Bitcoin Forum

This rate of price increases isn't healthy anymore.

We have quite a few people sitting on over 50K++ Bitcoins that could retire in the click of a button.

All the positivity and bullishness reminds me of the last crash at $32.


So question is, when does the massive cash out happen? I'm no bear...but I'm not delusional either.

A major correction has to happen...right?

This is the crash.... upwards.

Now.

127 to 122 in minutes. Imagine what will happen in a few hours.

Of course, this "flash crash" is nothing unusual when compared to other "flash crashes" of late. The price will most likely recover again.

Nah. You'll know it when it happens.

But honestly, I am kind of nervous as well.

Yawn.

Heard this shit before.

All the negativity and bearishness reminds me of the last increase at $1.

Sure, it "crashed" when it hit those $30, but where did it "crash" to? $2, still an increase of 100%.

It all depends on your POV.

This might be the correction, maybe people realize that Bitcoin is undervalued.

Yeah I just don't know.  I'm crazy skeptical and have been selling a little since we hit 100 but the way Bitcoin is built, EVENTUALLY it will have a major upward revaluation that will take it to 4 digits per coin or more.... And with how crazy things are in "normal" currencies a whole lot of people are waking up to Bitcoin, which is going to make the gains even more nuts.

So I don't know.  Every instinct in my body tells me that markets don't go up and to the left indefinitely without major periodic corrections as people who bought in at higher numbers get scared and take profits, but if the momentum is nothing but up that instinct is going to be overridden.    I hope we have a correction, not a crash - Spending some time between 80-100 before starting going up again would be much healthier than this nothing-but-all-time-gains nonsense.  Makes me nervous.

Sell off + lag = 2 hour bounce.

If you bought Bitcoins at $15, which a whole bunch of new people to bitcoin did, you sure felt like it crashed. 

It's all well and good for members of the forum who bought in sub $1/btc but we need newbies to have a good experience, not have their investment sliced in half.

I'm bullish. I'm just confused on how the price can skyrocket this fast and people think it's going to go keep going forever and ever.

I think a lot of you may be very disappointed down the road. Then again, maybe I'm wrong and I'll hate myself for not going ALL IN at at all time high.

I'm betting there will be at least some type of correction, maybe like last week where it swung down 20 percent in a few minutes.

We can't predict the next month. Gox verification line is at 10,000. We are just now beginning to see the fall out from the Cyprus events and recent BTC attention.

$200 by Saturday.

A couple of friends bought all the way up to $30 and I always told them to hold and stay calm. Maybe they felt like it crashed, but what do you think they feel now? I always said it'll go to $100+, that's why I haven't sold any around $30 and haven't sold any during that "crash", because I was pretty damn sure that $30 is not the end.
Those who listened thank me now, those that didn't don't deserve better.  ;D

And for the newbies to have a good experience, we're talking about money here, not My Little Pony.
Bitcoin (as an investment) is a high risk investment, don't invest more than you can afford to lose.

For the user experience the price doesn't really matter, when you need to send $100 worth of bitcoins to someone, you just send $100 worth of bitcoins, makes no difference if that's 100BTC, or 0.000001BTC

One could think that in normal situations, HOWEVER, this ain't normal son. The price and adoption is going parabolic together. Each time a real company says "we are going to adopt/use bitcoin", the price is "reset", the then current price stands as the new "ground zero" and we go up from there. You cannot price bitcoin like any other traded asset because it is being traded in its infancy, which is an utterly unique situation. Couple all of this with the possibility of a mega player like Amazon or Google endorsing bitcoin and the price goes vertical for a month.

If there was anyone who could tell you, they'd be a millionaire wizard.

All we can do is watch, and plan for both the unknown hour when it shall arrive, and the possible - though unlikely - future where this is all solid and the crash never comes.

^^ THIS!! Nothing about bitcoin is normal!!

Well, point of "crash" is that bitcoins owned by dumb people (buy high, sell low) become bitcoins owned by smart people (buy low, sell high/hold)

Relax, a BTC will remain a BTC, also after a hard landing. Remember, the real bubble is out there with someone buying the equivalent of almost 4 Entire BTC markets each day.

Gox is lagging over 150 seconds...

The crash is from $2k to $1.95k :)

SANITY ON MY FORUMS?!?!?

Tonight. If you're in America. Otherwise tomorrow.

