Bitcoin Forum

How far is this from being a possible scenario for 2015?

The bottom is in. After a huge volume capitulation the bears cannot push the price down any lower - the invisible selling hand has stopped selling.

VC funding continues to pour into the space ignoring the bitcoin price entirely (75,000,000 USD in coinbase today including investment from US banking partners). The reason for banks investing is they know that the Bitlicense (due to be released in days) is positive for bitcoin. Once bitlicense is released and major players are positioned the ETF will go live shortly after, resulting in an avalanche of investment capital entering the space.

The entire 'crash' of inexplicable selling (in a sea of positive fundamentals) has been major players manipulating the market to buy up as many coins as possible for the next bull run.

They are now positioned and with short interest near ATH's still and long interest languishing at levels not seen for almost a year, it is time to push the price back upwards. This will squeeze the only gamblers who aren't in on the move - retail shorters - who are all sure we will see sub $100 coins. The squeeze will signal the start of the next bull run and drive the price back upwards towards 500 dollars where it will stabilise temporarily.

https://i.imgur.com/O9UTNTJ.jpg

Once the ETF is announced the price will begin moving upwards rapidly and draw in institutional investors and joe public alike. Online companies will begin offering a discount to buy goods online with bitcoin, creating a persistent use case for widespread adoption of the coin. The price will break 1000 dollars and keep moving upwards resulting in a mania of the like not seen since 2013.

Hopefully :)

EDIT: Previous low 166.45, current price 248.29

EDIT2: Added the historic btc short swap data..

EDIT3: Added bitcoins day destroyed to show that coins arent really moving despite the price weakness. This is new coins on the move!

https://i.imgur.com/D86EwvD.jpg

EDIT4: Can you see a high volume capitulation event? We thought it was October when the price hit 274 but the move in January was huge..

https://i.imgur.com/LULkn30.jpg

EDIT5: Added in the btc rich list..no selling from whales, this has all been new coins and leverage..

https://i.imgur.com/m4xrsr6.jpg

Shorters gonna short.

next bubble ?
swiss gold standard crash ... gold inflation = bitcoin next buy bubble = all happy !

This is complete nonsense.  No one knows if the ETF will succeed in drawing any interest at all.  Investors already know about btc, and so does the average joe. And they dont care.  Companies aren't going to expose themselves to the risk involved in dealing with btc.  I think widespread use is possible, but not any time soon.

The etf is an unknown quantity, it must have some effect when they buy in to the market, unless the Winklevoss twins are happy to sell up at this low price.

every persons which is not completely blind can see that we are in a bear bubble.

the announcement of coinbase is nothing but huge; not the amount of raised capital but who is giving the capital.

I assume we see a massive change within the next 1-2 months and me for the very first time believes that this crash was not driven by free markets but by massive manipulation

the crash was not driven by manipulation, the run-up was.  Now the free market is correcting btc value, I still think were going down in the near term (next 6-8 months).

I agree. During a bull bubble, predicting unlimited parabolic growth amid euphoria is delusional.

During a bear bubble, predicting single digit coins amid despair is delusional. It works the opposite.

I'm with you, Inca.  :)  Yet if there is another big dip, it will have to be short lived at this point. There's too much positive momentum in VC funding and infrastructure development for this bear market to continue for too much longer

The bearwhale is walking on his last legs.

This is a solid fact people are overlooking. The entire price drop (for the past few weeks) looks staged.

(read my personal text)

The latest move downwards (from below 600) is probably one of the clearer moves of direct market manipulation I have ever seen. Up there with gold moving vertically down 50 dollars when the SNB announced it would peg to the euro or when QE4EVER was announced last year by the FED.

A single glance at bfxdata shows 24,350 coins are currently borrowed in BTC swaps for shorts. This is virtually at the ATH despite a price 85% down from the actual ATH. A lot of small traders are expecting price drops. Yet those drops aren't happening and once the market begins to collectively realise we aren't going lower, there is only one way for it to go. And those coins need to be bought back. The average number of coins swapped for short contracts through most of 2014 was between 5,000 and 10,000 - mainly closer to 5,000. The change since august 2014 is quite instructive to observe. Short interest has risen 500% since then when the price was 580 ish. Short interest soared from 5,000 upwards, fell back after a major selloff, then rose even higher to where we are now.  

So what I am saying is that most of this entire move is manipulated with the use of leveraged selling into the market, allowing major players to accumulate astonishing amounts of bitcoin in the recent capitulation low, probably off exchange.

