Bitcoin Forum

Bitcoin exchange rates have been doing just fine, especially if we take into account series of attacks and scams.  Here is a year-long picture:
http://img716.imageshack.us/img716/9905/110904bitcoin1year.png

There is no "major drop". Now you can all relax and do something useful for Bitcoin. Spread the good word.

P.S. I know some folks will get confused with the log scale. If you are interested in the exchange value, you are concerned with the relative change in value, right?  For example, if you wish to invest $100 in Bitcoin, you do so - regardless of the price. You might end up buying 1000 or 0.003 coins, it doesn't matter. What matters is the relative change over time - has it doubled or tripled or halved? If the value, for example, has doubled over a year and now you decide to sell, you will have made exactly double the amount of dollars you invested - regardless of what the exchange rate was when you first invested. This is why log plot, and log plot only, is appropriate and accurate representation of the exchange rate.  In cases where exchange rates remain within a narrow range, linear scale will distort the picture only slightly, so it can still be used if for some strange reason you are inclined to.

Thanks! Where did you get the historical data?

Agreed. A good buying strategy is the same for what most people should do with gold and silver. Buy some bitcoins every month, regardless of the price. In the long run, you will probably be ahead. The idea here is that, like gold and silver, bitcoins are money, and it is better money to save in gold, silver and bitcoins than fiat currencies. Don't treat it like an investment where you try to maximize your gain. Just treat it as savings, and that's why you buy some every month, just like you should be saving your money every month.

Thanks for the intelligent post and proper information regarding the performance and rates...

It's absurd how many people claim the sky is falling and use (on purpose, I suspect) the wrong chart to support their claim. :/

I've been carrying a notebook and a pencil with me for the past year. But that has nothing to do with it. Just go to http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/ (http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/) and choose the time period from the drop-down menu.

that's nothing new, unfortunatly too many people don't keep up with the facts; thanx for bringing more people up to speed :)

Log scale and long averages, pf....

Log scale? Jesus christ. The denial is strong in this thread.

Log scale makes a lot of sense for bitcoin. It is a currency that will eventually inevitably grow at an exponential rate. It is also - unlike fiat currencies - based in mathematics. Also, it makes the graphs easier to read and understand for those of us who might be otherwise bothered by trifling matters like excessive short-term volatility, allowing us instead to focus on the extraordinary long-term prospects of bitcoin. The very name "logarithmic" itself fits well with the elegant nature of bitcoin.

I challenge you to find a scale system better suited to plot bitcoin prices. Linear? Hah - that's as retarded as using the Euler method! Hypergolic? Violates the Kutta condition.

Pretty funny, I have to admit.

I wish you actually made a logical argument instead of resorting to Jesus christ. It's quite simple, I'll try and explain it better. If you represent the data in linear scale, doubling the price from 1 to 2 is represented by say one inch on y axis, whereas doubling the price from 10 to 20 is represented by ten inches. Both cases are actually identical as far as your fiat investment is concerned (it has doubled), but linear scale misrepresents them as fundamentally different. That is, you would be in denial that someone could have doubled their investment going from 1 to 2 just as someone else got it going from 10 to 20. In logarithmic scale these two identical cases are also visually identical. Linear scale is distorted, log scale is not. This is nothing exclusive to Bitcoin. It is nothing exclusive to exponential trends either. Log scale is appropriate whenever you want to represent relative change without distortion.

That image is fuzzy?

Yes, it is. It's been through a lot. Just go to, for example, http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/ (http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/), chose options as you please, and see it for yourself clearly.

That's all fine and dandy except that you made a one year graph to make it look like nothing has been going on recently when it actually has been on a downtrend for a while and still looking bearish. Something clearly is up and it would serve Bitcoin's interest better if we actually discussed what's wrong and how to correct it instead of pretending that the future looks as bright as the sun.

This is what the 3-month trend looks like:

https://i.imgur.com/Aenp2.png

Thank you - this is another great example of distorted thinking, and is of educational value for Bitcoin users: making a statement based on two arbitrary data points that are chosen to fit the statement. Falling for this kind of circular logic requires ability to ignore all other combinations of data points that would prove exactly opposite.

