Bitcoin Forum

New member signups on these forums have finally taken a decisive turn to the upside.  Yesterday there were 79, and today 82, and the day is not over yet.  82 would be the most since September 14th when there were 84 - nearly a month ago.

Positive news coverage of Bitcoin is rampant, and the association with the Occupy Wall Street movement is giving us some serious exposure.  Something is in the air, and of course this is just speculation, but I think we're about to leave the $3.xx price for a good long time, if not forever.

Hide your kids, hide your wife, and re-flash those mining rigs!

Oh yes, I have this feeling also. Hope these feeling become reality.

And hide your husband too, because bitcoin be coming through!

Cool so if I create a sockpuppet account today I can increase this "imminent uptrend" by 33%  ::)

No... I'm not really following you...

In case IHBT congratulations  :-\

I am afraid you are right. Nothing is moving. It is all pretty much dead.  :-\

Only thing that could possibly save us right now is a big company getting bitcoin adoption started etc.

What, like Kiva (http://bitcoin-trader.blogspot.com/2011/10/kiva-software-engineers-pushing-for.html) or something?

lol where is the chart-porn!? ;o)

It's all crap!!

$19: We're about to break 20 again, expect a rally soon.

$15: The rally back to 30 and beyond is about to happen.

$14: It's been steady at 14 for weeks, rally should be coming.

$12: It cannot go any lower.

$10: BUY, BUY, BUY

$9: We should hover back to 12 soon, and then rally back up.

$6: This is the point where people will start buying, expect it to got to hundreds within weeks/months

$5: It cannot drop lower.

$4: Many miners have shut down their rigs, expect a rally.

$3.90: It will go up soon...

I keep lurking here because this is really a lesson in self-deception,. Before you say anything, no, I'm not trolling, I've been here for a while, I rarely post, and I'm truly very interested in BTC for various reasons. Yet, I'm just baffled by the almost religious bullishness.

I wouldn't go as far as to say religious bullishness.  There have been many times BTC was poised to raise in value and just about every time there is something negative to stop it (i.e. hacks, massive sell-off, thieves,  supposed ripoffs, bunk exchanges, or just general FUD).  Even now one of the first things you see when you search is the Allinvain post (which I still do not believe BTW).  Value started to drop right after the supposed Allinvain theft and continued down after the Mt.Gox hack, every time it starts to stabilize something else happens.  

BTC has its value in many ways...I don't think the USD value accurately represents that.  Many are looking for something exactly like this but because of difficulty buying (cannot purchase by standard means i.e. paypal, credit card...the fact that you have to do a bank transfer scares a lot away) or because they read some horrible article they get scared away.  I am not typically a conspiracy type person but I do believe in this case there are entities which do not want BTC to succeed.  They have every reason to be scared, BTC has valid uses which cause them to lose money.  I would never think BTC will replace any currency (USD or otherwise) but credit card companies and those who collect exchange fees could lose money for sure if use became widespread.  Those who control the transactions do not want another parallel method of payment reducing their income.  Not only that but the banking system and US govt. have been working very hard to track and verify every bank transaction.  If you deposit/withdraw more than a couple thousand cash your bank is required to file a report to the govt., if you deposit more than 5k you have to fill out paperwork.  This is to stop drugs/terrorism/money laundering, just like every other freedom you have lost it has been brought about by FUD.  

They are working very hard to get rid of cash in general...why would they allow BTC to succeed.  Best to destroy it before it gets a foothold.

Just today for instance there is a PopSci article about Bitcoin (actually about tracking Satoshi)...it appears on the frontpage but when you click the link it is gone.  Just like everything else related to BTC as soon as there is a possibility for promotion it disappears.
(edit: I emailed the author and he explained it was a bad link and it is fixed)

I think the parallel to religious fanaticism is perfectly appropriate. What the OP posted is exactly true. I've watched the forum for some time, cried out about how clearly it was where Bitcoin is heading, and then gave up and stopped coning altogether. Really, the one thing that has me coming back to read is to see the self-deception in action as well as the circle-jerks that occur among the pious. Its better than any Sociological field study I did during my college years.

Here's something for your PhD: Someone just bought 6000 BTC.  Hide your kids, hide your wife!

And there will be more, attracted by the low price. Now lot's of people afford to have 20 coins. it's like buying silver. You don't need to buy tons. Buy some ounces, store them and if enough people buy a few, everybody will be rich. Wealth exists in the world, but if it's distributed to 5% of the people this means POORNESS. If you redistribute it (of course, not equally), everybody's standard's rise.

Well, the difficulty is going to have the biggest drop ever tomorrow by more than 160000 and the drop size is growing.

That and add the merged mining this week, I would guess the miners willing sell for less in the future, not more.

At $4 dollars, it is at a discount I suppose. Definitely easier now for people to own some of their own.
I want to see a rally already..



