Bitcoin Forum

Very simple poll

I voted other because I think it's a mix:

1) There did seem to be some DDOSing, but it was also just a lot of traffic due to panic.
2) Bubble-burst: not quite, but it is a... (see below)
3) Massive sell-off/correction indicating how delicate the market is becoming.

By the way... we lost about half of our capitalization at one point, we're not out of the woods yet. This could be a double top in the making. Be careful!

There likely was a DOS, a massive one. That triggered panic selling that caused the bubble to burst. The more bitcoin went up, the more people were worried about it and it only took a DOS to start panic selling.

I think people are going to be more wary of bitcoin until there are more exchanges out there that deal with more volume. I saw in the news a startup was just funded to launch one. Hopefully they can get it up and running quickly.

I don't think this is the end of bitcoin, I think we will bounce back, but we might not see $250 again for a bit.

Some early adopter dumped a lot of coins, and now it's backup over 200  ;D

I think this may have been panic selling triggered by all the trolling from supposed 'expert' traders claiming that Bitcoin is a bubble, it doesn't look like a correction to me, if a correction does happen though, I don't necessarily think this will be a bad thing at all.

No it is 150$.
So let me get this straight: 1 BTC is selling for 3$ to 10$ for 18 months, relativ stable. Then there came the middle of Jan 2013. Then within 2 months the price suddenly triples to 30-40$. And then, within 2 weeks the price triples again to 100$. And then, within two days the prices triples almost again, then within hours the price drops back to 100$, then within Minutes back to 200$.

This is a big rally and I'm on board with my 0,5BTC :-)

Oh definitie DoS attack for sure!!! That is sooooo obvious!!!

DoS and negative spin causing panic selling of weak hands!!!

Certainly nothing to do with speculative bubble profit taking, panic selling, and certainly nothing to do with market manipulation.

The fundamentals of Bitcoin are too strong. The world is changing. Bitcoin is going to make me very very rich free the world from the shackles of central banks and the governments they control. Why would the existing financial establishment want to lose money making Bitcoin crash, when they could make money investing in it. Bitcoin is the solution that those central bankers trying their best to fix the economy have been looking for. If you disagree with me, then you are an idiot!

Nothing to see here people, business as usual, kindly move along to the Mt Gox exchange and keep buying in at any price!

aren't 1 and 3 the same?

No, one implies a mere hiccup towards deathcode's projected profit margins, the other implies that the game is up and now is time to maximise the reduced but still obscene profit margins.

when a bubble bursts it is a correction

I thought about it for a while before separating those concepts. A bubble and a correction are different in my book. I think in my opinion when a bubble burst the. Price should go back to the beginning of the bubble. This was not the case. A correction is whe. There's a spike that is not justified and the. A profit taking takes place and the price is adjusted to real values. This is just my opinion and conceptually I could be wrong though.
To me, what happened today was a huge DoS not only against mtgox, but also other exchanges and even bitcointalk! Every site related to bitcoins was somewhat slow.
I think DoS is the bug cause. We need to start isolating the exchanges and the use of brokers could be an alternative.

I don't buy it.

Massive DDOS doesn't cause a lot (or just a few) of people to decide to sell a huge volume.

We had DDOSes before and it merely made it slower to either purchase or sell the coin.

We had big volume dumps before big DDOSes, it was just lower price and lower volatility.

Mere speculation here but BTC is still a thin niche market and there could be a hand full of Big time BTC holders/traders colluding to drive the price up and sell off...

not saying its true just pointing out a possible scenerio.

Ddos causes lag and failure of bitcoin exchanges, and initial sell off of the traders anticipating the drop. This drop scares the weakest hands who scramble to log in and sell, increasing lag and so on in a feedback loop.

Bubble burst

Well, to be sure we will have to see MtGox trade log. Since there are 7 million dormant coins out there, according to paper by Ron & Shamir, some entity's big profit taking is entirely a possibility. Hell, I would do it if I could. If I had a million, not to sell at least 200,000 at these prices? A Ferrari today is better than Ferrari in a year, maybe.

The rest is then just a noise from small, scared hands.