The great thing is we will find out over the coming months, won't we. Either the price will nose dive into the ground (because ..the chart..but the chart!..oh shiii) and the former CEO of Citi will have chucked away millions of dollars betting on bitcoin (today investing in coinbase) or it will rise. And if it rises, it will rise very quickly indeed - the bitcoin price is currently a football being held under the water - something that is hard to do for very long.

This news made me smile! Banks investing? Those are the smart banks.

However, I find it hard to believe the bear market can end with so much positive sentiment in the OP post. Us bulls gotta tone it down, trick the bears into thinking we've given up. (See my sig.)

Would that make us Trolls at that point?  Hanging around for hours upon hours posting in a forum about a topic we no longer believe in? LOL

Updated the post with the leveraged shorts added in..

Added a couple of other charts..

Yep, I totally agree with the sentiments being put forth by inca. The last 6 months do feel staged and while the ATH price was quite surprising, it's even more unbelievable to be at the prices we're at - not that I'm obsessively complaining as I definitely took advantage of it and grabbed my share and still am. The real bull whales were preparing this market for their timeline this whole time and lots of unfortunate people sold at huge losses and this upcoming short squeeze will be even worse depending on various leveraging. This is why I've always felt it wise to hold most of what you got and play with your bonus chips cause you never know what's going on behind the scenes and when things can change. It definitely takes a lot of sand to be able to put up with this kind of market. After going through this last bear market in bitcoin, you can pretty much put up with most other things in life more easily.  ;)

This is what the football surfacing might look like: https://www.tradingview.com/v/dHbn7XZ4/

Great stuff! Though I think we'll probably have some low volume stability before the beginning of the next bull market.
But let it come, we're patient :)

@inca
You are right, this manipulation is obvious, i also found it a long time ago.
Your Topic is a problem for the invisible hand ;)

nice topic, OP might be on to something

Who are these "major players", I wonder? Who (that is presumably already rather rich) stands to get so much richer?

This time fo real  :)
https://m1.behance.net/rendition/modules/43896343/disp/bb1a71015322b867e523eb280144a061.jpg

These people's hunger for money knows no bounds.

Warring Buffer is secretly filling his buckets with bitcoins while scaring other investors away by yelling "I wouldn't touch bitcoin with a stick"

Even so, do you think people are better off speculating on popular altcoins? Seems like there is a lot more potential to make big gains there.

What's the IPO price of the ETF?

Definitely. Perhaps it's wise to look at the charts and detect the altcoins that are not affected by bitcoin's movement so much? NuShares seems pretty independent from Bitcoin's price.

I think it is only fair to add that there are still over $15 million margin loan on BFX.  While this number has come down significantly - it is still a lot bigger than the amount of BTC short.

Hoping for ETF  is like hoping for Litecoin on Gox. Totally irrelevant.

:D haha, one of my friend's friend actually kept bitcoins on mt gox but had to leave the internet for several months and instructed my friend to use his account for buying heavily into ltc if ltc came to gox. I don't know if he was goxxed in the end or not, but that ltc going to gox story was fun.

anyway, is there any date announced when the etf goes live?

the litecoin on gox rumor did cause litecoin to go up for a while.  we will see some sort of reaction when that happens

I don't think the market is expecting it, nor pricing it in as SEC approval is at least a year-long process. If we don't get it, meh. If we do, watch out!

I actually laughed out loud when I saw that. Brilliant antithesis to the bearish tone on this forum. :)

It seems someone posted the shorts picture to r/bitcoin and it's on the front page. Whoever you are, well done!

The market clearly appears to be bottoming. Will we see a long, slow base-building, or a much faster transition to Bull market?

Yeah, that's basically also what I keep saying to myself. All the money going out of the market mostly just stays on the sidelines, ready to go back as soon as there's a definite uptrend recognisable! Bears will change their attitude as soon as they can profit from it.

Sideway for a while before slowly going up would be my bet.

I'd really like to know exactly what the original chart represents. I know what everyone *thinks* it means but I think there is some assuming going on.

What I mean is, this link http://bfxdata.com/sentiment/longshort.php shows a different picture.

I used bitfinex a long time ago, and from what I recall swaps are just you saying that whatever you have on account there, you are prepared to loan out to someone else. So from this it looks like the inference here is that because BTC swaps are at a high that there is more short interest than usual.

