Bitcoin Forum

If the price of bitcoin goes to 32 dollars..... do you really think that if the price crashes again people will let the price go down as far as it has knowing that it has proven it can rise that far not once but more than once? I don't think so. If a crash happens I don't see it as being drastic. Of course it could be wishful thinking. But I'm happy whether the price goes down or up personally. In fact I would almost rather it go down so I can buy more bitcoins.

The price of Bitcoin isn't some random number. It has to do with physical goods tied to the use of the Bitcoin.

You can buy more with Bitcoin now than ever before.

Reaching a value twice means nothing in terms of market fundamentals. The psychological pressure may be present, but if the fundamentals are there, there will be no crash.

Not exclusively. It has properties similar to gold as well. How many physical goods do you guy and sell directly with gold? I think it's a common misconception that the success-case for bitcoin is tied exclusively to its utility as a means of transaction. That's only half the equation. If bitcoin, like gold, is only really ever transacted as a major settlement (as opposed to day-to-day transactional) currency, it can still be hugely successful. That said, I think bitcoin's near-ideal transactional properties will cause a real consumer economy to develop around it eventually, but the point is that that doesn't *have* to happen for bitcoin to have considerable value.

I think i'm in agreement with this. Bitcoin is in sort of a unique situation in that it's a store of value and a form of money and transaction at the same time. Both could impact the value. Did I understand you right?

the btc value is strongly tied with difficulty. I dare to say that if and when ASICs go public and diff bocome 10x,
then it is logical that BTC goes 10x (=200$) as well  ;)

I'm not sure about that......... but I don't believe that mining doesn't have an impact on the price of bitcions. If it's suddenly "twice as hard" to acquire bitcoins through mining... then that has to do something it would seem....... or what about all of that money and capital being invested in new equipment currently? Won't that capital and investment somehow translate into the actual value of bitcoin itself eventually when it catches up? If you bought 100k in mining equipment recently.. it wouldn't effect the bitcoin price rice away. but with that kind of capital invested into bitcoin... does it have an effect on the price? I'm not sure. I'm just full of questions all the time now thinking about bitcoin.

price is going up because speculators feel bitcoin is growing...

once they feel the "growth" is priced in, they will start to sell, and price will not stop going down until someone catches the knife, if the growth was real then their nothing to worry about the knife will be caught fast, if not.... down down down the rabbit hole we'll go.

so the real question is.... did anyone actually pay for wordpress with bitcoin?

Though the comparison to the previous record of 32 makes me greatly uneasy (as that was generally accepted to be a pump and dump), in general conditions are currently much more favorable than they once were.

More to do with bitcoin, broader economy base, larger exposure, less of a spiking frenzy, and so on.

I do find it interesting however how much of bitcoins continued success relies on what amounts essentially to "good will". There are a number of "bitcoin millionaires" from the old CPU days still lying about with tens or hundreds of thousands of bitcoins that could potentially rock the boat whenever suits their fancy. ASICs are still a pie in the sky dream for the most part, however at any moment with the demonstrated existence of them, someone could rock/fork the network, before/if the first units arrive in anyone elses hands. Same thing historically could have happened with whomever it was who produced the software to mine on GPUs.

That aside, I would tend to distrust these sudden price surges myself. And I'm not just bitter because I literally had myself priced to buy riiiight before it surged :'(

It's very difficult to speculate on how people will react to $32. My take on it is that we would see a medium sized correction but that would be a massive bear trap. We could easily shoot to $50+ or even around $100 after that. At that point we would have a big crash and settle somewhere between $20 and $50.

So far, there has never been a crash in the world of Bitcoin. Don't use words where you have no idea of their proper meaning. Instead, use a search engine to learn about "correction".

i think we'll see a correction before crossing 32$. IMO the rise is too fast.
a scenario like in mid-august 2012 looks quite possible.

Agree, but wasn't that mini-crash triggered by something like the Bitfloor hack?

Avalon has already shipped first working ASIC units.  They are mining as we speak.

I am always thinking about why is gold price so high and there is almost no use with it?

In this case, the gold's value depend on several things:
1.Stable and not easy to degrade
2.Limited supply
3.Historical acceptance
4.Political neutral
5.Anonymity

BTC almost have the same properties with even better mobility, it is just a matter of time to become mainstream

The only problem for BTC: It is so easy to lose them. If someone lost his gold, someone else will pick it up. But that could even make it more precious

I think that it WILL surpass 32 for many varying reasons.I think it might hit 32 by mid-spring if this keeps up where the price is nominal.

-If BFL and Avalon get their act together the difficulty will certainly rise quite a bit.

-I think the current trades are actually buying up cheap BTC in lieu of this so that BTC will actually be worth more later on and to also influence the price obviously.The biggest danger obviously is a massive sell-off and individuals not feeling bullish anymore.

-There seems to be a record number of transactions on most exchanges NOT just the Gox!

-ASIC's are not going to influence the price much by flooding it even though that was the fear before!

-I suspect well beyond 32 maybe possible.

This would only be true if difficulty added value, it does not. Bitcoin has never been hacked before ASICs so the ASICs just add frosting to the cake.

The current stable price of BTC is about 22$ rising some 100-200% per year. If it goes further and then crashes though we will probably never go below 10$.

BTC is following a predictable exponential adoption curve, but is varying along that curve.