Sure it is, it's shaken out the skittish "investors" who don't actually understand their investment.

Note that it's still up something like 1000% in just 5 short months.  This is why you have to use log scales, and longer time frames - so you don't lose the perspective that matters.

We are only choosing arbitrary data points to fit the statement when it doesn't fit his statement.

You misunderstood me. There is no trend, just the past data. I simply presented all relevant data in a way that does not distort it, and concluded that bitcoin has been doing just fine. Of course I agree that in the past three months the exchange rate has declined - this clearly shows in my original plot, and it shows in the context of the overall performance over the past year. I don't know if the future looks bright or dark, but I can see that serious blows did not do much damage, meaning the idea, the protocol, and the public opinion are relatively solid. So far, so good.

As for your focus on recent data, I think you'll agree that it's simply about lack of influx of new buyers. One could argue that the last rally was a speculative bubble that is now slowly deflating, and I think that's good for Bitcoin in the long term. Stability, merchants, and such.

Cool, Its a good news  :)

If you want to make bad news look good: A) use a log graph, B) include completely irrelevant data in your graph, such as last year's bitcoin price which 99% of bitcoiners have never experienced and can never experience.  Sure, if I bought bitcoins at $0.05 I would still be saying that bitcoins today are fantastic and the price is brilliant.  But the vast majority of bitcoin users do not.

Haha, yeah. I completely agree, this is the sort of thing governments would do to manipulate the public.

Log chart for 0.05-1$, seriously? Get in touch with reality and have a look at the volume in USD. Then see how many people bought at 20-30 for their first time.

Also, the downtrend from 32 has been longer than any other in history (where it always exceeded the former high in just 2 months), and much sharper. From 32 to 5.74 it’s a 82% regression, and we are currently 76% down. So no, it’s apparently not a historically normal correction.

Your kind has brought up the same thing when Bitcoin declined from 30 to 20, leading many people to hold on to their losing investment. So I say GTFO with your "objective" data of when Bitcoin was something noone has ever heard of.

A log scale is only useful if the data appears to have exponential growth/decline on a linear scale. Bitcoin does not. HTH.

You got it wrong. When data appears to have exponential growth/decline on a linear scale, log scale will make it look like a straight line. That is all, and that is irrelevant. Who cares if it looks like a straight line or not?  My paragraph above explains clearly why log scale is appropriate. It's really not that hard to grasp.

This is a valid argument, except that I wasn't trying to make things look good or bad.  I simply presented data for the past 12 months in an objective way. I learned about Bitcoin towards the end of 2010, so my perspective may be different than that of the majority, I agree. Furthermore, I haven't invested in Bitcoin anything that I can't afford to lose, and in fact the main reason for me being involved at all has nothing to do with making money. I mine, I trade, but my perspective is a bit broader than that.



Well, yes. How else would you use log chart? If you represent only a narrow range, than linear and log scale will look almost identical anyway. When data spans several orders of magnitude, linear scale is not appropriate, and I explained why.

Bingo.  80% of bitcoin involvement, both in hashing power and $ started at around $8/BTC.   An amazing amount of buying happened between $11 and $32, and plenty of people are now looking at a massive absolute dollar loss in their portfolio.

It's nice that we're flatlining on the log scale and that people involved before the start of this year are still realizing mind boggling profits, but reality for nearly all direct buyers of bitcoins is they're looking at a hefty loss in their brokerage account.  And even the early adopters must have done some math on how much they were worth at $32, $20, $15, $13 etc, and are now looking at their free Porsche rapidly becoming a free pizza.  Logs are great and all, but people think about their investments in absolute dollars.  Just saying...

My investment strategy has me selling like clockwork by Tue or Wed of each week.  Missed last week, and ouch so sorry about that.  But still profitable, still mining, still siphoning out a few $ a week...

