Bitcoin Forum

Pardon me if this is obvious but...  I feel like one of the main reasons that the price of bitcoins is hovering around 14, rather than at IDK, 30, 100 :), is that there are massive sells every so often.  I'm not entirely sure that it's just one seller at a time, but it sure looks that way when I look at the charts.  The price will be fairly stable, and then there's like $100K sold in one minute, and the price will drop 50 cents or a dollar.  It will slowly recover, surely greatly helped by massive buys at some point.  But I feel like it can't get too high because these massive sells always sweep out all of the buy orders. 

So it seems to me that there are a few players, whether they're early adopters or big speculators, who are keeping the market a lot lower than it would be otherwise.  Mostly because they can't be bothered to sell small amounts at a time.  And if any of them read this, please spread out your sells a bit.  :)

When 1 person sells 10000 coins, maybe 100 people buy 100 coins each.

If this is really what's happening, then I'd prefer to get it over with as soon as possible.

Because after a while the 'early adopter' argument will gradually dissolve.

also agree.

the more Bitcoin get spread around, the better.  because the more people who have them, the more they will be used.

yeah, there's a little bit of short-term pain.  so what?

a couple of months.  maybe even three or four.  we need the time for all the software that's being written and refined to bear fruit, anyway.

and then we bury paypal in an unmarked grave...

If some early adopter sell his 99999 coins to get out of the game and he doesn't bother to sell at 13 because they costed nothing to generate, yes, we'll have a little price drop, but now that 99999 coins will be in hands of someone that will value that coins and know that they worth a lot more than 13 :)

Well, good points.  I'm more in it for the short-term gain right now, simply because I bought my miners with money that should have gone towards bills and food.  :)  But also, I think this is a valid point of view because if the miners don't make a profit, there's not much incentive to mine, and thus the hash rate and security will drop.  But yeah, let's get it over with. 

I also think it's good in the long term that the price is going down. The late arrivals were complaining that the price was bubbled, too high, and unaffordable to the mainstream...

Well, here you go, maybe it will drop to the more affordable early-adopter levels again - USD parity or whatever...  :D

B worked just as well at 33 US cents, for everyone except short-term speculators... ;)

And not just "the more people who have them the more they will be used", but also this...

the more people that have them, the more varied the sale prices will be.  1 person is more likely to sell 10,000 bitcoins for the same price on a market, as opposed to 100 people each selling 100 bitcoins at competitive prices

I accessed silk road site & they sell ONLY for bitcoins. They also very much upset about the rapid change in bitcoin price.
Silk road closed 3-4 days before Mtgox attacked/hacked. After Mtgox attack price is VERY stable, which silk road wants VERY MUCH to sell anything.

My sentiments exactly! May be right on this, maybe not. But I'm strongly leaning on the former, however illogical i may seem to the naysayers of bitcoin viability and acceptance...time will tell, we shall see.

Yeah, it would work great for everyone but the miners who bought their equipment for, let's say $1k, knowing that it would generate a maximum of, say 60-100 bitcoins over its lifetime due to increasing difficulty.  Not cool if BTC drops to 33 cents. :)  Ie. in order for the miners to stick around, there has to be some sort of reasonable ratio of difficulty to price.  At the very least to cover electricity (I get it cheap but it's quite possible that I'll spend half of my earnings on the utility bill this month at the current market prices and a difficulty increase).

all I am doing right now is mining and hording my coins.  not gonna jump into any markets, not going to play any of these gambling games on the forums.  Not going to do anything that could harm my Wallet.

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Ok, as a note - if it is not good to mine, stop - enough stop, difficulty goes down.

Second, if you think yo uare cheap in getting electricity and STILL expect to pay 50% you are delusional. I currently mine on my appartment (end user priceing) and my cost is more like 20%. And next month I switch to a commercial space - rent and all paid from the savings in power costs (only). So, if you pay 50% you do NOT get electricity "quite cheap".

It reminds me the pump & dump pennystock scheme: from many shares in a few hands, to a few shares in many hands. :)

I had to pull my money out of BTC a few days ago, I came out $2 ahead from my initial purchase back in mid June to my exit out of bitcoins earlier this week at $14. It's just been a steady decline pretty much since Mt. Gox came back online. It sucks to see, I was really rooting for bitcoins, but with all the financial turmoil and gold and silver surging, I think you just simply have people pulling their money out of bitcoins, and putting it into precious metals and other places. Bitcoins are a great idea, but I just don't think it's time yet for it's price to be so inflated. A return to levels seen back in April would be more appropriate for now, and if its continues to survive, hopefully it bounces back if the world economy picks up as well. Right now however, gold and silver is where people should be putting their money to protect their wealth.

I bought 25 ounces of physical silver with the money I pulled out of Mt. Gox, and I'm glad I did.

