Bitcoin Forum

Looking at Mt. Gox's megachart just now, I saw that price is currently stagnant at just below the thirty dollar mark. Price slows down, it happens all the time, right? Well, the more important factor is the volume of trades occurring. If you look at trade volume on the chart you'll notice it's very low, which means the buyers stopped buying until the price moves over 30 dollars (round numbers tend to cause this type of resistance). The problem is with nobody buying, the value won't go over 30 since the rise in value was caused by speculators buying into the currency. Also, if the price sits too long right below a point of resistance, those speculators will take it as a signal to sell, effectively pulling the value down. If you were waiting to sell enough bitcoins to recoup your startup costs for gear, now would be the time to do it.

Rereading, that seemed a bit bleak. I don't mean to infer that the sky is falling and the value is going to drop to nothing, simply that a pretty significant retracement in value is about to occur.

Why would the buyers want to wait before the price goes OVER 30 USD? Is it because they want to see a positive trend before they act?

Right, speculators are either going to buy (or hold on to their) coins if the price breaks through and holds above 30 because that means price is going to use the old point of resistance ($30) as a point of support and climb to the next level of resistance, which will presumably be $35 or $40. Then that cycle repeats until the price bounces off a point of resistance and retraces in a downward direction.

There is a great chance, and perhaps even need for a little correction. The cycle will eventually repeat only question is if 30 really is such a good entry or a better shortterm exit point.

Yes I think your right, retrace to $22-25. The volume of new bitcoin articles has dropped on google news. Even though there will be a delay of some buyers getting money across, less news = less demand = price correction.

I hope you are right and bitcoins goes down in price.

The price could go as low as $12-$13 without losing it's mid-term bullish trend. This is a 3 month chart:

http://img193.imageshack.us/img193/2526/chartzo.png (http://img193.imageshack.us/i/chartzo.png/)

It wont. Compared to the current difficulty level the relative demand is too high for such a low price.

$24-$27 for 567,000 difficulty ($30 is overvalue atm), $30-$35+ stable at next diff. level.

Difficulty has little to do with the price people willing to pay, it has only to do with the price miners are willing to sell their new printed money, and well if the price doesnt appreciate to satisfy miners we'll just have a period of less miners, less money, higher upward potential before things return to "normal".
With that being said i think there's a different reason to claim "it wont", over 50% of mtgox total volume (in currency) came only last couple of days, in other words the BIG holders now seem to have a average intro price of at least 20$, i doubt they'd just lose 50%, especially when it seems these purchases are done by only a few individuals, they likely would buy it all the way down.

If you watch the trades on MtGox you can watch a couple of bots consistently play, there is a measurable level of influence they provided as people bought into the market.

I personally believe that the price is a bit high and like you said all the speculators are already in with their money. We need to get more drug users to come and use bitcoin.

Not that I am one, but I just know that it gets used a lot for this.

I see the Bitcoin with a stable price of 22$-25$ for now.

I certainly hope not.

Not so sure. This can change quick with a couple of articles in one or more countries.

a major retrace is just another buying opportunity. I wanted to buy significantly more, but got priced out of the market. When/if the price drops, I'll buy more.

I admit I don't understand chartist tea-leaf readers. If the fundamentals are good, the market will eventually catch up. 

Is there another technology that fills the market niche of bitcoin? no.
Is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency useful? yes.
Is there another implementation of the same technology besides Bitcoin? no. Even if their was, it's all open source, which means we could just use their code in our project which has a two year head start.

The claim that all markets, including the market for bitcoin, are irrational in predictable ways may have merit, but technical analysis clouds the objectivity of a fundamental analysis and vise versa. 

not sure in other countries but in the US it takes a full week to get money into mtgox right now.  This coupled with their issues the past few days with Dwolla probably means there are funds in limbo waiting to be credited to accounts.  There may be a solid push once this is resolved but it might not happen til the weekend is over. 

In regards to MTgox, a lot of people are having issues getting money into and out of the exchange due to the Dwolla issues they are having. These issues are also causing many people to halt trading until the issues are resolved. This is at least one reason for the decreased volume.

I agree there will be a correction in the price. I think there are many more new coins coming into the market then speculators or people who need the currency will buy. When the price stagnates for a few days people will try and take some profits.

For the people who own thousands of these coins, they were crazy if they did not sell some of their bitcoins when the price was over $30.

I think the bitcoin has potential, but the prices are just far too high with so many coins out there, and the risk of someone so easily dumping all their coins.

Good. It'll wash the people that are in for quick bubble money, and hopefully stabilize the price, which will allow the bitcoin economy  to developp.

AFAIK someone can only dump as much bitcoins on the market as there are people willing to buy them.  add to that id bet the people with the most coin paid the least and therefore have the least 'tied up' and are more OG, willing to just hold them longer just coz they can.

 8)

* it's the weekend. *

it's a fairly typical trading pattern.  it's just magnified because the exchange rate has gotten so yummy.

Looking at the market depth charts, I think we can expect a small temporary rally at 25 $/btc and then if it drops again, a much larger Rally into a bull market at 22 $/BTC

I know I'm not selling my coins until it hits $30 USD. It reached that point and then backed down. No one in the right mind is going to sell right now when it's $25 USD.

A large number of people talk about when they will sell their bitcoins, implying a lot of people are speculators on the bit coin market, hoarding bitcoins. My best guess, once again, is that it is highly likely the price is being driven high through speculation and people's blind bullish outlook is keeping the price high.

For how long?

Price has dropped ~$5 since I posted this 9 hours ago. It held pretty well at the $25 mark, but just fell through to $24 and I say it will fall all the way to $20 at least, in the next few hours.