 

We won't see a rally.  If there is one, you will see lots of people dumping their coins once it rises enough.  Miners who are holding for a better price (most just watch for peaks).  Speculators who bought in at the last dip will be looking to unload their tens of thousands of coins as well.  Same pattern as always, slight rally, everyone dumps their coins, it find a new low, goes back up a bit as people buy in expecting a swing, it swings, people sell their cheaply bought coins.  There are a lot of coins out there waiting to sell the minute the price starts going up a bit, because the past few months have shown that a price above 5 dollars is not sustainable.  It's beginning to look like 4 isn't either, time will tell. 

This... BTC is plagued by scammers and hackers, who are the main reason why the price is so low.

This part I agree with.  I don't think it'll be from $4 though...

Why do we talk about being "saved" by a corporation? That's like waiting around for a "job creator" to rescue you. Bitcoin does not need any help, if it did, it would have no merit.
The price of bitcoins is irrelevant. If they are $100/ or $.01/, they are just value place-markers. Are nickels a failure because they are only worth $.05?     

Yeah, but I bought at $14, so the price is a little bit relevant to me (I should have sold at $10, but then I though it'll be ok it's going to go up, then I thought $8 but then I remembered  'don;t invest anything you are not willing to lose', which I had, so then I thought fuck it. Please don't tell my wife)

It's painful to have bought at $14. As an investment vehicle, bitcoin is extremely risky asset. With large potential for upside gains and downside losses. You may still see profits in the future, especially after production is cut in half in 2013.

For others thinking about buying bitcoin, consider using it as a currency instead of an investment. The real power of BTC is fast, private buying/selling between regular people. Getting rich quick is only rarely going to happen in finance.   
P.S. I won't tell my wife either, just in case our wives talk.  ;)

And this, kids, is the first honest admission of a failed trader.  Also the reason we're still at $4.  Sunk cost fallacy in full swing.  Miners are investing their power bill, also not selling -- they're massively bullish on future price.   Those looking at unrealized losses are in the "denial" metal stage of post bubble.  The part where everyone convinces themselves to hold for the long term.

Saw it with my wife and her $80,000 in Lucent stock in 2001.  "It's down, I can't sell now." "It's just a correction." "Oh well, I'm in this for the long term, it'll recover." "I'm down more than 50%, that's a huge loss.  I'll be writing it off for years." "It can't go any lower, it's still a great company." "I'll just keep holding." "Ok, it's not worth selling now..."  "You trade garbage like this all day long, you deal with it.  I can't even look at this piece of shit any more." 

I thought it was a very good lesson.  $80k of unrealized gains may not be a lot of money for many, but for a 26 year old it would have been a *very* noticeable chunk of her yearly take home.  The ~$5k by the time she was ready to sell not so much.  Over the next decade she's become a much, much better trader and investor as a result.  Unfortunately, the tiny amounts people have invested in bitcoin won't be teaching the same kind of lesson I don't think.

Even though I bought at the wrong time I think it's still worth the gamble. Either bitcoin will fail or it will be incredibly successful. I think only a fool would think it wasn't worth the gamble - if it succeeds I'll be a multi-millionaire, if it fails I've lost a few thousand dollars I can afford to lose.

40 of those were sock puppets trolling the Alternate coins forum.

I am starting to feel like I am one of the only ones with just a single account on this forum. 

Nah you're not the only one; there's another.

sadly so many of you have bough where the price was >10$

i would also be religious-BEARish now if i were you :D

chart look bullish, although. do you realize those strong bullish outbreaks? seen them before the last months? NO? well, that is a point, isnt it?

http://img824.imageshack.us/img824/782/unbenanntulu.jpg

also be sure to check out http://www.bitcoinbullbear.com/index.html

wow! huge sell wall 4000@4 just went up.  :o

another 2000@3.99

someone's liquidating

That's what they WANT you to think.  If they actually wanted to liquidate they'd just take a dump on the buy orders.  This is The Manipulator, he's back!  After taking a monstrous assblasting at $8 and $6 he's ready to try again at $4, as I predicted.   He just wants cheap bitcoins.  BUY BUY BUY.

Seriously though, 6k coins is about current daily mined volume, or only $24k.  It's nothing.

Market is very bullish.

I expect 3$ in the next days.

And yes i said bullish. I can't even imagine the price if the market was bearish...

I can.  Called $1.25 as a capitulation point at $5, still thinking it's valid at current price/difficulty.  And yeah, Wednesday is almost over with no jump up.  Nothing much last Sunday either.  I don't have high hopes for Thursday, and weekend effect will kick in after that.  As a very wise man once said, "drop em or get raped."

I used to use twitter #bitcoin tagged tweets as another measure of bitcoin popularity - until someone started spamming it, unfortunately any measure that is made public will be gamed.

There is some MAJOR wtf stuff happening at all the pools... hope this doesn't affect price, lol

What stuff?

deepbit is definitely down and apparently a couple other big ones are down as well.  You can visit deepbit by using the ip and the hash rate is something like 9Ghash :-(

Maybe you should play the lottery :D.

It's also an instrumental tool to initiate panic.

I was expecting an artificial price spike due to this.  I didn't expect it to be so brief or feeble.