Also, you are wrong about the $100 investment being a $100 investment no matter what the BTC price.   That is utterly wrong.  You are buying a much larger portion of the total at a lower than at a higher price.  It's like a market cap for a public stock.  A company with 6000 customers might be a fantastic investment with a 1M dollar market cap but a completely stupid investment with a 200M market cap.  Ditto bitcoin.

The OP is right with this one. It's entirely irrelevant that a large number of current Bitcoin users bought Bitcoins at a price higher than the one we currently have. That is only an issue if you're doing a mid-term investment. For all other buyers, the long term players and people who actually want to use the currency, it was not an issue at all. The people who did mid-term investments made a big fucking mistake buying as an investment, it's that simple.

The people who are in it for the long term are still doing good even if they bought at double the current price. We've had a downward trend of what, a few months? That is an insignificant time for many of us! If it's significant to you, well then it's your problem. But when we talk about the long term then we show charts that actually show us the long term.

Everyone knows now, and smart people knew then, that the $32 was just a massive bubble. It's not relevant in the long run. Bitcoin has grown massively and is very stable right now with a good long term price. What happens now and in the future is what matters, talking about what happened during the last 2 months specifically is irrelevant.

...except that what you do conceals 10-20% losses over a mid-range period. Logarithmic scales are only useful when prices have changed significantly. The only reason to do what you do - log scale and long timeframe - is to hide the fact that bitcoin are steadily declining.

It's relevant when for 80% of the current bitcoin community bitcoin has only existed for about 4 months.  Even as a long term investment it's possible to increase the ultimate payout by adjusting your position to reflect present reality as you go along.  I'm a long term bitcoin bull, but I've been SELLING over the past few months.   Today, the same money I made selling would buy me 2.5 as many bitcoins as I've sold.  And unless the short and medium term trend reverses soon there's a good chance I'll get 3x, 4x or even 100x as many coins for the same investment.

I don't know about you, but I'm feeling pretty smart about myself right now compared to the buy & holders.

7 day moving average - no log scale (http://pi.uk.com/bitcoin/charts/market-price?timespan=180days&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=7)

Thanks to the OP for the log graph, pretty interesting way to look at things!

Most people that bought coins to hold them, imagining they'd make a x100 profit were mistaken about bitcoin's very nature...

Bitcoin is in a major drop. We just have had many extremely major increases before. Saying bitcoin is doing just fine is like saying Irene was just fine because Katrina was much, much, worse. If any stock halves in two monthes, it's crashing a lot. If any stock doubles in a two weeks, it's rallying even more than a lot. But just because the rally dwarfed the crash does not mean it isn't crashing.

This chart is not nessesarily skewed, but it is based on past prices and the large amount of fluctuation. If I extended that chart up to one million and down to 0.000001, I could present the data saying "bitcoin price has barely changed since the start" because after all, it has only thousand-folded and the chart should display a truly long-term forecast for the decades to come.

Or just about the timescales involved

I beg to disagree, I feel that the less bitcoins circulate the more value they lose.

If it's used like a currency, if it circulates, if people are trading with them then mechanically more people will use them, more people will accept them, they will necessarily gain value and remain stable.

Waiting 20 years won't make them anymore valuable if everyone hoards them...

Somehow I feel it's like a self balancing mechanism :)

If everyone hoards them, they will increase in value. It's sort of like the bubble effect though - since there really won't be much holding it up, it might crash big time.

Alright, I think I understand this point of view. I simply provided an objective, unskewed picture of the past 12 months. Of course this picture (fragments of it, that is) will have different subjective meaning for different people, depending on their situation. That is all. From my perspective, Bitcoin is doing just fine for now.

I get what you mean, I've done the same. I've sold pretty much all my coins because the trend was so clearly down. But I only had the balls to do this because I've actually read analysis, thought about it a lot on my own and just wanted to try trading.

Not everyone wants to do that because it's risky when you don't know what you're doing, some people just buy and hold for a long time. Obviously if you know what you're doing you'll make much more profit than those who just hold but then again it requires effort and time so that you don't miss the boat going down or up so it's not "free profit". And it's more risky than just holding in some ways, however holding can be very risky if Bitcoin never goes up again.