It is the "other", obviously. BTC is in media and big guys want in with cheaper price. Whoever holds on, the real rise will come after this. I watch a journalist (read paid sockpuppet), who writes bad stuff about stocks which synchronously dips without reason, and then corrects in few days. He wrote about bitcoin in same tone about a day two back.

+1 lol.

LOL, reminds me of good ole' 2000 and Yahoo penny stocks bulletin boards.

No worries, crap like this will save us:

http://news.yahoo.com/bitcoin-hacker-currency-bursts-mainstream-222018978--finance.html

It didn't crash to what it was before the rise started, it is inevitable it would start to plateau following Cyprus cashouts, we're seeing who was just using Bitcoin to transfer their money to another fiat currency, or who decided it was better to stay as the value kept increasing, and there are more and more merchants starting to accept BTC following the new media hype and speculation.

ill put in my 2 cents here. I was watching the depth chart very carefully from the time bitcoin hit 200 all through the drop to 100. I believe there was a massive dark pool sell order, combined with the ddos, made it impossible for people to withdraw their buy orders, and for other sellers to get in and sell. meaning whoever it was chewed through all the buy orders from 250 down to 105. i don't know how many coins that was, but it was a lot.

the reason i think this was a dark pool sell was that there was a huge spread once bitcoin hit below 200. sellers were selling still around 180-190, while all buy orders were being  sold down to 120 or so. Buyers would creep back up, but anytime they did they would just get eaten up by an invisible sell. This kept going on until around buys were at 105, while all non dark sell orders were at about 140. I presume whoever was selling did not want the price to completely tank, as they stopped before it broke below 100, which would of probably caused a panic.

now who knows whats gonna happen, but i think this is a very bearish sign.

Not necessarily.

The existence of the "dark pool" was well known. Anybody who read Ron/Shamir paper and choose not to ignore it (or actually had attention span to read it and ability to understand it) knew that is very probable.

It doesn't even take that much analysis: everybody who has been following BTC closely knew that there are 'entities' out here with a huge stash of coins, min 500,000 that they got for pennies.

Ron/Shamir also documented some curious patterns. For example a pattern where a single address would sell hundred of thousands of BTCs to multiple destinations, and, through Mt.Gox, they would all return back to the same address.

I called that market-making in one post. You can say it was testing and preparation for today.

That is really nothing unusual for stocks and is often very easily visible on pumped-dumped poorly liquid penny stocks.

can you link to that paper/article? I never heard of it. I don't think its bearish because of the existence of dark pools, but because a huge down swing like that will scare people into thinking twice about getting into btc at this price.

just an update though, gox says that they were not ddosed today, but that genuine volume of traders overloaded servers. https://www.facebook.com/MtGox

it was market manipulation, plain and simple. see the thread in the newbie section.

eprint.iacr.org/2012/584.pdf

link?

Geez, this reminds me of 2011.

Dammit!

I think its because it grew way to fast in two days it went from 130 to 240 there is nothing that can grow this much in price.
Except for food and water when there is nothing to eat and drink.
I think this was a correction big time but when you look at the charts you can see the bitcoin is stabilizing and even growing in price again.
It just went up to quick but it will go up again eventually, it isn't a total bubble burst its just because people came to their sense.

When you have an asset who soars +1500% in a few months you sell it. Bitcoin is not an investment and you shouldn't put all your savings on it.

Seems pretty straight forward, bitcoin is blowing up and MTGox can't keep up with demand. Thus it lags and people think the sky is falling. Thanks for the cheap coins last night though.

https://mtgox.com/press_release_20130411.html

This is the second time Mt. Gox crashes Bitcoin.

Should we race for the third wave now ?

$140 is not low ... it was lower 3 days ago...

Until people understand what is happening there will be a lot more cheap coins :)

Waiting for the bottom to BUY !

...and real value where there is just fiat paper monies and IOUs  ;D

real value (http://www.forbes.com/sites/louiswoodhill/2013/04/11/bitcoins-are-digital-collectibles-not-real-money/)  8)

I am astonished.   What a crap  all over around  (all forums, portals, FB, twitter etc) ?  A "massive crash"  ?!

