Bitcoin Forum

I was thinking earlier about who really is going to be buying a lot of coins in the future to pump up the price. When I consider things, there actually are a lot of people selling in large quantities everyday.

Sellers:
1) People who acquired BTC cheaply early on an want to dump for huge gains
2) Miners usually need to sell to cover electricity and such. I believe the majority of recently mined coins are sold quickly.
3) When people buy on tiger direct or what not, the BTC is instantly sold for USD


Buyers:
1) Traders/Speculators
2) Dice gamblers
3) Miners who can buy equipment in btc

Help me think of who else is buying up a lot of coins on the regular.

Buyers:
4) People covering their shorts

altcoin Speculators
poeple that want to send money to friends and family overseas without any fees.
people whose governments / banks devalue their currency at alarming rates.
hedge funds
me!

Lol, my BTCUSD holdings have been devalued at an alarming rate recently :)

Hopefully that changes soon.

That is the main issue at the moment. There are no significant buyers, and not much new money is coming into the bitcoin market; however selling pressure is at least constant from miners, if not increasing lately due to a lack of confidence on the part of bitcoin investors/speculators/early adopters. The bitcoin market is really being guided by one of the simplest economic principals: supply and demand; supply is just much greater than demand at the moment, so the price will continue to go down. Also, the people who really have to cover are the longs, not the shorts, as leveraged long positions still far outweigh short positions.

I hope these conditions do not change for a while, and so should you. If you believe in the long term success and proliferation of bitcoin as a currency and payment platform, you should welcome this bear market. It allows you to accumulate far more bitcoins than you could have if we were going to the moon right now. I suspect that low prices now will have very little impact on the high prices in the long term, or new ATHs, so why not enjoy cheap coins while they last and try to accumulate as much as possible in the medium term.

The only people who should worry right now are those that really took too much risk on the long side, and are bagholding highly leveraged long positions in the red. Anyhow, I'm glad they did what they did, because it only means lower prices once we break 340 and all of the longs are in the red. For everyone else, getting to 200s and 300s will be a dream come true. We can double our bitcoin positions when that happens, and make far more money during the next major rally.

Are you sure?

Hint: Big buyers don't necessarily use exchanges.

Most likely all the mentioned persons, but mostly investors/speculators.

I'm buying every BTC I can whenever I have fiat and the price is still under $500 for sure.

I'd feel scared with a lot of fiat toilet papers at the moment, rather have most of my money in BTC.

If you don't have your money in BTC and the price would increase 10x during a massive rally you could have 10x the purchasing power of the amount you put in to BTC.

Think about the likelyhood of this happening or BTC dieing, with all the insane good news we got the last couple of months, especially now with the Paypal announcement there is only one way to go and that is up in my opinion.

However I sincerely hope the price will stay this low for a while or even drop a little bit so I can scoop up some more coins before we might be leaving the 3 digit realm for good.

Yes, I am confident that right now, there is very little buying pressure on exchanges or OTC. If there is buying pressure on OTC, the price rises there, and then OTC buyers will compete and as the price rises, some of them will decide to use exchanges because it will be cheaper there. I would think that OTC transactions probably are generally at lower than exchange price by a small percentage right now. But this could easily switch; since OTC transactions have the benefit of no slippage and high volume, buyers will also decide to pay a premium if demand is high. Yet, if the premium becomes too high, some OTC buyers will switch to exchanges, taking a little more counterparty risk and possible slippage problems, because the lower price benefit will be greater. The result would be higher prices on exchanges. It is possible that OTC coins are going at a slight premium right now, but its not enough to raise the prices on exchanges. To me that means it is not significant.

This is not to say there is not fiat waiting on the sidelines for lower prices. We can even see a lot of evidence of this on the bitfinex's orderbook. Smart money will wait very very patiently for a major capitulation. Any hints that the bear market is not over yet, and they will smartly wait longer.

only idiots buying now coins before the big crash...

the party is over...

Sellers:
4) People that bought with money they couldn't afford to lose and pussied out :)

You don't think that for example the Bitstamp's price is the reference price used in (big) OTC deals, and there could be downward manipulation in exchanges because of that? Or is it just that there is no demand, and GABI, BIT, Paypal etc. have just made very bad decision to be involved with bitcoin? Every noob knows bitcoin is doomed  ;D ::)

It will change soon if past history could be a guide.

Everyone who believes that bitcoin is undervalued because people don't really care about bitcoin atm.
Like they didn't care about the internet back in the 90s...

I didn't care about sending text messages (e-mail) to my fellow students on the University network either. That changed.

Surprising thing is the Internet was very popular in the late 90s.  PayPal didn't exist, using eBay was a pain because you had to wire money manually, and online banking was virtually unheard of, but the concept of looking up information, online gaming, and ordering products online from merchants using credit card was already well established.

Remember the dotcom boom exploded in March 2000 so pretty much everything up to that point in the mania cycle happened in the 90s.

The late 90's. My first email experiences were around 1995 (Pegasus). Internet access at home only started in 1998 for me with about 100k connections in the Netherlands. Perhaps others were connected sooner, but the big boom was the late '90s, not before.

People who have no other way to save their money and are assured that their governments can't interfere with their money through inflation.

was using email in 1991, it was pretty widespread in universities at that time.

people who dumped at higher price

Money laundering also need to buy bitcoins

Buyers:

Every day bitcoin lives, I get more confident in the system.
I just buy. I feel happy when I receive them.
I usually don't look at the price too much, I just buy the relative dips. I'm not really good in catching the knife.

Have been using e-mail since 1986... Knew in the mid-to-late 80's that packet-switched networks (i.e. TCP/IP) are the future and not circuit-switched ones (X.25), and that even phone calls would be routed over IP networks. Sadly, I did not bet my meager student wealth on it then :-(
Now, with wife and family, I can't just bet my meager employee wealth on bitcoin, even though I'm equally convinced that it (or at least the blockchain concept for currency transactions) is the future. So I just gather small amounts. Still I'm happy to know that at most 0.1% of the world population can ever have more bitcoin than I have now  8)

Onkel Paul