Bitcoin Forum

If Huobi wasn't trading right now, Bitcoin would not have went down a jot, we would still be hovering between a $6 range in the lower $800s.

Huobi started the sell off and Bitstamp resisted it to the utmost, until the pressure became too great that enough normal Joe /Bloggs market players started to sell-off.

However since Huobi was trading, Bitcoin got driven down, and then recovered to 796 on Stamp....then the Ask walls started piling up. the price started dropping fast once again, it looked like a foregone conclusion, so I decided to short. within minutes I was in the green! However, three seperate purchases, initiated at at certain points in the chart development, swallowed up the towering Ask walls that were chasing the spot price down. I figured out that some entity on Stamp used $750K of purchasing power to preserve the BTC spot price in four seperate mammoth sales that appeared out of knowhere. No such freak volume was seen on any other exchange and this volume far outweighed the volume on the bounce from $767. Needless to say, the other exchanges followed Stamp's lead.

There are powerful forces at work primarily on Stamp but no doubt with manipulated Bot trading on all USD exchanges who have tasked themselves with holding up Bitcoins value. I can only guess what their motivations might be, but certain not to reward 'holders' for their kind 'support'.

Fkn sharks in these waters and I dont like it one little bit and I wouldn't be surprised if it all culminates in a whole lot of people getting royally fkd up the arse.

It's too early to call this a "recovery". It could be the first dead cat bounce in a multi-week downtrend.

"sell-off"

"recovery"

Sorry to break it to you fellas, but we are still in a long consolidation.

In a day or three we will be at the end of this consolidation.

Beginning with yourself of course!  :D

Sorry, couldn't resist!  ;)

U aren't a blinkered bull-tard TERA like most on here.

Go look at the 1 minute chart at three massive purchases that devoured an Ask wall chasing rapidly after the spot price. Believe me when I tell you these purchases came out of knowhere. One minute I had my short stop loss sitting a couple of cents above break even point ($785), with 350 Ask bids between me and spot price, then with an instant, my stop loss fell to within 10 BTC of Asks of the spot price. I shifted it back to $790 where there were a further 300 Ask bids, but these guys meant business. Seeing the forces at work I admitted defeat and took the hit.

Had it not been for these monster flash BTC purchases, that came out of knowhere and were not replicated on any other exchange, we would have already have had our dead cat bounce and we would have shot down past $765 support. Since the China selling pressure obviously fucked up the Price Holding Bot algorithms, this was a clear case of emergency price support action. No ifs or buts about it.

It remains to be seen whether this entity can hold up Bitcoin in the face of a mass Chinese sell-off, but every indication that I get from absolutel fkn hours spent focusing on these charts and the market action, I would suggest that a very determined attempt is being made.


Sorry T.Stuart, I already made $1200 from my short sell. Lost $150 on second short sell, though but still not bad for a nights work.

When confused about action on Bitstamp, the explanation is likely Bitfinex.

LOL.

No.

(unless someone operating through Bitfinex conspired to spend the best part of $750K just to support the Bitcoin price)

Can I ask, is anyone able to buy Bitcoins without being accused of being an algorithm-monster price-holding crash-delaying party-pooper?



I know. Congratulations! But like I said, I couldn't resist! It's the wonderful vocabulary you use.  :)

Large orders sit in the books but are not shown.  When they become active, they can light up.  

If you short right above a major resistance line, you have to expect buying to occur.   I know I was buying in that range.

Bitstamp is pretty dead without bitfinex and bitfinex brings all the life into bitstamp.

Bitfinex doesn't appear on the bitstamp order book yet executes there. Also, it has:
4:1 margin trading
Shorting
Fill or kill orders
Stop loss / trigger orders
Trailing stop loss orders
Dark orders

The dual order book systems and all these crazy orders make it seem like somthing fishy going on at bitstamp but it's really Bitfinex. I trade on Bitfinex and watch these 500-1000btc buy orders randomly pop up on the bidside all the time and then halfway execute on the bitfinex internal order book while halfway executing on the bitstamp order book.

Great analysis MatTheCat

I watched the thing all day (I am in Asia for a while).  Clearly started on Huobi, followed by OKCoin then the western exchanges

The one odd thing I noticed were a TON of little tiny orders.  Now I don't watch this closely and I don't really daytrade so I know everyone is going to say "that's normal" and "those are bots".  But these were $1-$2 orders (0.001 BTC in some cases), and were clearly pushing the price down.  It was odd.

I am a believer that Huobi is driving these mini "events" by trading on their own exchange in order to capitalize on their current position as the largest exchange in the world.  They will not be around for long.  

Edit: Spelled your name wrong

I have been on Bitfinex all night nursing my rather successfull short bet, and then latterly my not so successful short bet. When I place an order on Bitfinex to be executed on Stamp, I see it lining up on Stamp's ticker. I normally route my Bitfinex orders through Stamp because the volume on Bitfinex itself is rather sparse. Stamp volume in comparison is enormous.

Go back and look at the bounce back from the rapid drop to 775 and you will see it makes no sense that this single one off $250K order (that was done within a second), would be a big load of premade orders coming in from Bitfinex, as they would have been triggered before this point......unless a big bnuch of traders just coincidentally made a big mass of orders right at the price within the three minutes preceeding the BTC spot falling right through this range, which just so happened to save Bitcoin's neck.

Its manipulation, plain and simple, and manipulation at a huge cost to someone with very deep pockets.

Considering the scope of the attention and the lightning fast adoption of late I'd be willing to bet that there are some extremely deep pockets involved today that weren't involved a month ago.

