Bitcoin Forum

Barry Silbert, creator of SecondMarket, said at the Inside Bitcoin conference that he guarantees there will be another Bitcoin price bubble. He argues that 500-1000M$ is ready to be invested by Wall Street and they are waiting for institutional level infrastructure.

Source: Reddit/Twitter (http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/22ilu9/barry_silbert_at_inside_bitcoins_conference_i/)

So.. what do you think?

Sounds about right. I think we'll see a Wall Street bubble just like the Chinese one, only bigger and with a bigger crash on the other side.

$1000M dollar is nothing, do you realize that right?

If you want another bitcoin bubble you need another $20 Billion+

I think it would be naive not to think that some of the big guys are slowly buying up now so they can later drive up the bubble and cash out on the top.

Statements like these mean that he is panicking that bitcoin may not recover and his bitcoin endeavours may go down the drain. If he wants to guarantee something, then present concrete data that will show the high probability of another price bubble. Don't talk about Wall Street like it's some abstract single entity. Talk about concrete investors that have made plans or promises of investing. When you present your high hopes as guaranteed promises, then it's a sign of weakness not strength. Barry just degraded himself to the level of bulltards on this forum, who constantly "guarantee" that this is the point of trend reversal.
And anyway, don't advertise bitcoin with with promises of new bubbles. Bubbles can pop at any moment and are unpredictable investment sources, meaning they are not very attractive investment opportunities in the general sense. Rephrase and use words like "the price will rise rapidly" or even words like "boom". This statement doesn't show Barry as an very sharp fellow.

$1 Billion is nothing.
$20 Billion is nothing.
Compared to the trillions of dollars being pumped into stock markets, billion dollar is a drop in the bucket.

It just shows you how small people are thinking (I'm looking at you, cosmo).

It may not cause another bubble, but it could certainly push us above the ATH of $1200.

That amount of money trying to take up positions within a year time frame would absolutely cause another bubble.

I don't understand the waiting part. If you wanted to invest $100 million in Bitcoin would you really wait for more infrastructure to develop? Don't these people realize that the price will be much higher by the time that happens? Something doesn't add up.

Most of the self proclaimed big buyers have been using personal or purely speculative funds.

I would've though that if much of your investment money ultimately belongs to customers or your overlords then you'll be bound by much stricter rules as to where you can throw it. They'll have to wait for some regulation and insurance of sorts.

I'll tell you exactly what's going to happen. The price of bitcoin is going to stay right about where it is until the miners who are losing money are forced to sell huge chunks to Wall Street or until the price drops far enough for a critical mass of Bitcoins to change hands.  Then Wall Street will fuel the next pump. The next High will be proportionally lower and the next low will be proportionally higher because the patterns is so recognizable that people will front-run it.

great news, ready to sell

Why end of July?

I've often wondered about this - particularly at the moment, when bitcoins appear to be cheap.
I've not come up with any answers, except that
1) A LOT of 'investors' are short-term speculators who hold for days or weeks at most
2) There's still enough perceived risk to put off newcomers
3) Those who have made money from bitcoin (and therefore have both money and inclination to invest in bitcoin) are waiting for lower prices.
Still doesn't add up to me, though.

The great impediment to gains in BTCUSD is the bandwidth of the pipe.  It's just too hard to buy BTC.

The great impediment to institutional investment is volatility, which is the result of the price being too low relative to the amount of money that wants to move in/out.

It's a bootstrap problem. One way to resolve it is to increase the size of the bitcoin economy, resulting in more velocity, more churn, more liquidity and more price stability.  That will remove barriers to institutions.  Another way is to fatten the pipe, as e.g. by creating a BTC ETP.  Entrepreneurs are working on both of these avenues, so stay tuned.  (Or better yet get out there an innovate yourself.)

I sort of agree, but then I think... it isn't that hard to buy bitcoins. Again, if you have deep pockets, can't you just call up Barry Silbert and do it? Barry's team at SecondMarket will source bitcoins from all of the major exchanges/miners/locals, etc.

Let me guess, you were one of the people going around saying "new all time high by April" too?

That's how they know, probably. Buy up as much as possible outside the exchanges, when done with that pump the price on the exchanges and massively increase your net worth.

I can see why institutional investors would stay away until there's more regulation: legal nightmare in the event of lost coins.
Others? Not sure. Perhaps bitcoin is less well known/understood outside these boards than we'd like to think.

