Bitcoin Forum

There is something weird going on in the BTC market:

http://img26.imageshack.us/img26/5879/stagnation.png (http://"http://img26.imageshack.us/img26/5879/stagnation.png")

The volume constantly decreases, while the price remains unchanged...
What does it mean ? Are we seeing market stagnation ? Or is the bitcoin overpriced perhaps ? Or maybe large speculators wants to fool us into thnking so ?

Can somebody with knowledge of currency markets put this in perspective ?

Nobody is changing their mind whether or not to buy or sell.

Yes, but that probably means something. There must be something deeper than that going on.

IMHO: Gradually the volume indicator comes to the real consumption of bitcoin in the world. Before that there were 100% speculations.

Maybe it's because former paypal customers on mtgox are slowly running out of USD balance, and once they run out they decide to give up on mtgox because Liberty Reserve is too cumbersome.   

There are exchanges where you can buy Bitcoin directly for Western Union or bank wire, so why should someone buy LR via Western Union only to trade it into BTC?  That would only make sense if there was an arbitrage opportunity, but most users can't be bothered with doing arbitrage.

Western Union sucks. They charged me 20 bucks for a 20 dollar transfer. bitcoingateway looks like the best option so far.

That's why I prefer to mail the cash. Even if one in 20 of your letters gets stolen in the mail (a very high estimate) that's still cheaper than Western Union.

Bitcoingateway is great in terms of convenience, but they need to have a high spread (last time I looked it was approx 10 %) in order to protect themselves against the high risks of accepting credit cards. Compare that to bitcoin4cash and bitcoinexchange who offer a 3% spread.

You can trade via #bitcoin-otc.

However, you have to remember that currency speculation on bitcoin is not often an indicator of bitcoin economy's health status. I mean, 3 new business started up and it barely affected any changes in the price or volume, if any at all.

bitcoinexchange is free in EU, otherwise 20 euros, which is even more than western union

Yeah, but could we get back on the topic ?



I second this, unless somebody has better proposition.

But still, i find the not-so-rising  BTC/USD course worrying. This is a deflationary currency after all.

Mt Gox just implemented the Dark Pool?

Wont that hide the real market movements?

For now it's still an inflationary currency. That is, unless people are losing more than 50 BTC every 10 minutes.

I'm not worried. It rose prematurely because speculators anticipated the deflation.

IMO, some stability is a good thing. Bubbles are not.

Let it go sidewards for a while, it will encourage people to use it as a currency instead of hoarding it because they believe it to be worth so much more in a few weeks :)

I think the .65% trade fee made the market way less liquid than it used to be.

Dark pool ? Nice, i didn't know about it.
That may be a good explanation.

The  simplest explaination is that there is one big player (if you follow the threads you know who) who is trying to sell more than 100,000 coins gradually and it takes time until the market has absorbed it.

There is a balance because there are gradually new buyers coming in and "bitholders" have no intention to sell because they believe there is a chance that BTC/USD will explode anytime soon again.

What we are seeing is the result of stopping the Paypal fraud. We don't have that crowd of scammers bidding stolen money against each other any longer.

The volumes at all 3 cash auctions are low because folks are hording, hoping for some meteoric rise. We are loosing sight of the objective, being distracted by this fun game we have created.

We need to keep focused on implementing acceptance as far and wide as possible so that btc becomes a better vector to communicate value.

Do us this favour; when you are studying and "playing" the market, devote a tiny slice of your wet CPU to thinking about how to improve bitcoin acceptance.

Last night I tried to buy a case of beer to be delivered in a distant city with bitcoin. The deal failed but I'll make it work soon and be the first bitcoin user, that I know of, to do such a trade.

;-)

I am responsible for 21% of all posts in Project Development. Make that percentage smaller!

He said they would be reported after they happen. It seems large bids/asks have the ability to be hidden is all.

If anyone with coins thinks they are overvalued they can sell them right now, they are not, so that's not what's happening.

Fool us? Into thinking fewer trades are happening on mtgox? That's actually true, so we can't be fooled into thinking it.

People's relative desire for BTC compared to USD has not been changing much in the last few days, that's all.

Think about a very simple case. Person A has some red rocks and Person B has some blue rocks. A needs to have 2 blue rocks for some purpose, but generally prefers to have blue. Person B thinks they are roughly equal in value (since he just puts them in a bag hits people). So they trade 2 rocks on the first day. Now both have what they want. If nothing changes for them, they'll never trade again.

The more people involved the less likely it is for volume to drop to zero, but the idea is the same. Trades only happen when two people disagree about their marginal preference for the things involved. Once they happen the tension is relieved and another trade doesn't happen until there are pair of disagreers.

It's probably a combination of the previously-mentioned dark pools (previously-open orders moved to dark) and the closing of a russian bitcoin investment site (bitcointrade.biz):
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http://bitcointalk.org/index.php%3Ftopic%3D1070.40%3Btopicseen&prev=_t

If the site is truthful it had considerable money tied in the bitcoin market, but has now ceased operation.

Silly bitcoiners, trying to tie events to lack of bitcoin volume when there may be no correlation.

@kiba: you are right

There are many other financial markets displaying very low volume before breaking out either way. this is just normal and so is trading bitcoins on MtGox or anywhere else