Since bitcoin is a risky experiment, I can understand if someone is consistently bearish, but those that are consistently bullish baffle me, too.  Like a monk repeating their mantras, they do seem like the ones that post the most regularly.

My guess is that at least one of the perma-bulls is trying to sway public opinion, and posts a "rally!" message every time they take a long position. At least this makes some kind of sense.

That's very much what happens.  The biggest perma bulls have the largest financial interests in pumping the market up.  They're been at it all through the $32 -> $4 fall.  It hasn't proven to be successful so far, so one wonders why they persist with a losing strategy.

The question is, is the price "so low"? It seems like it because it shot up to $32 at one point. However, just one year ago, 1 bitcoin was 20 cents US and if you had told me it would hit $1 by this time this year I'm not sure I would have believed you.

That is true.  Bitcoins could be worth $1 each tomorrow and some people could legitimately still claim that bitcoin's value has boomed.  This is assuming they either mined or bought bitcoins when they were worth a handful of cents each.

What we really need to look at is how many people were aware of bitcoin, and had a substantial stake in it when they were worth just a few cents each.  If 100 people bought in at 10c each, yet the vast majority of people interested in bitcoin (let's say, 1000) bought in when popularity boomed in early/mid 2011, the vast majority would be disillusioned with the price hovering around $4.  There are a few winners, but many losers.

Bitcoin's price bubble is still deflating and it's difficult to see what current product or event could see it reach $10+ again.

If the price drops below what some promote as the 'long term trend' - then bitcoin will not have any plausible growth story - it will not stop collapsing until it reaches the level that can be supported by commerce using bitcoin.

By supporting I mean the situation where the utility of the bitcoin system is greater then the electricity and other costs of running the system.  It is very hard to quantify the utility of the bitcoin system - there are some transactions that are facilitated by it - but even if we count that they operate with 50% of profit (which is probably way too generous even for SilkRoad) and if we all of that profit count as generated by the bitcoin system - I suspect that this still would not be even the same order of magnitude as the $500K/month electricity cost of the recent hash rate (which is dropping but not very fast).

+1

true dat

but how did you get your 500k figure? which electricity cost, w/mhash? and at which hashrate/difficulty would it be stable at say 1$, if 7200 btc are produced avery day... ?

That $500K is a very rough estimation - but this is all I could arrive at: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=28780.0

Another huge wave of interest, with lots of new money coming in. That's why a lot of people are trying to introduce bitcoins to the Occupy movement. The only problem is, those people have no money.

Good point.

I consider it inappropriate to try to push the Bitcoin pyramid on the Occupy Wall Street people, who have a legitimate beef and are trying to do something about it.

Of course, if OWS finds Bitcoin useful all your previous preaching will negate due to new wave of adoption

To add to the news,one of the films I'm involved in making is partly funded by BTC.I can't say too much at the moment but having an actual film funded by BTC will definatley help things.

Disagree - the Move Your Money project (moveyourmoneyproject.org) is closely tied to Occupy Wall Street, and bitcoin is another way of achieving the same goal of removing money from Wall Street.  It's clearly relevant to OWS.

And Bitcoin is not a pyramid: more accurate would be a one-time startup cost to all of the early adopters, same as with any VC-funded startup, until most of the coins are minted.  The blockchain does take money to support, but which one do you think more closely aligns to the beliefs of OWS participants: a bunch of crypto-hackers trying to build an alternative currency, or wall street banks?  Both take a cut of profits (banking fees, mined blocks) to keep going.  And bitcoin will never need a $1 trillion bailout, which comes to $3,300 per man, woman, and child in the US.

Also, The Occupy Wall Street General Assembly can't just walk into a bank branch and get an account.  PayPal has shut down addresses associated with OWS.  But they were able to just create a bitcoin address, at no cost, and have accepted almost $1100 so far through their donation address:
https://blockexplorer.com/address/1Q7DQVTubbUqr5by2YoZJRKCEzj9D3LQ9w

It seems clear to me that bitcoins are highly useful to OWS participants.  The perfect is the enemy of the good in many cases, and you often have to choose between bad or even worse.  Bitcoin, which certainly has problems, is a useful financial tool in some situations.  If the only thing Bitcoin ends up being used for is to easily send money to prohibited groups like Wikileaks and OWS, I'd consider it a success.

He said a 'big' company?

630,000 people using Kiva since 2005?   

That would be like getting Bitcoin users to accept Bitcoin.

I actually think Bitcoin adoption by a huge corporation at this point might kill Bitcoin altogether.

I think those in the Occupy movement DO have money.  They're likely mostly middle class.  The demonstrations are tame, and tame demonstrations are led by people with something to lose.  Why would the middle class be part of the Occupy movement?  Because they don't want to be poor!

+1

After a never ending series of hacks, scams and security accidents Bitcoin is losing its market value even when the fundamentals appear to be sound.  Though I have faith in Bitcoin itself, I don't have any faith at all in the price anymore. 

The numbers were up to over 100, but now are back down, no breakout for now I guess.