There is at least ONE big bubble yet to come. I have seen it in my dreams many times and I know it because shit hasn't hit the fan yet. After that, anything could happen, even death. Speaking of dreams, today I had a dream where gold had crashed 70% but interestingly silver not. I have no gold nor silver though, thus pretty irrelevant dream for me, however I can see it happening because the industrial value of gold is much less than it's market value. Once people realize that gold is not the ultimate store of value it will go down big time. Old school investors such as that Warren Buffer dude will lose their wealth.

I guarantee that Dogecoin will decrease way less than Bitcoin will do.
Wall Street investors told me that they will rescue doge first if Bitcoin fails, no hoax.

http://lh6.ggpht.com/06xeG1LzRRKxoTiYwA5pzpuHVwjCqWldEdrHaqkTRT7AN9lBIlZUsd0Cnfl5yFrsY5EE6v94FX38LO9NPhL-FvgCL4aqslaKUOI

Ask a random person how to buy bitcoin.  They will not have a clue.  It will probably be frightening to them.  It's just too hard.  Proliferating ATMs would help a lot.  Getting it in 7-11 or RedBox would help a lot.

Good point. I wonder why it has taken so long to spread bitcoin ATMs all over the world. Like WTF so many dudes here have a lot of bitcoins and they want to get even more rich but everyone just sits and waits for the price to boost. Instead, the ones with a lot of coins should accelerate the adoption rate. Max Keiser said he has 10k bitcoins. Why doesn't he buy like 10 bitcoin ATMs, spread them all over the world and help bitcoin to succeed?

I'm sure there will be another bubble with or without the wallstreet guys...

However it's sad to see Bitcoin reduced to the speculation/investment aspect. Longterm, Bitcoin can only succeed if it is used in mainstream. And there is a lot of work to do to accomplish that...

Come on, it's not hard. Not even the first time, all you need is a location. Make an account on this exchange, send money, click the button to convert it to bitcoin, done. Optionally transfer it to a local wallet, which anyone who knows how to email can learn in minutes. The real hurdle is that first step to deciding to look into it.

Theres an app for that ;)

http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1083084/thumbs/o-BITCOIN-PORN-facebook.jpg

Heh. Heheh. Uhm, no. $20 Million more like.

What you need is a sane way to invest serious money.

And that's it. The money will follow.

Ummm, IDK, maybe the being a douchebag has something to do with it.

Neither of you can guarantee anything, though personally I sure feel like BTC now is priced much lower than its future worth. I am definitely bullish on it and have faith in the network/community as a whole. I really do hope there is another long journey upwards in price, maybe that would finally shut everyone up who has said that Bitcoin is just a massive Ponzi scheme in itself.

Can't tell if serious or trolling about what you said with Wall Street investors and Dogecoin...
I could kind of justify it making sense in some kind of fucked up way in my head.

Purchases of Bitcoin totaling 20 billion dollars would take the price well into the five-digit range. A lot less than that will be sufficient to cause a new bubble.

Sounds a bit extreme for the short min term but I can see that Wall Street would be interested in this market once it matures

It will not even require average people buying Bitcoin to give rise to another massive bubble. If only 1 percent of the U.S. population (3 million people) decide to invest an average of only 100 dollars each, the price will almost certainly rise to several thousand dollars.

The problem is convincing people that it's worth investing in, rather than simply another electronic currency which they don't care about. You'd need adoption from a major corporation before you'd see consumers interested in using it as a payment option - as right now it's all just price speculation from people who are 'investing' rather than trying to use it as a means of payment.

I would prefer to call it an opportunity.

Could it be that the amount of new money coming in is lower than the amount for coins mined? Na "insert overly complicated evaluation here"

i have talked to friend about bitcoin. he is investment banker. he said, that bitcoin is not really interesting for him and banks wont join yet. the volume is simply too low for the big money.

imagine that 100million usd is peanuts for wallstreet. if they would pump money into bitcoin, the price would explode short term but they would have trouble to sell at a profit because the volumes are too low.
so i agree with my friend, i think its too early for wall street.

what do you think about this?