My theory:

Bitcoins will drop to 10-15. The price will stabilize there. The stability will encourage many more people to trade more in Bitcoins, like actually using them for goods, rather than just the crazy speculation currently going on, and economic activity will increase a lot. After enough stability the value of Bitcoins will shoot up again, when there is enough real economic activity to support it.

I think the speculators that came in w/out doing any mining at all (aka, no steady income of production btc) stand to lose (well someone will win, but others will become very unhappy)
 
I'm mining only about 1btc every other day, and I'll sell periodically whether or not it's at $5 or $50.  I would rather see tangible money instead of it being worth pennies if it crashes one day :)

Not really the smartest move economically for a small miner.

After 3-4 months difficulty will be at a level where you can make maybe 0.02 bitcoins per day, but the value will have increased in an exponential scale.
As difficulty goes up after that, your earnings will become near to zero.

You will have sold BTC at $20 per piece, but in the new market you have no means of producing BTC nor do you have BTC because you sold them off.

So you are effectively limited to dealing with bought coins on exchanges because other avenues are now closed and you didn't save anything.

Well that's the risk I'll take :)   I'm not going to sell everything. Just a few here and there to keep things volatile, and to show for it

The real question is, can one survive solely on BTC. There needs to be a big market for BTC otherwise the price will fall to worthless.

http://twitter.com/#!/BitcoinAnalyst (http://twitter.com/#!/BitcoinAnalyst)

I newbie question: When I look at the Depth of market chart, the price is obvious the price of the bid or ask, what does the amount mean?
Does it mean A) the quantity of BTC only or B) the qty of BTC * the price?

Eg. If I see an ask (Price:$30, Amount:300), does it mean the person is selling 10 BTC or 300 BTC?

I think: altogether 300 bitcoins are offered for the exact price of 30$

What?

Anyways, there's a pretty good bear market going on. At $15 I might actually purchase some BTC which I haven't done before.
Since it's weekend and US->DW/LR wires aren't probably moving I think it could go down in the mid 10s before bouncing up.

Not going to sell mining proceeds now, though.

So funny, people selling out while the price is going down...  ::)

I just looked at Bitcoin Monitor, which shows all the different activity on the Bitcoin network, and it shows that the amount of trading is continuing to ramp up, while Mt Gox shows that those trades are sales whose ask price is decreasing further and further as people trying to sell are lowering their ask in order to get them sold first before price drops more. Price has already dipped below $20.

With selling building up by the minute (literally), I'm willing to bet the price will drop all the way to $10.
We may have just seen the shortest economic bubble of all time :P

I can buy some at under 10$ finally :D

"Another trade is still in progress, please retry in a few seconds"

Funny how this keeps showing up during the retraces.  It only seems to happen when you wish to buy BTC, putting up a sell order still goes through.

So people are seeing the price drop, selling, and old buy orders are getting filled.

I predict another spike to $30 when this error goes away as people try to buy back in for cheap.

too soon, there was no major incident that happend which could have an effect on the trading prices. self-adjusting, as some people wrote it in an another thread to 22-25$ till the difficulty rises. speculating with bitcoins is currently the most attractive thing to do if you like to gamble, because there is actually the chance to win something with it.

It could even dip a tiny bit lower than this as people percieve an "apocalypse" scenario. But they'll bounce back, and hopefully people will start to see the "risks" of speculation: maybe we'll see more actual bitcoin economic activity.

Another candidate for the "require 0.01btc payment for registration on the forums" to deter trolls.
I'm willing to bet you signed up just to post this.

Really, even if you're just trying to push the price down just so you can buy it cheap, you're doing a pretty awful job at it. The market will correct itself.

Then again, I do hope it goes well below $20 temporarily.

I've seen that when both buying and selling. Seemed like they were just overloaded.

Doesn't MtGox make like $100,000USD a month? Sup with servers being overloaded.

I don't know how much they make, nor do I care. But you can't deny their service is *slow*.

I'm not trolling, and the bubble comment was tongue in cheek. I actually have no intention to buy BTC, and only casually mine them. My day job however is that of a Forex intraday trader, so I find the bitcoin economy interesting and I've been following along with it pretty closely. As I said in my second post, I don't think the value will drop to nothing, and I know this is just a correction that will reverse if people actually start using bitcoins instead of simply speculating on them. I made this thread to warn people of the retrace and possibly help people realize that it was a good idea to sell *some* of their bitcoins at that time to recoup their initial mining setup costs. I'm sure the people who took my advice 12 hours ago are glad they did. I do not however think people should sell off all their bitcoins since we'll see a slow and steady rise back up as coins are actually put to use (when The Silk Road reopens its doors, most likely ;D)

I think your initial post is pretty much spot on. Buyers are what's driving the vale of bitcoin. If the buyers lose trust, the bitcoin will lose value. I think we will see a strong correlation with people's trust as the gov't involvement increases in this. The gov't go after Silk Roads, but they are just going to re-open somewhere else right? So if the gov't can't stop Silk Roads, what's the next logical step? To take out the exchangers. When that happens, bitcoin is going to lose a lot value because many people treat it as nothing more than cash cow and not the digital currency it is.

since there's a correlation..
http://www.google.com/trends?q=bitcoin
seems like legitimate organic growth to me

I also believe that the value will go up. But don't forget to offer services for Bitcoins. Otherwise people will loose interest and sell.

After the big downwards movement of some minutes ago, it went up just when it touched $13 as expected. Midterm bullish is still alive ATM.

I think many tried to and that's why it quickly dropped from $30.

famous last words  ;D