Considering how small Bitcoin is right now and the speculation that it will continue to achieve more adoption as time goes on; The pockets could easily be deep enough to buy out the remainder of China and the SR coins without even breaking a sweat...

If wanted to acquire BTC I would want the market to take a death plunge. Indeed, I do want to acquire lots of Bitcoins which is exactly why I want the market to take a death plunge, I however don't have the power to make this happen and have to satisfy myself with remaining astute as possible to good opportunities that present themselves.

Far from bringing down the price, these gargantuan flash purchases were strategically placed and triggered to put the halts on big nasty post bounce slip that was gaining momentum rapidly. It looked so certain and then BANG, $250K order within a second, a few minutes later, a $175K order followed by a $140K order, both of them executed within a second. If you study the charts closely, you will see that these large BTC purchases saved Bitcoins bacon. If these were genuine investments from someone with deep pockets, then this person is a fucking horrendous trader as if he had just sat back and let the panic do its work, he could have gotten these Bitcoins $100 per unit cheaper.

He's not the only trader on Bitstamp/Bitfinex with deep pockets you know, maybe he missed the initial bounce from the crucial $767 support and didn't want to be beaten again by someone else with deep pockets. There's no way of telling whether the price would have dropped $100 further if he had waited, maybe someone else would have stepped in and bought up the coins. Whales have to fight too amongst each other for the coins, not everything you see is manipulation if it doesn't work in your favor.

It looks to me like you never traded in larger volume... I'm far from being a whale, but the scenario you described above is something I have (roughly) played through myself. When trading in larger volume there are two questions that need to be balanced against each other: where are we right now in the trend, and is there/will there be enough on the order book to capture my order without too much slippage. So I often place orders well "before the trend ends" because experience showed me that once I wait until the trend naturally reverses, the order book composition is such that slippage eats any additional profits I got by waiting.

But couldn't those have just been orders being filled? 

+1  And buying in at $765 or $775 isn't really a big deal. 

I don't know if it was you, but someone on here told me that my ranting about the blatant bot price market engineering was akin to a kid crying cos he is getting beat on a computer game. And it's true. These markets are manipulated. I don't who is doing it or what there intentions are, or when they are going to do it. But if I am going to play in Bitcoin that is the rules. The rules of Bitcoin is that the 99% are playing on a shady underhand uneven playing field, which I suppose doesn't make it much different from every other market in the world aside from it perhaps being even less regulated.

It seems to me that there are two prominent entities in Bitcoin right now. One of those entities (the Huobi monster) appears to be Chinese in flavour. If this entity gets it's way, then Bitcoin is going to crash through the floor-boards in spectacular fashion. The other entity is the Bitstamp monster, who is in league with his castrated and by now rather ineffectual peer, the MtGox monster. If this entity gets it's way, the Bitcoin price will be held up and stabilised, or at least until a certain point in time when the price stabilisation has served its purpose.

It is very possible that there is some kind of war going on betwen Chinese entities and Western entities for control of Bitcoin. Although I completely lack the details, the template of the forces at work are very clear to me.

For this reason, although the charts are screaming CRASH to me, I am presently long Bitcoin. For the time being, I reckon Bitcoin is a protected species (I will think about cashing out when we trend up to $930).

For the past 3 weeks, every time bitcoin price goes down sharply, it seems to recover fairly quickly.

Perhaps the powers that be want to create the illusion that the China deadline is trivial and prices will remain stable for the time being. Until the day actually comes they instigate an epic sell-off that will even make make the most permabull hodler shit his pants.

At what price will hodlers become No-longer-will-i-hodle  ? 550$ 400$ 300$

I have noticed lots of massive cash outs on Bitstamp whilst trading in the lower $800 range. The recent trends have consisted mostly of very low volume and price stagnation. Anyone who is watching the charts as obsessively as I have been will have noticed all the little automated peculiarities that have served to hold the price up, then after the Bid pressure has built up to such an extent, an 800 BTC ordered comes bang out of knowhere and only knocks the price down $4! The next BTC traded takes the price down a further $15, then a bot trades 0.001 Bitcoin and is the spot right back up to where it is.

I have noticed two serperate events on Stamp that were like this.

To cut a long story short, for all the low volume and turgid price action, there have been a lot of massive cash-outs executed not just within the minute candle stick time frame, but within one second.

And I wasn't so directly tuned into the previous $765 corrections, but this one was certainly triggered by Huobi, strongly resisted by Stamp until I guess the algorithims couldn't cope with the movement of trade, bounced of the $765 as the market would have anticipated it would be, but then started to plummet back down at vicious rate, before the market was saved by some mulit-millionaire stepping in and wiping out the spot chasing ASK walls at crucial moments.

I won't pretend that I know wtf is going on but it is crossing my mind that Bitcoin is being managed at these levels to allow a lot of big boys bumper cash-outs. If so, then when the manipulation stops, the price will still be high but the market may find itself badly under-capitalised....which of course means one thing.  

I'm confirming sources right now that appear trustworthy and confirm that this will indeed happen.  Notice that bitcoin is not making new all time highs over the past month, which confirms all the bad news and confirms that bitcoin is collapsing.  It might seem sad, but it is a fact, as I have demonstrated.

No idea, but we will find out in a few days. It might even go to levels nobody will expect.

I agree, if it should fall hard due to whatever reason a lot of people will get burned trying to catch falling knifes, as the majority is almost 100% sure that it won´t ever go below 500$.

I guess it just means that there are some extremely bullish multi-millionaires out there...

Banksters and Uncle Sam can even manipulate huge markets like gold. Fooling around with bitcoin is peanuts to them.

