Bitcoin Forum

All of the exchanges on Bitcoinity that are listed under USD together have fewer Bitcoins for sale than 60k. In recent memory I know that I have seen more than twice that for sale on Gox alone.

With exchanges closing and fewer and fewer coins available on the market I believe there will soon be a preposterous spike in the exchange rate for BTC as the market reacts to the lack of supply.


The market depth on Gox:
https://i.imgur.com/xmyugAs.png

Effect: Price goes up and more people want to sell at the higher price.

Look at the chart at the bottom of this page: http://blockchained.com/

Looks like bitcoins are scarce. :-) It will harder and harder to buy single ONE.

Exchanges aren't the entire market. I've moved to doing in-person exchanges while Gox USD withdrawals have been on hiatus. Gives me a chance to meet people, too.

I think there are a good few others in the same boat, though I'm sure it's nothing like the total volume Gox used to have. Never heard of "price discovery" in one-on-one BTC transactions, though. There always seems to be an infinite supply and demand at the exchange rate (though probably not Gox, anymore). Given that, an increase of price on btc-e or BitStamp probably has the same effect movement on Gox had when its pricing was used.

I think current price already reflects the low supply of coins.

For me the current historical low supply of coins confirms price is already historically high.

Sure it can get worse, but chances are higher it will get better.

Chances are that the greed of the few will result in a bad name for Bitcoin IMO ... this rally is purely 'tape painting' by the wealthy designed to sheer a few more sheep
Show me a real BTC economy and I might change my mind
Until then I see FUD eveywhere
Crash incoming ... from what level I do not know, but it's coming, and it is being driven by the big holders of BTC looking after their own interests, not those of BTC. Same shit, different bucket.

Someone has been stocking up on bitcoins with no indication of selling them. Add to that the fact that there are probably a lot more hoarders than speculators and the shortages on the exchanges aren't surprising. As Bitcoin infrastructure improves and adoption increases, demand will further increase.

If these coins have left circulation for a while, the price shouldn't fall in a hurry. Is it another Winklevoss-style buy-and-stash? An infrastructure business that needs an inventory?

Or is it someone who will pump coins into the next bubble to cash in when it pops?

It's rational self interest. It makes you alive and it makes people around you safe. Try it.

The price won't continue to rise if nobody is selling, it's idiocy to assume this.

What will happen is people will stop buying.

There's only one thing that follows this and it's not 'to the moon' or 'trending to infinity' as I've read on these forums from some people - it will crash and crash hard.

Quoted to be revisited later.

Perhaps you would like to clarify some figures and time frames you see it "crashing" to?

Oh yeah? See https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=286274.0

I stopped reading right there.

I have no idea but it's clearly unsustainable in the long run.

Apart from a few 'whale buys' there's not much action / volume lately. The price rising on low volume is not a good indicator for continued rises.

Look at the volume on this chart over the time period of the recent price rises compared to the previous rise into the ~$146 range

http://s15.postimg.org/ay00np6rf/goxvolume.png (http://postimage.org/)

The recent volume is tiny compared to the last time the price rose to this range. The last time this happened on pretty high volume and it still crashed hard.

This time it happened on low volume which suggests to me that there's not much confidence in the market.

The recent rises happened due to a few isolated 'whale buys'.

There will be blood !

http://www.myyearoffaith.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Storm-Clouds.jpg

There is a storm coming.. at least on Bitstamp.

Due to the lack of historical depth data, I'm unable to provide greater detail, but I watched Bitstamps bid/ask sum over the last days and it is on a decline and went constantly from roughly $ 125 to $ 104.

Means: less bids, more asks.

The price on Bitstamp follows Gox and seems to be stable at the moment, but selling pressure is rising, while the divergence on Gox between bids and asks increases. This underlines the assumption that people are getting out of Gox, but only to sell on other exchanges. At last to some degree.

You ever consider that it isn't a few whales moving the price but rather the MARKET of buyers outweighing the sellers?

The rise from $9 to $15 and beyond was on low volume until we went parabolic.

Don't underestimate how small the Bitcoin market is and how many potential buyers exist that want in on the market with their stashes of fiat.

We're looking at the same data I guess, but I see it differently. Bid/ask ratio, normalized wrt curent price (something that the wonderful coinorama.net does automatically), the ratio steadily went up throughout August, from 0.5 to a peak of a bit above 1 on August 31st, then declining back to an 0.8-ish value that was the peak value a few days before, higher than almost all of previous August. Then it stabilized, slowly gaining (at around 0.83 now).

How is that a brewing storm, exactly?

The calm before the storm ?

Fine. But if so, then August 8, 16 and 23 were calms before the storm as well. Pretty mellow storm, I must say :D

Storm can propel the price to go up.

I view a storm as VOLATILITY.

I love how no-one is predicting a more banal outcome. The dynamics are in a balanced, resting state at some combination of pertinent variables, and yet everyone's either saying "CRASH!!!!1" or "SPIKE!!!!!!?". How about a damp squib? September ends at ~$130? I wonder....

After reading a number of your posts in the past week or so you almost made it to my ignore list. Good thing I didn't. +1 for non-black/white thinking. (same for the common "in 10 years, a coin will either be worth MILLIONS, or NOTHING!!!" slogan)

Thanks for the resource! Looking at the historical ratio, this does indeed provide a different result.

Much of what's going on reflects lack of liquidity.  Nobody can get USD out of Mt. Gox. So a dollar stuck on Mt. Gox is worth less than a dollar outside it. This generates a spread between Mt. Gox and the other exchanges.

People on Mt. Gox with USD can buy Bitcoins at a premium and try to sell them elsewhere. But that pushes up prices on other exchanges, all of which are rather thinly traded. How much of the recent runup in Bitcoin merely reflects how hard it is to get out of Bitcoins right now?

Market sentiment determines the general direction, buy, sell, hold, not the price, bots care about price, because they can't sense market sentiment.

When BTC rises in price on Gox, it's because there is more USD to spend on each BTC, simple supply vs demand.  It doesn't matter if it's caused by a shortage of BTC or a surplus of USD the result is similar.

There are a lot of people holding LTC atm looking for the pot of gold at the end of the Gox rainbow. This reduces general liquidity. If Gox had said we are not adding LTC this year, then it's reasonable to assume that overall crypto trade would improve as the need to hold LTC would disappear somewhat.

If you are looking at the volume traded in terms of USD, the volume looks about as high as it was during the initial run-up from mid-January to March

https://i.imgur.com/KO7ty99.png

Which is precisely why looking at volume in THAT way is foolish.

You got it backwards, people buying on gox and selling other places pushes the price DOWN on the other exchanges and the price UP on gox.

Could you explain more?

It seems to me that people only have so much USD to move around. If the price of bitcoin doubles and the amount of USD traded stays the same, I'd say the volume traded is constant.

I think so too. You can't demand volumen in bitcoin grows with the price, cause there is a restricted number of coins.

And what you looked at is just the gox-volumen. If you add the volumen of other exchanges, its much higher than in march.