So you guys think the price will go up in 3 month's time?

Well last month everyone said it would be $100 by this month.
Oh what's that? They were wrong?

Hmmm.

Yes they were, because a lot of speculators in BTC are just starting to come to terms over how volatile a truly free market can be and they're learning the hard way. The reality is that noone knows how this is going to go because this currency is backed purely by an idea rather than any tried and tested commodity. Even "Satoshi Nakamoto" has supposedly said he has absolutely no idea what will happen to Bitcoin. It is a very bold and necessary project, but it is simply incredibly volatile and no sense of community or commitment among users is going to change that.

If you're investing heavily be sure you can afford to lose it all. If you can you may luck out and end up quite rich off a bold endeavor. If you can't you are quite likely to end up royally screwed.

I think what we're seeing is simply a few early adopters dumping their coins for what they can get because they think the party is over & that we will never again see $30 highs (or at least not for a very long time) &/or they believe the price is going to drop back to < $10, so their getting what they can for them.

And/or they don't want to sell but are being forced to by unforeseen personal circumstances. (i.e. Need cash urgently, must sell bitcoins)

If you're mining and hoarding Bitcoins, you're speculating. It's exactly as if you made some money, then spent it by buying Bitcoins for speculation purposes.

ROTFL. If you're not buying Bitcoins, you're speculating. It's exactly as if you bought thousands of Bitcoins, then sold them for speculation purposes.

And this ^^

I think also (as someone else in this forum suggested) that anyone into Bitcoins now, that stays in, will be considered one of the the new generation of 'early adopters' in 6 - 12 months from now. There will always be those that were the original early adopters, but I think we're seeing their numbers dwindle, for reasons already stated, but also perhaps because they never really were 'true believers' in Bitcoin. They were in the right place at the right time, and were the first to make a handsome profit from the first major price jump, but over time they will be a minority group of ever reducing numbers.

there are still at least 3-4 players with 100k+ coins.

Few are interested in a market where one person can crash the price at will.

Nobody can crash the price at will.
When mtgox was hacked, in the minutes that followed the 500k sale which crashed the price from $17 to $0.01, and before mtgox cancelled all those trades, prices had gone back up to $13, because people were buying en masse.
And that, of course, is an extreme case...

losing 24% of your wealth in a span of 30 minutes. 

You can't deny that all it takes is one of those 3-4 individuals to make a massive sell orders for bitcoin to decrease say another 25-50% almost instantly.

I believe this will happen several times, but once it is done with the massive upside will start to rear its head.

So, does that mean I'm also speculating in postage stamps, baseball cards, vintage vases, old wine, and classic cars.... by not buying them?  Great :-)

That's only true if you consider all the money you've spent on Bitcoins as lost already.

wow! that's quite a revelation...

turned out more supply than demand makes prices to go down  :o

That is of course true.  If you don't sell the asset at a lower price then you haven't realised the losses.

However, it's also the game US banks are playing with toxic CDOs.  They're currently marked to model, not marked to market.  The bank may say they're worth 90c in the dollar when really they're 30c.  Even though the bank has not sold the asset, and therefore not realised the losses, those losses are real and genuine.  They affect bank reserves and can cripple future lending.

Recently I applied for a mortgage and the broker wanted to know what my assets are worth right now, not when I bought them or what I think they're worth.

IF someone crashes the market by making a large sale, then that just gives us an opportunity to purchase BTC at early adopter prices..

Guys, the shifts between $30 and $12 are temporary and quite frankly - completely insignificant.

Just looking at the medium/long term trends going on in this world (dwindling USD value, other world currency inflation, global government instability and people uprising) I have no doubt that BTC will be worth thousands of USD and possibly more in future years.

True. In medium term bitcoin goes either to 1000$ or to 0$. If so, than it really makes not such a big difference whether it was bought at 10$ or at 30$.

Actually I think the price is reasonable, if it is higher, there will be more people buying mining equipment to make coins and drive up the difficulty and lower the profitability further.

Currently the return of the investment is just at normal business level. If it is too profitable, then all the money will rush into this business thus make competetion harder and drop the profitability

Well.. Take gold for example. Assuming you don't own nor have previously owned gold bullion, you are speculating the price will not hold up and will crash at any time.

Your opportunity cost (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost) is a few hundred % over the years.

If you believed it's a sound investment & had the courage to invest in it, you would speculate by buying gold.
Similarly, by not buying relatively cheap BTC at $13 per piece, you are speculating it's overpriced and not worth spending your money on as an investment.

Opportunity cost of not buying BTC at current rates is unknown, but previous people who had the chance to buy at $0.2, $0.5 per coin etc.. Were obviously speculating there would be a bear market & potentially lost tens, hundreds of thousands of dollars.