Exactly, Bitcoin is a play toy to scale and there are individuals who own assets worth several times the market cap of Bitcoin. The fact that they are supporting this price means they expect a great return and don't want to see anybody turned off to potential market adoption by witnessing a "collapse." The price has been held up and will continue to be held up until the market can hold itself up.

Watch what happens in Feb and March. The price will skyrocket.

You guys don't give HODLERS enough credit!

Fortunatly for us they can not just print bitcoins to naked short. They have to buy them or lend them withc severly limits their manipulation.

I've been dollar cost averaging once a week for the last month. I bought 3x yesterday and haven't sold any in the last 2 months. lol

Your flaw is assuming there is only one player or only a few players. $140K and $250K orders are not that much on a leveraged trading platform now that all the bitcoiners have become rich in 2013. What you see is dozens of different players all playing a game and anticipating eachother's movements. They all see a likely location where a local bottom will occur and some of them decide that it would be wisest to buy the ask walls now. If they don't do it then the other players will buy them first and they will end up eating slippage at a higher price. I don't think any one player even thinks they have the capability to affect the outcome of the market, unless their name is Loaded or something.

It has happened again just then. Bitcoin approaches a bottom, which if breached, would be bearish as hell, only for a 120 BTC order to come out of knowhere and prevent Bitcoin dropping in into the $760s, then a couple of minutes later, two further single 120 BTC purchases boot Bitcoin back up to 780s.

These are large purchases, from just one individual or not, leveraged or not, on the face of things they do not make financial sense. These entitities are losing money in order to support a higher Bitcoin price and for what reason, god only knows....although, I suppose that the cost of these rescue buy-outs can be recooperated by dumping into the more positive market sentiment that results from Bitcoin bouncing up and away from vital support zones.

Very hard market to trade. The charts look bearish as hell, but if Bitcoin has a fairy godmother(s) floating around (at least for the time being), what the charts say doesn't really matter for a day-trader. Still a long way off from the point where I feel that I would become an investor. For that, I am wanting 2014's version of September 2013 and that just aint now, despite all the ludicrous claims of $800 being 'cheap bitcoins'.

It´s costs nothing more than some trading fees if the buyer buys his own asks to enleash some bullish sentiment. 5 -10$ above there a few 25-50 BTC asks split, waitin to be bought by "real" buyers. A few minutes later all bids that have been build in the meantime get dumped  :D

I agree we are on a downtrend but it is a slow one like May 2013 and there are going to be traders at every step of the way trying to play the local bottoms in order to make profit. There are also investors who might actually think these are good prices (this is bitcoin after all and people are very bullish, especially after hearing news like Tiger Direct $250K). But mostly it is traders and bots with these orders with the sole purpose of taking a profit in the next 5 minutes - 5 days. Once again bitcoin is now a 10 billion dollar market that saw a 4000% gain in 2013. You are over-guaging these amounts of money. There are now a lot of wealthy people willing to gamble large amounts of money at the slightest sign of a profit and there is a lot of liquidity to support them. During the crashes in December, I myself leveraged as much as 400btc at the bottoms. I actually thought it was going lower eventually but I saw a short term opportunity to make a huge profit. And I am a "bear"... now imagine the bulls.

We're trying not to spook the merchants that are the key to wider adoption. If this interferes with your day-trading, so be it. You aligned your interests against the greater good of the community, so seems kind of a douche move to bitch about it now. Hell, you might even get your way, But I'll be fighting it. It's not manipulation. It's betting on Bitcoin's future. Workin' pretty good for me so far.

http://www.servustv.com/cs/STImages/000/000/935/721/photo950x950/ser_scientology.jpg


 :D :D :D

For the past few hours the exact opposite has been happening.  Sellers appear on BFX and hold the price down on Bitstamp.  Fact is, people buy and sell coins.  Sometimes big buyers want to buy.  Sometimes big sellers want to sell.  Why do you get your knickers in a twist?  Fat lot you're going to do about it by whingeing.

You know,if I believed that the Bitcoin market is being held up by a society of benevolent market manipulators, who really believe that they are doing what they are doing for the greater good of mankind, then I would happily go long. Not just to make money but because I am like that. Problem is that I don't think this. I think that the Bitcoin market price is being held up by a society of malevolent sharks and who knows what interests they have mind but they certainly don't have my interests at heart. I wouldn't be surprised if Bitcoin is artificially supported up until a certain point in time when a certain objective is achieved, and then that support is either removed, or the manipulators actually make moves to crash it themselves......

.....if big Wall St capital wants in on Bitcoin, they are going to take their positions as cheaply as possible.

In the meantime, I don't know whether I can short Bitcoin cos I don't know what price targets the whales are looking to maintain and I can't go long cos if this artificial support is removed, then Bitcoin crashes through the floor boards because it is still wildly over extended without the fairy godmothers floating about working their magic to keep the thing up.


Those large sell offs aren't damaging the spot price. The large buys have totally saved the Bitcoin market price from freefall. The sell-offs are possibly the whales liquidising their market intervention purchases. I have watched the Bitcoin markets like a guard hound the past few days (getting addicted to it) and I have a pretty good sense of the market management policy in place on the USD exchanges.

Duuuude. Your inability to predict the future is not evidence of a grand conspiracy. Markets always act to take your money. It's the sum total of thousands of actors, all wanting to maximize profit and minimize loss.  The casino is rigged! It's the ancient cry of the loser.  Show some dignity and suffer in silence. We all take hits and make wrong calls. Ride it out, cut your losses, double down or go home. Your conspiracy theory isn't original or entertaining. Or maybe it is entertaining and I just have an underdeveloped sense of schadenfreude.

