Bitcoin Forum

Evan Faggart's analysis of "Why Predicting Bitcoin 'Bubbles' is Pointless (http://coinbrief.net/predicting-bitcoin-bubbles-pointless/)" is up on Coinbrief.net

I agree that it's pointless in predicting bubbles; as we all know, past performance is not a reliable indicator of the future. And, if Bitcoin is ever going to reach the stage of mass adoption, what happened last year can not be considered a bubble; it would only have been a bubble if the majority of the world population was already using BTC & the price had soared. While only a tiny percentage of people are using BTC, it is not a bubble.

It may be pointless to the guy who wrote the article, but I'd like to know the possibility of retiring this year, so it's certainly not pointless to me.

a bubble can be defined extensionally or intensionally.  any dramatic rise and subsequent collapse is a bubble in ordinary parlance.   the next will occur when the next, higher bandwidth, channel opens for fiat to flow into crypto.  the most reliable predictors for this are not price analyses but causal events observable in the news stream, edgar filings, etc.

Most of the criticisms of TA in Bitcoin are actually criticisms of the TA posted by amateurs who didn't actually know what they were doing.

So perhaps you could point us in the direction of someone who in your opinion isn't just an amateur?

Sorry, but I can't agree to that assumption. It has been shown a myriad of times that it is possible to predict human action within very reasonable levels of certainty.

The problem is not that's impossible to predict human action in general. The problem is that for future trend prediction in particular a whole interdependent chain of actions of a whole population of investors must be predicted which greatly decreases the level of certainty, because prediction errors increase quadratically.

You can not predict where a single sheep will run, but looking at the whole flock you can predict where the whole will be running for a while (forward) and that's the trend :)

You can't predict the market normally.  But you can predict reaction at the extremes.  Volatility reverts to mean.  <--- This is what you can predict

What I was going to say pretty much.


You can analyse a steady market, but BTC is largely effected by humans. We are irrational, buy in panics, sell in panics. Some strong, some weak.

You can't analyse something as volatile as bitcoin because when it seems like you have a grasp on it, some event occurs and human emotion comes in to play.