LOL +1

Oh? What makes you so sure? I know it hasn't done much today. I say this as a person who would be very happy to buy in lower.

Sure? Not really. But just wait and see.

As to buying in lower, I think you'll have to wait half a year or a little longer. You can try to benefit from volatility, but it is difficult to make money in a falling market in which you cannot easily sell short or buy put options. That is a distortion that makes the bitcoin market slanted upwards. It helps creating bubbles, but makes it difficult to deflate them.

retire into what?  ???

Reminder that Bitfinex has a lending market which currently has very reasonable APRs for BTC shorts (and they integrate with Gox for minimal slippage too).

I would start to worry if the price stopped the rapid growth for now (corrections are normal)

Bitcoin is a very useful protocol (and proved to be working brilliantly so far). In my opinion the speed of growth matches the adoption rate of other significant technological products/advancements.

Some people look at this from a false perspective based on old, completely different experiences. They tend to lobby everywhere that it must be a bubble. As they are quite loud, I must say that they bring down the quality of most of the BTC forums.

In my opinion the price is not as significant as some people here try to describe. It's just expresses how big the BTC economy is relative to other currencies.

"The financial markets generally are unpredictable. So that one has to have different scenarios... The idea that you can actually predict what's going to happen contradicts my way of looking at the market.
George Soros

2 of my scenarios are:

1.) no fundamental flaw in the protocol = rapid growth, with many corrections.

2.) fundamental flaw found = a real crash to zero

Fear-mongering  is pointless.

I forgot to mention that the bitcoin market sometimes goes into a low-volume-wait mode. That can delay everything else by days. We are in that mode right now.

Let me make a more detailed prediction. The price will gently begin to sink. Over a couple of days the downward trend will accelerate until the first bull trap will appear with the price rising again. But it will not rise to the earlier high levels. After the over-eager bulls have jumped onto the bandwagon, the price will turn around once more and slide to even lower levels.

The price will essentially sink for about half a year with a few major intermediate ups and downs, then it will slowly begin to stabilize. I cannot say at which level it will do that, but a very rough guess would be $20. This depends on circumstances in the past that I do not know exactly and also on circumstances in the future, which nobody can know in advance.

You, amongst others, have it totally backwards.

The 'crash', will come from fiat.

And it's just about to happen .....

There's no way we'll go below 50 again. There's way too many people waiting to buy cheap coins. If we ever get below 100 there will be a mad rush to start buying again.

If the crash happens at these levels 50 and below is a certainty. It would have to go up another 400% in order for that to be considered the floor.

It depends. Are the current buyers mere momentum investors chasing a rising price? Or are they people who understand the merits of BTC and expect that it could ultimately be a similar asset class as gold with a similar valuation (in which case each BTC would have to have a much larger valuation than at present)? If the former, yeah we could have a big crash. If the latter, then buyers are averaging in and willing to wait for the ultimate valuation to be reached. So I'm not really on the side of either naive bulls, nor of the cynical "BTC is a fad" haters. I tend to think more people are not mere momentum chasers because everyone can see the chart with the speculative blow off in 2011 and subsequent crash. I don't think it's a valueless fad, or it never would have bottomed out. It would have been a zero already.

Looks like its about to happen. 

Look.

I don't necessarily disagree that this isn't sustainable. I don't necessarily disagree that the rally could end at any moment.

But look at the predictions you've made recently. Look at how many times recently that you've said "the end is now", and meant it, and been wrong.

For your own sake, you need to wash your eyes. Figure out why you keep making the same prediction, and why it keeps coming out wrong. Watching you be reduced to this one-note chant of "crash tomorrow" makes me sad. :(

private island(s)

The current movements have little meaning, because there is hardly any volume behind them.

I would say that the market is in one of its bitcoin-typical low-volume-wait mode phases. They seem to happen when the "speculators" have no idea where the price should go. To me they are an indication that the market is not reality-driven. It is phantasy-driven. This may just be a different expression for bubble.

Unfortunately, price bubbles are by their nature unpredictable. You can safely make a general prediction that the bubble will burst, but it is difficult to predict exactly when and at which price it will happen.

My personal guess is that the bubble will burst within days, but I have to admit that it is only a guess and that I cannot preclude that the price will go up to $200 first.