I am not whinging about my inability to predict the future.

I am making an observation of forces at work in the market. I have tried to keep the rationalising to a minimum because I really don't know 'why' these forces are at work but I do know that they are present. I would consider that being aware of the existence of these hidden hands is quite important for anyone trading Bitcoin.

Also, I would just like to point out that I netted over $1000 overall for that evenings/nights trading. So I did 'win'....just not as much as I would have liked.

I am not whinging about my inability to predict the future.

I am making an observation of forces at work in the market. I have tried to keep the rationalising to a minimum because I really don't know 'why' these forces are at work but I do know that they are present.

Also, I would just like to point out that I netted over $1000 overall for that evenings/nights trading. So I did 'win'....just not as much as I would have liked.
[/quote]

So you don't know why they are at work but you know that they are "bad" forces, right? That makes sense  ::)

and whining that you did win, but not as much as you wanted, makes you look even worse than if you had lost. 

Obviously when you are playing a game and you discover that the rules to the game aren't quite as they seem, it causes a bit of disgruntlement. A period of mental adjustment is required to absorb that cheating and manipulation is part of the rules.

The manipulation is 'bad' because it is only done in the interest of the manipulator. The manipulation is not my friend and only benefits me if I can align my bets with the manipulators desires. Since I have no charts or statistical indicators that provide me with insight into  the workings of the manipulators heads, this is easier said than done. Therefore, it is good to have an idea of what the policy is. Had I knew, what I now know, then I would have came out my short at the $765 support as I would have known that this would not be allowed to be broken, no matter what.

The rules are: You can buy and sell at the price someone else will agree to. That's all of the rules. Rants about cheating and rigging just look silly.

As for why a whale would want to spend money to support the price, it might be a simple matter of long term adoption. If the price falls to a third or a tenth or something similarly perverse, as some people dream of, bitcoin is not going to see the same level of adoption as it otherwise would. The price itself doesn't matter if you get the same long term ROI at $1000 as you would at $300.

How many Bitcoins do you own?

You may be quite happy with the efforts being made to uphold the price as it protects the nominal value of your wealth. You may also like to think that this is all being done for the long term strength of the Bitcoin market because again, that would be all kind of beneficial to the long term nominal value of your Bitcoin wealth. However, what if this price fixing was part of a Dunkirk evacuation operation allowing whales to get a certain amount of Bitcoin into cash at artificially high prices? Been a whole lot of cashing out recently. I seen an 800 BTC order knocking the Stamp price down $4. How much do you think the price would be knocked down if you or I tried to offload 800 BTC in one order. $50, $75, probably more?

Actually, I'm quite happy with your efforts, felix.  I've concluded that your paranoid theories are being promulgated to shake weak hands, in order to make the market less volatile and more robust, in the manner of an innoculation against a life-threatening virus.  Indeed it's not just you, but an entire conspiratorial army of ersatz bears who spread FUD in order to prevent a sequence of increasingly frequent blow-off tops from leading to a finite-time singularity prematurely.  For that matter, even if I knew without a shred of doubt that you honestly believed in your entire parade of boogey-men, I would still be convinced that you were doing strategic holders exactly that service, albiet unwittingly.  So... thank you.

What is a strategic holder?

Someone who is too stupid to trade Bitcoin and turn a profit, but through phenomenal luck has amassed great riches?

Is a 'strategic holder' the same sort of person who will likely hold onto his Bitcoins as they one day turn to dust, too stupid to do anything else with them?

Is a 'strategic holder' the Bitcoin equivalent of 'Silver Stacker' in the precious metals investing community. They did quite well for a while didn't they, believing in all their circle jerk silver propaganda stories, until one day it stopped working out so well. You reckon Bitcoinland is going to be immune from that?

Yeah, that's it. It's gotta be luck. The one thing that that is common among all losers is a victim mentality. They were unlucky. Someone was out to get them. It's never their fault they are losers.

In Bitcoin, I have missed the boat thus far (although I have still made thousands), despite being down at the harbour in very good time, seeing the boat and telling everyone, anyone riding that boat could be in for a great trip.

In life in general however, I done very well. Looking back, I can't honestly say that the way things have all fallen into place was down to my own personal brilliance or intelligence....twas all just fucking luck. Thing is, I am smart and self aware enough to know this. But other people, people with a weakness for padding up their own egos, need to somehow attribute anything good they have got as being a result of something inherently great about themselves.

You are not great and I can tell by the way you communicate that you are not even that smart. Lucky? Most definitely.

For obvious reasons, this forum is full of fkn idiots like yourself who have gotten seriously lucky, resulting in a whole lot of people around this place with a hyper inflated sense of self significance. It is enough to make me wish that Bitcoins goes down in flames (and it definitely will one day within our lifetimes and probably a lot sooner than that) just to see all you guys getting wiped out.....but I won't wish that cos I will probably be riding on it when it does.

You are kind of an ass, mat. What's up with that?

It is called deliberate antagonisation. You can find it all over this place. I like to take it step further than most....but only with those whose vibe is not to my liking.

Dude, you got problems.

So by your logic your greatness comes from the fact that you know you were lucky while others who don't attribute their (good) decisions to luck are idiots?

I'm sorry but the fact is that just because you personally don't believe that bitcoin as a technology will succeed doesn't mean it won't.
People hodling because they believe in the technology are not idiots. They are speculating on something other than what you believe in.
At this stage history is mostly in their favour. If that will remain so is to be seen.

No.