What ???!   A crash ???   
But we are simply where we all been only ONE (1!) week ago.  Just think of it !  ONE week ago.
How many days has passed since we all were  sreaming   "look !  BTC is already $100+  today !

I deeply believe that all these events has nothing to do with trust/believe in BTC, with the fundamentals of BTC

From the other side - WHAT can you expect, when MtGox, the largest exchange (70-80% market share) has an operation  time lag of 4600-4800 seconds ! 
Grab you calculator and think again of what you got - that is a HUGE 1.2 - 1.5 hours  LAG  !!!

What king of trade (logical?) can you expect on such a crap system???
And compare this to a advanced FOREX, NYSE automatic trading systems, where   serious contenders would not even try their chances, unless their access delay (ping, lag, what ever you call it) is less then 1-2 ms ( mili-seconds, that is)

Think of it. 
While you can ( $ while MtGox is stopped for a cool-ff)

Most people probably did not buy in at that time, which is why it's a big shocker to people.

Those who know the history are probably not surprised, those who burned their assets in the fire of bitcoin craze probably are.

This reminds me greatly of July 2011, almost to a tee. The only difference is it's so much more massive that I missed the boat on raking in some arbitrage (I didn't expect a jump to > $250). But just as then, huge run up in relatively short period of time, for no reason, while everyone jumping for joy. Then big drop, then medium recovery, then big drop, small recovery, medium drop, etc. until eventually bitcoin was almost worthless. Hopefully the fundamentals are there to support bitcoin at a reasonable value this time, otherwise it might forever solidify bitcoin as just a pump and dump scheme for those with the capital and know how.

Pretty sure because of all the price dumping on mtgox. However, there can always be something more behind that.

Some big fishes cashed out I think. ;)

Hey deathcode old pal!

Just wondering how your exit strategy fared amongst these multiple DoD attacks?

Did you get yourself that motorbike you were looking at?

Because a butterfly flapped it's wings in Hawaii.

You know if you look back at the history of ALL the large crashes in BTC, they are all associated with a speculative bubble which is popped by some kind of service-interruption at Mt.Gox.  To my knowledge this is the 3rd, the first was Nov 2010, the second July 2012 and now the third is April 2013.  This seems to be following a pattern of occurring every 8 months.  Which shows that the community has an appallingly short memory.

Which is much better than having an appallingly scrambled memory, as I only recall there ever being a major crash back in July/June 2011, and of course now April 2013. There was certainly no crash throughout 2012, as I waited through most of the latter part of it for a correction that I felt would come, but never did.

Now if only the darn thing wasn't facing south this wouldn't have happened..

You need only go back and look at Mt.Gox history to see the bubble an crash in Nov 2010, it something like 10 cents up to 50 then back down to 20, it also ran for a shorter timer period, just a week from start to finish.  In absolute terms a small thing but proportionally its was as large as the other more recent bubbles.

I have never been a Bitcoin investor but I have been a Bitcoin buyer and spender right throughout the period that you state and cant remember anything like what you state, which pretty much means it was just a glitch in the system as opposed to being triggered by either mass buying or mass selling. Bitcoin only really costs 50c or $500, if enough sellers or buyers are accepting those prices. I could go on an exchange with a handful of Bitcoins. I could put in an offer for 50c, and put in a ask for 50c. Therefore, for a brief moment, Bitcoins would be worth 50c. I could do the same in the other direction as well.

Not just price correction, but also the average for per man.

By definition if a failure in infrastructure causes a panic, it's a panic, not a bubble. Speculative bubbles pop when they reach a point on the supply and demand curves that is unsustainable usually when supply is choked off for some reason. When an external force like a major selloff is the main cause it's a correction, not a bubble. This was nearly criminal negligence at best and intentional fleecing of the flock at the worst by MtGox. I say it's possibly intentional because if their intent was to provide a reliable service they could have added stop-loss orders even if they couldn't fix their server lag issues. The only real reason not to protect your clients with a stop-loss is if you intend to use or allow someone else to use the panic to clean up.

Ddos and selloff, but it is far from the end.