What he actually said was that he had had serious enquiry from 10 plus firms looking at putting money into bitcoin - and these are firms who do not look at things unless they can invest $50mm, so call it $500,000,000 of interest, so at $450 a coin, approx 1 million coins , or 8% of current outstanding, approximately twice the traded float.
In terms of new coin supply assuming price stability, that's 20 difficulty periods worth of coin , or approximately all the coins that will be mined this year from now.

Wall Street is a very diverse environment with lots of different types of investors with different risk appetite and different return requirements. For the vast majority of wall street Bitcoin is not a proposition in the short term, for a small minority it is very much on their radar screen - that is why bitpay, circle, coinbase etc are able to source venture capital.  Most of Wall Street is far more likely in the short term to invest in things it understands, things with dividends and cashflows, ie corporates than it is in buying a bitcoin or lots of them - but others will see that bitcoin offers other things.
Bitcoin is an option like play in the financial world, and it is not particularly correlated with stocks and bonds - thus it offers diversification - wall street likes diversification.
The IRS tax ruling is a positive - it delivers some certainty- Wall Street likes certainty and hates uncertainty
Bitcoin maturing and engaging with regulators is a positive - Wall Street does not want to get arrested for investing in bitcoin or bitcoin startups, they also want to IPO those startups they won't be able to do that without a regulatory environment.
Barry Silberts industrial level exchange will be a positive - Wall Street is not going to buy coins on BitStamp unless Bitstamp relocate to London or NY.

Things are going in the right direction for Wall Street to have more involvement in bitcoin or crypto currency, but you will have to be more patient that this forum is generally wont to be.

Bitstamp is in London, sort of. It's just their bank that's Slovenian.
Are you saying people on this forum are impati- HEY! We broke $453!!! CHOO CHOO!!

well said. i agree with all of these points. some of wall street would like to invest in bitcoin and already do it right now. but it wont be the big money yet. its also mainly about start ups and infrastructure.

til wallstreet buys bitcoins in high amounts its still a long way. as far as i know, second market currently holds around 100.000 btc (~50m usd). so its way too less to buy large amounts of btc there atm (talking about 200.000btc+//100m usd).

overall its a positiv development but we are still in an early phase.

Plenty of hedge funds are buying bitcoin.  They are doing it slowly, and stealthily, so as not to move the market.

Pretty sure Barry Silbert's prediction is right!
But right now we can only imagine and wait what's gonna happen  :(

Is this from personal experience or do you have a source?

This right here is why when people tell me Bitcoin is like the tulip bubble I wonder how stupid they are.  In order for BTC to be like the tulip bubble it would have to hit like 10 mill a coin and crash to 100 a coin in less than 3 months, we've seen nothing even close to this at all.

Only time will tell.

Personal experience, and sources.  Several fund managers have stated on Bloomberg and CNBC that they were accumulating bitcoin.  I know fund managers who contract for mining output.

+1 for the post. For me, the growth will not just be in Bitcoin but allied altcoins too. Mining investments are also on the rise. From my interactions at the bitcoin conference, I felt that as we move ahead in time, more and more institutional players are entering into mining.

Very interesting. The mining angle makes a lot of sense.
I had assumed that it would be easiest to approach big players privately and make them an offer for (say) thousands or tens of thousands of coins at a given sum each. Trying to sell that many on Stamp etc would crash the market so it's a good option for whales who want to cash out in large amounts.
Although I imagine that's going on too, I was surprised that it doesn't appear to be reflected in bitcoin days destroyed - anyone who's bitcoin rich has probably been hodling for 2-3 years so it would probably show up above the noise.
Do you happen to know (roughly) what kind of quantities they're buying up?

I know of two funds contracting for mining output.  I am not privy to the details of the arrangement.  The mining operations are in Pennsylvania and include both BTC and LTC.   Having seen the mining operations, I would estimate the mine in question at 100 thps SHA-256 plus 60 ghps scrypt.  Of that I would guess that they take no more than 80% of the output.  Numbers are crude and uninformed estimates.  In all likelihood there are many such arrangements, and on a much larger scale, but this is the one that I know about.

+1
especially the last sentence of you

Silbert is a slightly more respectable Fontas

this is the "pre-pump" stage

True  :D :D :D

but right now we´re still an overextended bull-trap!

its a bear trap!

Silbert can't actually pump the price though, he's just desperately propping

He is kind of fake Fontas, really. A wannabe Fontas

Lol you know you took a bad turn in your life if you end up a wannabe Fontas!