Bitcoin Forum

http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg30zigHourlyzczsg2011-05-02zeg2011-06-15ztgSzm1g10zm2g25zi1gMACDzi2gRSIzv
10-11-12 Jun 2011 - 70% definitively this was a crash - it was a start of a 3 month long slide down

http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg30zigHourlyzczsg2011-05-02zeg2011-06-15ztgSzm1g10zm2g25zi1gMACDzi2gRSIzv
10-11-12 Apr 2013 - 80% this was a crash - but it never got lower than the minimum on the 12th

http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#czsg2012-08-14zeg2012-08-23ztgSzm1g10zm2g25zv
18-19-20 Aug 2012 - over 50% (the pirate crash) was this a crash? - it never got lower than the minimum on 20th, stabilized around 10 and then slowly grew untill it started to grow explosively

http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#czsg2012-08-14zeg2012-08-23ztgSzm1g10zm2g25zv
19-10 Nov 2013 - 50% - the recent one - was it a crash? - it quickly recovered and the price soon exceeded the previous ATH


And the current one -
http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg60zczsg2013-12-03zeg2013-12-10ztgSzm1g10zm2g25zv
5-6-7 Dec 2013 - slightly over 50% (so far)

Apart from the first one (and the current one that is yet to be seen) - in all of them the lowest price was on the third day and then the recovery started (some times slowly).

Intuitively I would call it a crash when there is a sharp drop in price, and then the price doesn't regain the all-time high for several months.
So I wouldn't call november 2013 a crash.  December 2013 remains to be seen.

Does it really matter what you call it.?

Those were all just price fluctuations of varying degree and duration.

A crash is when it doesn't recover for months and leads to a bear market. Otherwise its a correction.

Even at 50% retrace?

If you recall, there was such a retrace during the rally. It fell from 900 to 450 on gox and reached levels as low as 380 on other exchanges, before seeing a rapid recovery back to 900 and a breakout.

+1

Retrace's frequently hit 50%...often 76%...these are normal fibonacci retracements.

well said and correct

OK - but the question is of course how to determine if we'll have several months of down prices. Is there any indicator in the drop itself? If for example most people here would call it crash when it drops significantly more then 50% - then it can become a self fulfilling prophecy.

^^ That.

(But wouldn't you expect 61.8 and not 76? What am I missing?)

More than 30% drop in a 24 hour trading cycle is a crash in my book

wow another post that makes sense ; what's wrong with this forum? :) I think each new "crash" is smaller, percentage-wise, than the previous one, so pretty soon (when bitcoin moves not more than 10-20% in a crash) we can consider the volatility period as completed.

Sorry, yes of course you have one more stop in there at 61.8%, it is more rare that they touch 76%.

I always thought that tacit implication of crash, is that it goes down and stays down. At least for some period of time.

$32 that felt like a good hard crash. Long slide right down to 2. Months of pain.

$266 also probably a crash, but stabilisation in the $80-100 didn't feel quite so hard to bear. Didn't last quite so long either, generally bullish throughout the period.

The activity up to $1300 seemed more like volatility, which has to be expected in a market making such outsized moves.

Most recently the dip to ~$580 was the most serious, but the recovery so soon and so much means to me, I wouldn't say its a crash. I think it would have to go at least that low (because if it doesn't then its just movement inside a trading range, albeit a big one!) and it needs to carry on sliding afterwards, or at least not go up.

All these downward moves that don't stick, maybe that means that we are entering a serious adoption phase where an awful lot of money has to come into the market before stabilising. I don't see otherwise why such deep dips are being bought up so convincingly.

I remember the move from 32 to 266. It was quite incredible what was happening, in the sense that you really could not believe it was possible. I wonder if the same thing is going to happen again. I think the first run up a combination of naive buyers (early adopters, just getting cash in, combined with the volume of money that was due to be come into the market, combined with all the holders seeing big but not life changing returns, and so having the composure to be able to hold.

This next leg up, if its savvy investors (and the amounts of money involved would suggest that) then they aren't just going to pile in, they are going to try and get the best price, waiting, perhaps even trying to move the market a little here and there. Combined with the fact that some early adopters are now sat on serious gains, easy to shake people out because they are happy to take the money and run - and more power to them, they've done better than many people can ever expect to do investing in a lifetime.

These conditions are perfect to generate the kind of volatility we are seeing. Ultimately though, I think this 'next phase' of big money has to enter the market somehow and thats why we are seeing this constant buying pressure, regardless of how deep the intermittent selloffs go. The question is how much money has yet to come in, and where we will be when the dust settles.

Of course, people outside the Bitcoin world think 50% is huge (and tell us "feeling rather silly now, eh?"). What they're constantly missing is that generally, in a "crash", the price falls back to where it was maybe two weeks before. I don't think that would be called a crash in most markets. Thinking in terms of time this way feels somehow more reasonable and reassuring than thinking in percentage.

And of course, people who have been inside the Bitcoin world for a long time sometimes get blinded by the dollar figures they have been used to ("OMG the price dropped more than $500, that never happened back when the price was $450"). But that's another story.

Truth. My friend and I have a running joke during any correction and panic selling of "Oh damn, the price hasn't been this low in... two weeks!". You only have to look at BTC's past to know that this is how it simply grows. It is so great to understand this and profit off it ;)