By my logic people who start personally ridiculing anyone who happens to say beep against Bitcoins or the market, get the same back, and then some.

Believe in Bitcoins?

I used to, but these days Bitcoin smells more and more of death to me. Whether that is because with Bitcoin being the first of its kind, its a near statistical certainty that some kind of technological headache will crop that may just render it untenable, or because greed if not outright avarice are central tenets of the Bitcoin ethos I don't know.

The Bitcoin world consists of a pyramid heap of rats vying with one another to get the top, and I include myself with that. I hate Bitcoin, but I will continue to make money trading it, because I can.

To the top of what? I have a minuscule amount of BTC because I believe in the concept and that it could go up in value.

You are projecting your character and motivation onto a very diversified group of people.
In my eyes you are only interested in the short to medium term value swings and have no real notion of how significant this technology is.
For what it is worth you'd probably invest in Tulips if they were as volatile.

Cryptocurrencies will change the world, like it or not.

You are passive fodder on the very bottom of the pile that the rats will happily feed on. Anyone with a semi-significant stake in Bitcoin is not thinking or acting like you do, although you did state yourself, that you own BTC because it could go up in value. Perhaps your saving grace is that you don't have enough of a stake to get in a tizzy about.

Why do bitcointalk users always assume that bears are bitter or missed out on previous runs? Many of us actually bought in very low and are still way up in profit. Nevertheless, you can still be pessimistic about the BTC price for the near term (weeks/months).

Thank you for this Mat, I was struggling to see why our subconscious minds were at such polar opposites. Now I understand completely.

I appreciate your sharing of your dreams and your feelings about this market, so I thought I'd share mine.

My feeling is that "big Wall St capital" can go get fucked.

I am completely out of this market for the time being. I took all my bitcoin and left the casino. Lets me sleep at night. This thing could drop to 600, 300? who knows? but in my not-so-subconscious, this is a binary bet.

what will go to 0 first? bicoin? or the dollar?

0 value is elusive.  I paid 4USD for a quadrillion in Zimbabwe notes.  Think of it more like this:  Which one will destroy the most exchange value in the next 20 years?    I think USD will not be a reserve currency in 20 years, but BTC will.  I think USD might not be usable for paying taxes in 20 years, but BTC will.  I think 20 years may be very very optimistic, and I hedge for 2.5 years.

What's the probability that BTC goes below parity with a reserve currency basket valued 10 $USD2012 in a given time increment, as a function of time horizon?  It's the sum of three threat models:  Social exogenous, social endogenous, and technical.

Exogenous:  de minimis until the next sovereign crisis, rising fast to a peak around 2%/year, then dropping dramatically, and rising gradually over subsequent years due to macro risk.

Endogenous:  linear upslope from 2%/year to around 3%/year, until a political reorganization of nation states or of the bitcoin infrastructure,  unknowable thereafter.

Technical model:  de minimis, rising to approach a peak at some low value, say 1%/year, then decaying over time.

Endogenous threats are dominant in the current regime, I think.

Very good analysis Mat, I'd like to voice my speculation on WHO the manipulators are and WHY they act as they do.

First off WHO, the simple answer is 'deeper pocketed versions of the same zealots who have been railing against you in this thread', I know this seams almost anti-climactic doesn't it.  You normally think of manipulation as being done by people who are fundamentally different from the 'small fry' both in the depth of their pockets AND a more 'predatory' nature.  We don't expect manipulators to be delusional zealots but in BTC I think they are.  First off we know for sure the big holders of BTC are early adopters who drank the kool-aid very early, these folks have now accumulated sums of USD in the several million range (all still on exchanges mind you) and they thus have leverage on both sides to control the price.  'New' investors might come in with huge sums of USD but they can never match the BTC holdings of the early adopters so they can't do the kind of narrow-holding range manipulation your seeing, they can only cause a price spike as China effectively did when it entered the market.

And the WHY should be evident from some of the posts earlier, the manipulators feel they are 'saving' BTC from the evil forces of the Persian Army  THIS IS BITCOIN!!!  HODL!!!!!  This meme is very telling, we see that people equate the price of BTC with the success of BTC, this view is reinforced by the detractors that call BTC a bubble.  If the supporters 'HODL' the price up high enough then they are 'right' about BTC and everyone else is wrong, and most importantly their Libertarian wold-view is right and everyone else is wrong.  And these people see libertarian/Austrian economic theory as something that needs to be promoted and defended at any cost.  All of this is to ultimately as you said yourself fell that this is the "result of something inherently great about themselves", an ego trip that completely validates their political beliefs and ideologies.

Now what dose this mean for the long run price, are they preparing to crash the market some day and leave the rest of us holding the bag.  NO!!  These people will WILLINGLY go down with the ship if BTC ever finally tanks, nigh they would flaunt their martyrdom saying they 'lost everything because they had FAITH and held to the end, if only the wretched weak-handed fools had not crashed the price of BTC we could have defeated the evil gobermint and the FED and the USD and ushered in a libertarian Ann Randtopia!!!  The know that a fast-crash attempt to empty the exchanges and exist with the USD will net at most a ~40 million in exchange CREDITS which have very little chance of actually being redeemed for real USD at that scale, indeed most of the credits are on Gox which may not even be solvent and which will de-facto force them to put thouse credits back into the market, so for the whales BTC is like a tuna-net in the ocean, they can swim around and seem liquid but are really quite constrained, they realized their BTC AND exchange-credit wealth is illiquid and they like it that way, weakness should be PUNISHED not rewarded after-all (I wouldn't be the least surprised if their are intentional retaliations against anyone who breaks ranks and tries to cash-out).  So they are happy to just get a trickle of USD as they so very slowly sell, it's still enough for them to practically live off and it's more then they deserve anyways so why not keep this whole BTC thing going as long as possible, when it looks like 'stability' is what is needed then they create stability until it looks like another crop of new adopters is ready to be lured in, to them BTC is like that Spartan army doing a simple 'charge', 'fallback (as little as possible) and 'hold' pattern, claiming 'ground' is the goal and ground is measured in exchange rates.