However that variation will get smaller as BTC has gotten bigger, the 2011 spike was a times 30 increase in value, today that would mean 300$ per coin or some 1-2 billion dollars moving into BTC within the year. This will not happen. The traders are also more numerous and smarter today, I doubt we will see such clear bubbles again.

What do you mean by "something like?"
It definitely wasn't triggered by the Bitfloor hack...that didn't significantly change the price.

That "logic" is flawed. Difficulty follows price. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=118319.msg1270356#msg1270356)

Or Trendon selling stolen coins ?

The correction of mid-august was not a market correction IMO.. It was 1 btc scammer unloading tons of stolen BTC.. Market knew it, quickly recover to real valuation !

I hope he sold them. The possibility of those thieves and scammers retaining significant bitcoin holdings down the road bothers me.

i see this totally different!
there wasn't one big sell that triggered this...
the price rose exponentialy on logarythmic scale (like it does now). such a pattern mostly reaches a high which isnt reached in near future. http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/chart.png?width=939.9333340000001&m=mtgoxUSD&SubmitButton=Draw&r=360&i=12-hour&c=1&s=2012-02-09&e=2012-08-24&Prev=&Next=&t=S&b=&a1=&m1=10&a2=&m2=25&x=0&i1=&i2=&i3=&i4=&v=0&cv=0&ps=0&l=1&p=0&

it began to go down cause the exponential growth was too steep and the exponential support line was broken, panic started, many ppl sell (over 2 days).http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/chart.png?width=939.9333340000001&m=mtgoxUSD&SubmitButton=Draw&r=180&i=15-min&c=1&s=2012-08-17&e=2012-08-22&Prev=&Next=&t=S&b=&a1=&m1=10&a2=&m2=25&x=0&i1=&i2=&i3=&i4=&v=0&cv=0&ps=0&l=1&p=0&

then the prize fluctuated around the middle (~11$) of the fall like it does after every harder spike in the beginning of a correction and cooling down minds.
http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/chart.png?width=939.9333340000001&m=mtgoxUSD&SubmitButton=Draw&r=180&i=12-hour&c=1&s=2012-08-15&e=2012-12-01&Prev=&Next=&t=S&b=&a1=&m1=10&a2=&m2=25&x=0&i1=&i2=&i3=&i4=&v=0&cv=0&ps=0&l=1&p=0&
for 5 month the high was not reached until market decided which way to go after the big correction.

so IMO this fall and the following 4 month were just a major correction and now we're also looking at an steeper and steeper rise.

btw: all my analysis in logarythmic scale and unfortunately not in sierra chart (my pc broke down)

ps: one thing i learned is that wether bitfloor, bitcoinica, pirate, mtgox nor trendon is bitcoin. the price of bitcoin follows mainly self fulfilling technical chart analysis what works excellent for me ;-)

I too think there wont be a massive violent crash like 2011.  I don't think we're going <$20 ever again or not very far and not for long.  Tho that's just my speculation and maybe hopes too.

+1

The 2011 bubble was most certainly not a pump and dump. People use this term too carelessly.

The 2011 bubble was a simple speculative bubble that burst, plain and simple.

Pump and dump requires that some parties know the value to be nothing (or very small) and yet they intentionally work to bid up the price in order to "cash out" and let the thing crash down. I think the speculators in 2011 were genuinely speculating... meaning they were trying to figure out the proper price of a Bitcoin, and massive potential of this system caused that price to bubble further than it should've. People realized Bitcoin was very valuable, but perhaps not so valuable yet, and so the bubble popped.

Honestly I think people use the term "pump and dump" so often because it's catchy and allows them to over-simplify a huge number of market variables into an "evil intention" of a few.

They own about 18-20% of all the bitcoins.

Still better than the USD.  The USD scammers are printing more and more as we speak, devaluing the savings of honest workers.

DoomDumas, you are smarter than that and like me know that the "real valuation" of 1 bitcoin is 1 ounce of gold. The market just doesn't quite believe it yet... but it's getting there.

Maybe, but by the time BTC reaches $1500+, assuming it does, one troy ounce of pure gold might be trading at $20k+. :)

molecular, you are smarter than that, and like me you know that around 6 billion ounces of gold have already been mined (i.e. around 285 ounces of gold for every one of the 21 million bitcoins that will ever exist). You also know that the properties of a bitcoin make it at least 5 times better as a money than the properties of gold.  Thus, you know that the "real valuation" of 1 bitcoin is at least around 90 pounds of gold.  But you're right, the market hasn't quite recognized this yet. I wish it would hurry up. 

^ Jetpack uber bulls.

Where do you get 18-20%? I calculate ~535,000 stolen/scammed coins (from this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=83794.0 ), which is 2.54% of the ultimate 21,000,000 coin supply (about 5% of the current supply).

I stand in awe of your smartness! Now let's go tell the market about this.

How do we know most weren't sold or spent?

Most probably were. I certainly hope so.

I think they were. For each hack or theft there's a corresponding dump.

I definetely didn't because of the Gresham's Law. I prefer to pay in dollars and keep bitcoins and gold.

Through a bit of absurd luck, I managed to sell 5 BTC on Tradehill for $34 at the peak of the previous bubble.

It wasn't on Mt Gox, so maybe it doesn't count, but for me at least the mental milestone is $34.

Incidentally, I didn't enjoy selling at $34 - I was just paying some mining expenses, not trying to time the top of the bubble. I believe that the buyer of those 5 BTC made a fantastic investment if they are holding them for the long term.