Thank You proudhon, I knew when you made this post that we would easily smash through $150 this weekend. You ALWAYS come through for us, you are the best!!!

Yep, confirmed by proudhon, the next big rally leg just started.

Crash is delayed to some time after that.

I invite the OP and others to put your 'AMAGAD CRASHHHHHhh value' here - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=169212.0;topicseen

So that when it does reach the xxx amount you put down people can stop whining about a 'crash'

(And one day (soon) realise that the 'crash' is actually on the other side, buh bye fiat).

Why would there be such a value? For what I've seen, bitbears will always believe that we're in a bubble, they did it at 14, at 114, and would do the same at 1014.

In fact, the higher the price grows, the better are the odds of a correction, so louder bears.

The crash will come as soon as someone with 50,000 bit coins decides that its time to cash out and then buy it all back when the market starts recovering :P Pretty scary.

Thats the 1 scary thing about BTC i fear.
But also pertty much the only negative thing I can think of

Let's just hope never :D But I wouldn't be surprised if we went down a little this month. It's seeming a little too good to be true, despite all the great supporting facts that this is just a correction :>

carsh what carsh  ???

Many people seem to be really scared that the price will crash when early adopters star to dumb their Bitcoins. But what they don't understand is that soon there won't be any need to cash out. When price is 10k$/BTC you can just buy your mansion or yacht with Bitcoins directly.

I agree, its the only negative I've found so far. Love everything else about it. I'm hoping with more volume it stabilizes and big sell offs are a thing of the past for it, but then again, we'd need to know who the single biggest holder of bitcoins is, as that person is to be feared! Anyone know who holds the biggest amount of bitcoins? The leading bitcoin farmer on BTC Guild?

I'm not scared about the early adopters, i'm scared about hacker groups or just wealthy individuals that are currently playing the market. I have no doubts that the bicoin will appreciate in value in the long term, but if you are in it for the short term (3-6 months), then chances are you are gonna lose money. If you've been holding for a while, it's an easy hold right now.

I'm starting to think we'll reach the top this week. Or the next.

or never

I'd like to know if there is really someone who would possibly able to know when the market crashes.

Thats what they said a couple of weeks ago.

I have pondered this until my brain almost exploded. My best result is that a rough guess is possible, but it is fundamentally impossible to predict with any precision when or at what price a bubble bursts. This is similar to volcano eruptions. Sometimes you get some advance warnings, but a precise prediction is still impossible.

Why is this so? Because a single big seller can burst the bubble by selling a large amount and perhaps another large amount just when the price attempts to recover. If there is no big sale, the bubble can inflate higher and higher.

A second effect is that buyers simply run out of money. If you look at the bitcoin price curve of the last few months, you see that we have super-exponential growth, which is impossible to sustain for long. Even exponential growth quickly becomes unsustainable.

And when you look at historic price bubbles, one conspicuous observation is that the peak is always pointed. You never see a rounded head or a "permanently high plateau". It does not necessarily have to be pointed when you look at it through a microscope, but for any normal observer a price bubble always has a pointed peak.

This seems to indicate to me that the bubble also bursts on its own when the accelerating price increase cannot be sustained any longer.

I believe that there are a few simple psychological phenomena at work in these bubbles. You know how the run-up feels—you could observe that here all the time. After the burst you get the effect that many late buyers panic and sell at a loss, relatively quickly driving down the price.

By the way, let me try to explain the stupidity of a price bubble in a different way. From the dollar point of view, bitcoin trading is a zero sum game—no dollars are created or destroyed. They only change hands. This means that necessarily there will be winners and losers. But against all rational sense almost everybody believes to be a winner. That is like asking people whether they believe to be above average car drivers; some 80% answer that they believe exactly that.

I admit I'm basing this on little more than gut feeling. But the Sunday hike did feel like a start of the last leg in the rally. It happened in anticipation of new money coming to exchanges on Tuesday. Bubbles tend to accelerate just before they burst, for obvious reasons (people are making the mistake of viewing past performance as a proof of the future).

We'll see in the next few days. Consolidation below $200 would be more bullish than a rally to $300, in my book.

You mean a "permanently high plateau" at around $190? :)

In retrospect my "personal guess" was pretty good. The bubble did burst within three days. It actually did go up to $200 and beyond even within these few days, but fell back steeply, as expected.

It is good to check one's predictions later to hone the predictive skills, something every successful speculator probably does.