The question is now, can they keep this up?  And for how long?  I think it will eventually break them, the waning availability of new suckers, the exodus of China, and the declining profitability of mining hardware which will force more coins to flow into exchanges will exert enough pressure to break out of this ~850 band and bring a correction down to a more sustainable level.  Sustainable here simply meaning how much actual USD per day that libertarians can find out of their own pockets to throw at buying up the ~5k new BTCs per day that come into existence.  This should not be confused with the LONG term sustainability issue which involve a whole slew of legal and economic factors beyond the scope of just throwing USD purchases at BTC.  But for the short and mid term I feel we will see corrections in which small fry run for the doors but whales do not.

Nice analysis. True believers in Bitcoin don't have any fiat and they certainly don't keep any coins at an exchange. ;)

There it is with that chexit meme again.  WTF is this?  Exactly what does it mean for "China" to "exit"  bitcoin?  Is China trapped inside bitcoin, sending messages in fortune cookies that I never get?  I question that it actually has a meaning.  I'm beginning to think that it is actually just a sequence of syllables computed to create some desirable emotions in the readers, but it doesn't actually *mean* anything.


I'm certainly don't want to imply that anything else you said made sense, but this is particularly incomprehensible to me. Miners will not sell coins unprofitably.  They will hoard them until they are profitable.  A miner who did otherwise would be bankrupt very quickly, and thus forced out of mining, in a word, non-miners.  I'm quite convinced that Impaler is not a miner.  If you were, you would quickly become a bankrupt non-miner.  I am a miner.  I hoard until my gains allow me to multiply the size of my mining operation.  In this way, I am constantly iterating to higher and higher cashflows.

Considering that you yourself posted in the thread in which that theory was presented by me and positively received by a number of people

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=414657.0

your incredulity is surprising.  I am indeed not a miner, I am an observer of miners and a student of macro-economics which puts me in a better position to predict the overall trends then an individual miner who thinks micro-economically.  First you confuse 'declining profitability' with 'unprofitable', as you said the unprofitable miner ceases to mine and the miners as a whole stay profitable but JUST BARELY.  And just barely profitable miners still have costs that need to be paid, so the percentage of your daily take that can be hoarded declines.  It is as simple as that.

+1

I have seen so many "cultish" beaviour here on the board in the last time, that really worries me most about BTC. Like only true "believers" hold and will be rewarded (coz it might jump to 10000$ in 3 seconds, and nobody should miss the train. Also all the requests that everyone should immediately tell his friends that they should invest money, right now, coz it´s 100% that it´s goin to .. whatever. Most of them don´t see the slightest possibility that it possibly might not go up forever in this rate. All of the bad news are easily turned into good news, in fact every news is good news that show that Bitcoin will 100% go to the moon very soon. Everyone who is not overall positive for the Bitcoin technology itself or it´s actual price is an enemy and liar that must be fought, an idiot and what else. Altough it´s common sense that those enemies will not be able to surpess the rise to the moon, they can at best only delay it. So every true Bitcoiner should missionize as many new so far uninvolved peopele(and their money) as possible, so that they will be able to "see the light" .

Join the Cult!

http://static.a-z.ch/__ip/JUC0jeS3G5Nkd5MWOnxJ-g9ejpw/0137081948a628e8b40e274662f2775911ea959c/assetRelationTeaser-detail/schweiz/neuenburger-plakatverbot-fuer-ufo-sekte-war-emrk-konform-124840859

http://www.dmc.tv/images/Change_the_world/kind_adults/C531201p1.jpg


Btw i am an early adopter and used BTC first about more than 2 years ago and can see some positive advantages of the BTC technology, but i´m still scared of this behavior.

Kill the naysayers!!!
http://www.castlemonster.com/images/burn04.gif

Didn't even get through two paragraphs of your shit Impaler. Why is it so hard to avoid getting personal? Whatever validity your arguments might have, nobody cares when you present it that way.

+1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1

p.s. btw the original meaning of the word "idiot" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiot) describes a person who is concerned with his own private affairs only. So an "idiot" does not vote, does not post on bitcointalk and is in general, and I quote from wikipedia, an "uneducated or ignorant person". All of which demonstratively you are not. But "infidel" you are :)

p.p.s. "To the moon!"

Interesting, as I always suspected that people who need to quote the almighty Wikipedia rather than being able to rely on their own brains come across as idiots!  :D

What can I say. That was probably one of the most eye-opening things I have ever read on here. The early Bitcoin adopters were not cut-throat pirate financiers who like to drink babies' blood at the weekends on a full moon. They were wild-eyed libertarian zealots such as sgbett who have seriously lucked out. I made a 'near term price prediction' thread when Bitcoin was hovering at 790, telling people to go long Bitcoin, then short at 815-820 range. Bitcoin then done exactly as I predicted, at which point sgbett jumped into the thread and had a rant at my day-trading antics telling me that I should just be buying as many Bitcoins as I possibly can at these prices cos Bitcoin is going to $10K. Someone who bought Bitcoin at $1, getting ratty at someone successfully day-trading Bitcoin and demanding that the daytrader buy as many Bitcoins as he can, at $800!!