As a long term bull or Bitcoin enthusiast I obviously think it's very unlikely that it's not going up again so trading is overall more risky than just holding, you need to know what you're doing. I think I know something now but I have a lot to learn as a trader.

It was common sense for any miner to immediately sell his coins as they were mined on an almost daily basis. Most did.
I know I did thank goodness. Selling at 17 for example feels like a great move. Selling at 12 feels like a great move.

The question is what do you do today? I pretty much just hold onto my coins for several days and try to pick a high
moment to sell. Obviously that means a price above 8.50 for now.

So i also feel smug ;-) Well for the moment. heh.

Wish I had sold all at $10 range. Still holding about 15 BTC and can't wait for the price to rally to sell into...

I think he's right about timescales being relevant.  Here's some possible reasons:

• It takes time to build confidence in the technical implementation; e.g. before people are going to start trusting this system with significant amounts of their value, they'll first want to see a good track record of it doing it safely for others.
• I expect the limited supply of bitcoins to act as a kind of friction to their diffusion into the economy; if they starts to diffuse too fast, then the necessary exchange rate rises will tend to cause speculative manias, and the inevitable crashes will stifle adoption until a solid price support is revealed over time.
• Exchange rate run-ups likely attenuate actual use since I imagine this would cause people to want to hoard their bitcoins.
• Quick run-ups also seem to cause "early adopter envy", which likely prevents many people who would otherwise begin using Bitcoin from doing so at that time, and for some time afterward.  People don't appear to like seeing others get rich while "doing nothing", especially if they recognize their actions to be the cause of it.
• The legal uncertainty surrounding Bitcoin should cause people to refrain from trusting it with large amounts of their value.  Clarity here will be reached at government speed, i.e. years.
• Technical development of core and supporting infrastructure happens slowly, on the order of years.  And again, it takes time to build confidence in these new systems, and the improvements made to old ones.
• While the core foundation isn't yet mature, the developers (Gavin at least) are suggesting people refrain from actively promoting Bitcoin.

Yeah that graph doesnt work.  It is a here we go again, it has been falling, for awhile now and in the 7s today.  We had a nice stable 12 to 14 for awhile, then some drops to around 9 and now all the way in the 7s.  That would be a a HERE WE GO AGAIN.  If you showed a graph over a year where it went from 11 to 7, back and forth up and down for a year then yeah it would just be where the market runs, but this is a free market, and any time the price starts dropping 3 to 4 dollars theres a risk of it dropping off the earth down to 2 bux a coin.

I believe you're not alone -- and this is exactly why technical analysis works.  I'm far longer than I want to be, and looking at volumes it looks like a vast majority of "sell every day" miners are in the same boat we're in.

Which means the pressure keeps on building the longer bitcoin stagnates or slowly declines.  Slow pain is far far FAR worse than a quick surgical massive drop that reverses instantly - which is why the last visit to below 6 was not capitulation.

So I feel comfortable selling at $8 knowing full well this isn't the bottom.  It may be the bottom for a week or two, but give it more time and we'll see below $7 again.  Unless the trend reverses -- but then only a fool would cling to outdated analysis and projections.

TL;DR -- I believe my upside of selling at $8 is larger than my downside, so no changes in strategy yet.  Y'all feel free to hoard. =)

Nicely said, especially on the upside/downside potential. People who said bitcoin has the upside potential of $1000, and even that's the case, didn't realize that the probability for that to happen is about 1 in a million chance.

Putting up sell orders :)

I'm going to risk waiting for the 'Tuesday Effect' (which on this week should be Wed.) -- doing that has been treating me well.  Feel free to taunt me if I'm wrong.

I should listen to you since you've been observing the market longer than I did. :) My sell order is not executed yet and I'll wait for Wednesday.

Oh great.   If we go with the usual internet statistic of 1 person conversing for every 100 lurking, if I just convinced 100 people to wait till Wed to sell and they each have about 2-4 weeks worth of mined coins... DOOM!