Cough. Price ~$40.  :P

As I wrote:


If all my predictions were always perfectly correct, I would no longer be here. :)

But I stick to my earlier prediction that "we will see the bitcoin price essentially shrink over the next couple of months." I also predict that the price will go below $40.

Of course, that latter prediction can turn out to be wrong if something unforeseen happens, but I still consider it very likely that the price will go below $40 at some time later this year or next.

The big question in a price bubble is always when to sell or how long to ride the wave. The longer you hold on, the higher the profit, but the bigger the risk that the bubble bursts before you got out. During a bursting bubble you can usually not trade, because the exchanges stop working, so you can lose a lot.

Being conservative, I tend to sell early, more or less when I recognize that I'm in a bubble. But I'm working on it. Predicting bubbles may be one of the finer arts of speculation. It remains very imprecise though, because a few biggish sales can prick a bubble, and these cannot be predicted.

Bitcoin is clearly a better place to have your money than Liberty Reserve and at any given times there are probably billions sitting in LR. All that's needed is time to pass, so clearly Bitcoin is way undervalued.

If nothing goes wrong with bitcoin, you may well be right in the long run.

But for the speculator the question is a different one: Where is the price going in the short term?

For the next months the answer is generally: down. The price will fluctuate up and down, but overall it will go down, perhaps to $20, perhaps lower.

By the way, the price just went down to $90.

Someone's trying to take Proudhons place.

Fair value for BTC is going to settle at $100. That is that.

Yup. Ironic how easy it always looks by hindsight.

Below $40 for a longer time feels quite unlikely. There are so many dollars lurking to get back in.

I tend to not be able to sell in the bubble but then panic sell at the low point afterwards  ::)

Why are you so sure of it going down? Media attention peaked but now a lot of whales know about Bitcoin. The whales take their time or just wait for an opportunity to enter.

There was a slow dwindle in 2011 but that does not mean we will have another one in 2013.

Not fit to lick the great P's boots. ;D

Seriously, though, all we're seeing right now thus far seems to be a little holiday selloff. Switch off your bitcoinity ticker and move along, folks. Perhaps shovel whatever BTC you have straight into cold storage before you scratch the itch of temptation to gamble with them (gambling includes daytrading). :)

Thats the thing - the likelyhood that something unforseen happens is quite big these days. Slovenia? Malta? Luxemburg? Or the Argentinians discover that Bitcoin solves their problem?

Luxembourg? lolwut? they're surely not part of the Bitcoin Zone?   ???

http://www.fet.at/~mayly/trebuchet/img/comic/8.png
http://www.fet.at/~mayly/trebuchet/?id=8

 ;D

Because there is still nothing behind bitcoin, except a few trading outfits. I don't see any fundamentals yet. Ask wordpress.com, namecheap.com and others how many bitcoins they have received. I guess very few. People are not using bitcoins yet. They are almost exclusively bought by people who want to get rich quick.

The "whales" are just more speculators. Currently the speculators are going out, not coming in. The bad ones, to be precise, because the good ones have been out for a while already. In other words, the crazy speculators are now giving up, after losing their shirts, and sell their bitcoins to the even crazier ones, eager to lose their shirts as well. This will not stop before at least a couple of months have passed.

It seems to take time for everyone to understand what a good speculator knew all along—that after a bursting bubble the price will not consistently rise again before it hits rock bottom, which can take anything between 5 months and 2 years in the bitcoin market.

The interesting question is: Where is rock bottom? My guess is $20, but I would not be surprised if I saw a single digit price.

On the other hand, we can never be sure whether the run-up to the next bubble begins before this one has hit its own bottom. I suspect this is what happened after the 2011 bubble. That could mean a bottom around $30 this time. But these are wild guesses.

That makes a whole lot of sense. I will have to think about the ramifications.

The real problem is, we can never be sure that Bitcoin will have another bubble at all. I don't know whether it can survive the bear market with its position as Digital Cash #1 with things like altcoin competition (Litecoin is coming to MtGox, and Ripple might be a true future competitor) and problems like the block size limit. Thoughts?

Network effects! Remember Windows 3.1? Linux wiped the floor with it because it was technically lightyears ahead? Big players like Paypal are considering Bitcoin. Not LiteCoin, PPCoin, IxCoin, Namecoin or any of the other cheap knockoffs. Even if they have some parameter a tiny little bit more optimized.