Very telling!

I thought that perhaps he had ran into the blatant bulltrap. Perhaps it is more that fact that him and a few of his cronies set-up the bulltrap, that absolutely nobody walked into and are now a few Bitcoins/USD shorter than they were before. It took a volume of about 5000 BTC (on Bistampt) to ramp bitcoin from 790 - 817, yet just 500 BTC to bring it back down to 795. I don't believe for a minute that fresh capital is what caused Bitcoin to surge up from 790. It was USD from existing whales, trying to kickstart market. Joe Bloggs proved he wasn't so stupid to fall for it when we got up to the huge ask walls at the £820 range. Absolutely zero interest whatsoever.

The zealot theory as opposed to my financial shark theory could also explain the huge stage managed cash-outs being triggered as a result of the engineered frustration of free market price discovery. The whales need ammunition (USD) to throw at coming battles below.

In reality, there will be both sharks and zealots and all other kinds of political implications and interests at work in the higher echelons of Bitcoin or affecting Bitcoin. One thing is clear, is that the public interest in Bitcoin is dead for now. All that is going to prevent Bitcoin from tanking from these wildly overinflated prices achieved on relatively very low volume, is a prevailing of the HODL mentality amongst the well heeled Bitcoin classes. But there is just one problem with that. China.

I would also surmise that if Wall St capital is preparing to get into Bitcoin (a big IF), then those market players will do whatever they can to bring the Bitcoin price down as much as they can so they can take an as proficient an entry as they possibly can......cos that is what they do. It is their job. I wouldnt be surprised if we see a Bitcoin slaughter so big, that it causes even the fattest most zealous whales to squeel and drop a shit ton of coin into Wall St koffers.

I think you underestimate the hardened nerves of experienced Bitcoiners. Over the past three years the market has been up and down with swings and doomsday scenarios massively bigger than most Wall Streeters have ever seen. This experience counts for something you know, even among people without experience of financial markets, stocks, etc. (probably more so among this demographic actually).

You know, somehow I can tolerate Mat's doom & gloom brand of bearism... at least he has some skin in the game in a way most bears rarely do, he's actively shorting. I appreciate the drama around that, if not his analysis.

But you, Impaler...


You just sound like a pompous prick when you put on that bear suit.

I remember the last discussion we had about this topic.  August 7th, in one of chodpaba's threads. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=245783.msg2886041#msg2886041) Price had dipped slightly below 100 again these days (on bitstamp), and based on the same "I have a deep insight into the psychology of miners" bullshit argument, you predicted, what?, going back to 50? Something like that. You recommended fucking shorting, in fact, a few days before a trend that took us from ~100 to ~1200.

I'm sure you will forgive me if I'm not exactly reading your analysis based on miners' sales/hoarding strategies with the utmost reverence.

Double post. 'cause I got another nugget of wisdom for you guys.

All those walls of text about manipulation here and miner profitability there and how it all can only mean one thing: DOWN DOWN DOWN, or the bullish alternative: buy back now or the CHOO CHOO leaves without you... they're just noise. They miss one insight I recommend hammering into your brain, mantra like, until you *get* it...

What we've seen for the past 3 odd years follows one simple rule:

For the bootstrapping phase of a global, peer-to-peer {reserve currency, store of wealth, payment system} USD/BTC necessarily looks the way it does;

The way USD/BTC looks is not sufficient to guarantee the success of this becoming a global, peer-to-peer {reserve currency, store of wealth, payment system}.

That is all. If you convinced yourself of the above, many of your little nervous breakdowns will simply go away. You can still daytrade if that's what you do best, you can buy & hold (which means you bet on the long term success as described above), or you can close your positions and leave (if you have serious doubts about the success of Bitcoin in the fields described above). But you probably won't look at each minor swing and see dark forces at work pulling string at the expense of the "small guy", whether it's pulling price up or pushing it down.

In reality, this is what one of the most amazing social experiments during my lifetime looks like, in which a plethora of market forces attempt to participate in the experiment in order to fulfill their own highest ranked desire (idealism, greed, curiosity). It couldn't be any other way.

I agree wholeheartedly. But I reserve the right to get excited and yell "CHOO CHOO!" during rallies!  :D

Great post.

I've checked all the sources and this is confirmed.  Additionally, I believe this to be one of the most inspiring market discourses of this decade.  This should be required reading for anyone interested in bitcoin.

Essentially and importantly true.  Worthy of deeper discussion, on both the necessity and sufficiency sides.

Clearly you don't mean this specific chart is necessary, but rather a chart conforming to the necessary conditions.   Knowing what those were would suffice to detect when they fail.  Similarly, clearly identifying the sufficient conditions would enable one to determine whether they were present.  I'm not going to contribute to such a discussion presently, but I hope the value of it is clear, and that this clarity motivates thought.

I am still hoping for someone to explain what chexit actually means, though.  If you can't defend it, and you don't stop using it, you're going to look like a disingenuous person, a liar even.

True. The exact graph we see isn't the only one possible, but a number of underlying conditions generating the price are, so any version of it would probably be equally exciting /infuriating /paranoia provoking.

You call us zealots? We are zealots exactly the was Sir Francis Bacon was a zealot about the scientific method. He said it that simple idea would change the world dramatically for the better and most people thought he was off his rocker, but he was absolutely right and history validated that. Praxeology will do to economics what empirical skepticism has done for the physical sciences. Bitcoin may not become the world's reserve currency, but some cryptocurrency eventually will. It's the algorithm that's revolutionary and it's bitcoin that's proving it.
if BTC eventually drops below $100/BTC agian, I may consider the possibility that I was wrong, but not before that.