Considering the amount of trolling in these forums, I think the statistic is more like 1 person conversing for every -100 lurking. So, you just got more people to sell before Wednesday.

Anyone who disagrees with me = troll
Anyone who agrees = rational, normal forum member

There is no reason to sell right now unless you absolutely need the money.  Its hurting the market value, lowering the prices, and mining does not even pay for itself at this point.  We need something big to happen.  If newegg, or amazon or similar start accepting bitcoins, then the value will skyrocket.  If it stays like this, underground, geeky, risky, it really has no major future unless you run an exchange.

The fact is if I don't sell now, I might regret later when the price finally stablize at $1 or less.

Selling is also a good thing, to people who has a strong faith in bitcoin and can't wait to catch the bottom...

Damn. Sorry for hurting the market value and lowering the price. :( I’ll ask your permission before I sell next time.

PS: It’s always profitable for someone to mine, or else everyone would stop. There’s also the difficulty adjustment to regulate this.

Or unless you want more bitcoins for a lower price later.  I've been selling since $24, and along the way it's been all like, "thank you for selling me cheap bitcoins you stupid miner."  They were "cheap" at $24, $22, $20, $17.5, $15, $13, $11, $10.9... And with a bit of luck, $8 (although that's starting to look unrealistic).  You're welcome, and thank you for all the money you highly intelligent direct buyers.

The currently available FPGA miner can produce bitcoins for 20c at today's difficulty.  Factor in Moore's law and a looming difficulty nosedive and how long until you can get BTC for 2c/coin?  Power cost per coin isn't going to hold price up forever.  We miners will always be able to produce 7200/day -- at least until some time in 2012 when that goes to 3600/day.

The fact is if I don't buy now at $30, I might regret later when the price reaches $1000 or more.

That chance for it to go to < $1 is much greater than for it to go $1000. Know your odds...

grod will you buy at $24/coin now?  I have lots ot sell you!

PM me.  I'm willing to sell for 1/3 of what you're willing to pay.  :)

lol you wish I was :)

Just pointing out the similarity between fear and greed is all.

The point was, if everyone sells it hurts the bitcoin economy, theres no stability, people panic, people want to get there money back ASAP, prices drop even more, bitcoin loses more followers, businesses wont take the risk of accepting bitcoins etc etc, its a vicious circle. 

SO no YOU DONT NEED TO ASK ME TO SELL YOUR COINS.  My point was there is NO REASON TO SELL unless you absolutely need money right now period, if you care about bitcoins future.

Also, It is not always profitable for someone to mine, and people have stopped mining, look at the difficulty rating how it has slowed down.  You buy a computer now to mine, plus add in the cost of electricity, bitcoins selling for say 8 bux a coin, and now there actually around 6 bux, it will take forever to just pay off your computer, so no it is not profitable to mine.  I mine, and was making profit, but now its not worth it.  My card, ATI 6990, is a beast, but electricity and cost of the card, which many people bought similar cards or the same just for mining, and you cant even pay off the computer at this rate.

Yes I agree, there is much more chance for it to bottom out at a 1 dollar or less and stabilize there, then it going to 100 a coin.  Its not looking good, we were getting a little comfortable in the 10 to 12 range that it sat at for a while, now it just pushes most people away to see it drop to 6 bux so fast for no apparent reason.  Only hard core bitcoin supporters, which I am, and believers will keep saying how great bitcoins are, and how they will go back up, and you can make profit off of mining and selling bitcoins, but its all lies and or very very risky speculation with no data or facts to actually show that this is true.

In the long run, Bitcoin is either going to be worth nothing, or a very large amount. So I figure it doesn't matter too much what it does in the meantime.

Was sent here by reddit- looks about the same as discussions today.

Yeah. The future looks like the past...

Did you buy at 30 :D cause you saw the future :D .. lol

you can see the same talks at the current price level.

in my view: either it will be zero or alot ...and alot means not 1000 bucks...