Things like PayPal are currently nothing but maybes. So far, there is only Silk Road and SatoshiDice.

Remember MySpace?

LOL. You think that the PayPal and Western Union guys want to help bitcoin to bankrupt themselves? That's the stupidest idea I have heard this week.

Not my stupid idea, its David Marcus' stupid idea. You my find this amusing:
http://www.bloomberg.com/video/paypal-sees-20-billion-in-mobile-transactions-WlokACTBRterdjHAJGNB6w.html (http://www.bloomberg.com/video/paypal-sees-20-billion-in-mobile-transactions-WlokACTBRterdjHAJGNB6w.html)

He has fooled you, and that was his intention. He is stonewalling and spreading bits of false information to confuse the audience and buy himself time.

Do you really believe that PayPal will support bitcoin? Switch on your brain and think again.

I think he has better things to do than fooling me or you. As you may have noted, he was mentioning specifics. He could have stopped at a general statement about Bitcoin.


For funding PP accounts? Why not? Just because here, a lot of ppl are anti-PP, it does not follow that PP or a lot of other financial institutions are anti-Bitcoin.

I have opened a new discussion about PayPal (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=194831), because we are straying from the original topic here.

I made that prediction in 2010.  Everyone thought I was Insanely bullish.

We don't know what happen in the future. But bitcoins will increase its price as it gets additional popularity.

When enough new, inexperienced speculators come into the market, we will see another bubble.


That may be impossible to predict. Usually the first comer garners a natural monopoly. That is why there is only one big eBay, only one big PayPal, only one big Facebook, only one big Google. Of course these don't stay natural monopolies forever, but usually they can cling to their position for many years.

That said, if a new digital currency comes along that has at least one clear and important advantage over bitcoin, then things may change.

i dont really see ripple as a competitor because it requires btc to operate, no?

I literally read through almost this whole thread without realizing it was a month old and it was also a thread I made.

Alcohol is great.

Ripple will work fine with any currency.

There's already been a tonne of crashes, which have all led to the coin going back up. There's obviously sufficient people who have faith in Bitcoin to not let it fall. It's safe to say this our new price :) Well I feel this way at least.

If bitcoin does not fail and is not superseded, then you will be right in the long run. The typical speculator is looking at shorter-term price movements though, and here we have a high probability of the price generally moving downward during the months after a burst bubble, with interspersed bull traps.

MySpace preceded Facebook, and there were search engines before Google. I don't know about the other examples. It will be interesting to see what happens once Litecoin trades on MtGox. Although I don't believe Litecoin stands a chance, it may still decrease faith in Bitcoin. For a real contender, if it works as advertised, look at Ripple.

So how many RippleCoins do you own? :)

About 1000 I think, which is worth pretty much nothing. I sold nearly all I got in their forum handout. Ripple prices have been hugely inflated since its inception because they haven't distributed any meaningful sum yet. There are 100 billion ripples, and its last price is 8800 per BTC. Wish I could short this thing.

I wouldn't advise anyone to pay any money for them, OpenCoin claims they will distribute all within 2 years, so it's going to get flooded and you'll be able to get them for free, like here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=145506.0

My point was only that it appears to be a good system if it works under stress. There's no mining and transactions are instantaneous. If there is anything to compete meaningfully, I don't think it will be Litecoins and xyzcoin but Ripples because it's a completely different system.

I'll lend you my 50k if you pay a decent interest.

One thing i noticed about ripples is that they don't rise and fall with Bitcoin like the other alt coins.

just asking: So, when's the crash?

Two weeks.

There'll be one in 2016

Wait for the blockchain to fork again.

Then there will be a crash. 

small correction coming on the short-term... if the newb traders who pushed us above the trendline are panicky enough it could turn into another capitulation event.

cuz they are not mined and are not traded by miners for BTC, same with NXT

Ripple and NXT are digital currency but a completely different business model. Original investors own all the coins and trickle them into the market to pump the price up before they sell to pay for their initial investment and a few extra million.

Bitcoin doesn't crash; there are only corrections. ;D

Growth spurts and associated growing pains.

Minor bends and twists on the road to glory.   :D

The scenic route.  :D

Pit stops on the way to the promise land.  :D

Bitcoin is a drunk driver.