We weren't lucky. We made a bet with our own hard-earned money that what we believed in was right. We did this when almost all our families, friends and colleagues ridiculed us, discouraged us, and tried to convince us anyway they could that we were making a huge mistake. We fucking deserve it if we become fabulously wealthy. Now I'm not arrogant enough to believe that I know everything, so after bitcoin went 100X my buy-in, I pulled my original investment out so I'm only playing with house money now, but I'm sitting on a small paper fortune and I'm letting it ride. Sure, I do what I can do to reduce volatility, but I have an economic as well as an ideological reason for doing so. Satoshi got the incentives right, and so far all I have heard from you is more of the same poopooing I heard three years ago at $3/BTC. If I didn't listen to such sour grapes then, I sure as hell won't listen to it now. Time will tell who's right. 

Whether or not Bitcoin succeeds, this was an experiment worth doing. We will all learn from the results, unless you wanna bash the scientific method also. But these days, the cranks are the ones on the other side of that issue.

Get yourself a sexcoin. You'll feel better :)

I indeed don't have any skin in the game, as I rejected the whole BTC paradigm as unsustainable the moment I read how it worked, and I consider taking money from suckers in the process of a bubble market to be morally repugnant so I don't touch BTC, I post here purely for Socratic reasons.  A Bear is generally someone like Mat who is IN the market but expects it to go down so he can profit in the future, and I'm NOT nor will I ever be in the market so I'm not being a 'Bear' when I comment here, I'm more of a Gadfly.  If Bears find what I say useful then so be it.  I would fully expect BTC fanatics to me even more hostile towards me then they are to a true bear, your reaction is just another data-point to me and one that confirms my earlier post.

As for my predictions in chodpaba's thread, it was a perfectly reasonable prediction at the time, a bear market had been in place for months already and the similarities to the 2011 bear market were obvious to everyone.  The prediction clearly failed for two simple reason.

The freezing more or less of USD withdraws from Mt.Gox, this fundamentally broke the exit route out of BTC and halted the market decline.  Then a few months later the entrance of China into the market and a second 'hype-cycle' that started before the full capitulation of the bear market.  As I said the price of BTC reflects the ability of buyers to buy up coins and adding a HUGE ravenous population of speculators able and willing to do just that will logically drive the market.

Socratic reasons. You are not a fucking philosopher or some kind of higher thinker. You are a pompous alt-pumper.

Your analysis is correct, although I'd shorten that to "idiot" ;) Someone who desperately tries to appear knowledgeable, to cover for an actual intellectual emptiness. Will grow into a good investment banking assistant, saying many words with no meaning.

Guys, proper form is to attack the argument not the person that delivers it. Nobody wants to see this thread degenerate into name calling contest right?

Other than that I would like to hear your counter argument. What do you think will happen to the bitcoin price?

Disclosure: I own and mine both BTC and LTC.

That's what happened. When someone talks about how smart he is an answer along the lines of "no, lol" is completely appropriate.

This is a long shot.

Are you Q-bit from techpowerup forum?

Nope. BTW there is no Q-Bit on techpowerup forum. Anyway I never posted there...

Your mad skills at trading are nothing compared to your insights! There was nothing special about that particular thread, you post so much crap that it makes no difference which I rant in.

You are the latest in a long line if day trading hero's. You fit the stereotype perfectly. There is no telling you about the perils, because you already know everything there is to know about everything.

The funniest thing is that I actually agree with all the bears on here right now, I think that the price in USD is going down. Some days I lose thousands of imaginary dollars. Oh the trauma. Perhaps I should sell out to buy back lower!!!

The difference between us, is that I don't think I am so smart as to be able to call the tops and bottoms. You can't. You might win some, you might lose some.

Every time you win, that is lucky, but you'll just rationalise it into how much of e leet trader you are. Every time you don't, then you'll dip into your grab bag of reasons why the market is rigged against you. If anyone tries to point any of this out to you, you'll become abusive and frenzied. You'll create entire fantasies to justify the way you think. You already hate me, even though you are "winning" and I am "losing". You've invented wild theories about how I am on the wrong side of trades, or making losses so I'm butthurt. When the truth is far less exotic. My entire investment strategy is boring. I minimise capital risk, I have investment horizons of decades.

All of this is far too sensible for the speculation forum though, so I advise SHOTR immediately, because that descending wedge on the 5 minute chart looks really bearish... or is it a triangle thats bearish... If only I was a trader...

I had shorted well in advance of your advice but thanks anyway.


This bit of advice however was quite frankly fucking shit and kind of reveals you for what you are; a fat gormless old fool with zero acumen or ability that quite simply lucked out big time. You are the sort of idiot that will still be holding his coins when/if double figures come.

P.S. Hope you don't mind me being a bull for the next few days but I am, and with about 40% more coins in my Bitfinex speculation fund than I would have were I stupid enough to listen to fkn tards like you. Of course, I only buy 1:1 on the way up. I save the leverage for shorting cos I just love the sight of Bitcoin crashing through support after support.

P.P.S. I am not really a bull as clearly Bitcoin is going much further down. But since I have a stop loss set to take me out with at least a bit of profit, I can't really lose by going long to see if their is some respite for a day or two. I would love to take some more leverage short positions on Bitcoin at that big dirty $840 Ask wall, but I am away to my bed. We wouldn't want some fairy godmother whale cause my short stop loss to be called whilst I slept, would we?

I'm finding it tricky to understand how your cognitive processes work, but I think you read other people's posts something like this...