Do you think one of the reasons is that people don't sell Bitcoins because (at the moment?) it takes quite a long time to transfer Fiat money (USD, EUR, ...) from MtGox to your bank account?

It's hard to say. Trading volume isn't very high yet. It appears Bitcoins are not selling fast. Is there still dark pool trading?

not on mtgox, but certainly, mtgox is not the only place where trading happens.

My reading of the imbalance is that the majority of those trading bitcoins are long-term bullish.

So the sellers are simply not there to match the buyers. However the buyers are not completely chasing the price up either. They are waiting with low bids in hope that a flash crash will get them into a larger position at a cheap price.

Some of the recent momentum is other buyers who are thinking that the bottom is in and that if they wait with low bids they will miss the train - forever.

A lot of the bitcoin forum members have been here for years and *expect* slow progress. However, bitcoin may be where the WWW was in 1995 (four years after it was invented), not yet mainstream, and just before it morphed into the dotcom boom of late '90s.

If some big investors are accumulating Bitcoins, they certainly would not do so in one go, lest the price will be pushed up too quickly.
I suspect it's the reason behind the slow, methodical rise we see recently.

More and more I'm beginning to agree with cypherdoc... (the nerds know not what they have created)  ???

That's silly because it was designed to be exactly what it is. Maybe they didn't know there would be general interest, but certainly he/they knew what it would be if it did get traction, that was the whole point of the work.

"Oh, wow, we just realized what this is and the people who made it just had no idea" is quite patronizing.

It may be that many small investors are trying to move USD -> BTC https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=139704.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=139704.0)

http://www.picamatic.com/show/2013/01/29/10/37/8991112_1233x711.png

Logarithmic growth since last year.

Do you mean exponential?

Eeek yeah, sorry, I derped hard there.

I think some part of it might be that it is so easy to get coins to the exchange that people just wait until they want to make a serious ask to deposit them. With fiat deposits you never know how long it could take so you leave it loaded up, and if it is going to be loaded up anyway you might as well pick some low price where you'd love to pick up some coins and leave a bid there. This has the effect of really clearing out a ton of the asks when there is a general rise in prices.

Yeah its a bit of a misnomer with the way its worded, but what he means is that the ones who are actually using it (early adopters) often dont understand the fundamental economic situation and are therefore astonished by its performance.

I suppose there are early adopters like that, but I've experienced a 300x increase in value and I often wonder what is taking so long.