I have 2 things that need to clear about about that:

1. What the chart isn't showing is what the USD swaps are currently. I know when I first looked at OP's chart I assumed that was the blue line, but its not - the blue line is the rate (of interest) on swaps. Which, as you would expect is slightly lower, due to the increased availability of BTC swap.

So, On its own all the chart tells me is that more BTC is being loaned out to others than before. It doesn't tell me if this is outsized compared to USD swap interest.

2. Another thing I recall, and I'm sure I'll be corrected if it doesn't work this way. Is that the leverage anyone has available to them is some dollar value based on calculated account value x some leverage factor. The account value is calculated based on total USD and total BTC at their market value in a given instant.

I also seem to recall that you can then use your available leverage to go long *or* short. The implication here being that USD swap and BTC swap are just 2 components that make up the total swap that is being utilised by everyone who is currently long or short BTC on leverage.

If that is the case - and I repeat I may have this wrong, its been a while since I used bitfinex! - then swap interest only really tells us about how active the market is, and says nothing about longs vs short interest.

Now if anyone can give me a cast iron guarantee (amidst the usual internet sea of unfounded opinions) that borrowed BTC can *only* be used to go short, and borrowed USD can *only* be used to go long then that clears up point 2.

Point 1 remains though, whats the USD swap like? are they both up? or is there some divergence - which would give us something more telling I think?

ok sorry replying to my own post:

I think i found the answer to the first question...

https://i.imgur.com/6XeeRVhl.png

Looks like since around 8th December USD swaps have decreased, and BTC swaps have increased. Interesting.

Good. I think we've seen enough bearish sentiment on these forums.

Bitcoin fundamentals are crap. The high inflation will prevent it from taking off anytime soon.

High inflation? Year alright, the initial deployment of the coins. But you do realise that more than half of its coins have already been distributed? If you take into account the potential masses of FIAT money still not brought into the game, we're still at the beginning of things getting interesting.

Inca, what exchange was the chart of those shorts/swaps from?  Could you possibly provide a link?  Thanks!

Bitfinex is the exchange. It is the only Western exchange which allows leveraged trading that I am aware of. I am not convinced of the usefulness of the data coming out of the Chinese exchanges.

All the data is freely available on the excellent bfxdata.com

I thought it was Bitfinex
Someone was asking and I wanted to be sure

What's that? 25k coins need to be bought back? That's mining production of only one week. Sorry to pop your bubble there but the buyback of 25k coins isn't significant in the bigger picture.

shortsqueeze, ok. Happens before every big drop. Whales could pump and dump their way out. Bearmarket continue. Bulls will continue to be slaughtered.

Try buying 25,000 coins on finex and see how far you get :)

i could buy that across exchanges in under 3 days and wouldn't move the market up (if i had the funds)

The point with a squeeze is you haven't got three days. You may have three hours.

Sure, but a 'squeeze' only occures in a bearmarket and will not help bring down shorts in a meaningful way. Just temporary.
People will short from the top of the squeeze again. You'll get even more shorts.

Don't beat the dead horse.

#TrollLogic  :D

$28K by April??? Mama mia! Thatsa spicy football.

"The invisible hand has stopped selling". "Bears who can sell have sold and are now gone"
That's not how markets work. A lot of liquidity providers in exchanges are just traders and they can dump as soon as they see the market lacking confidence and buying pressure.
Do you think all the ones who bought at $150-$200 are permabulls that are gonna HODL forever and never sell? Definitely not.

The high volume is simply because it was a crash of proportions not seen for a while. Price went in a free fall that margin called and stopped longers, late shorters, a lot of people sold, a lot of people got dumped on, resold, a lot of coins exchanged hands.
High volume alone is not necessarily a sign that the capitulation is in or that eventually BTC will actually capitulate and start a new bull run.



For VC money related arguments, read my thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=931714.0

This is just a claim without any evidence.
One of the reasons market has been crashing for a year is simply lack of demand, a lack of demand that you can observe in the bid sum slowly  drying up over time in all exchanges: check coinsight.org

The hypothesis that the crash is a reflection of demand simply not being there and no new money hitting exchanges has evidence that supports it, the "it's all manipulation" hypothesis has practically none.

Longs are still higher than shorts. Don't see the point. The "shorters have to eventually buy back" applies to longers as well, a lot of them are severely underwater and have already been margin called and stopped.

The second market investment trust fund has not done much for the price to be honest. Don't know why another ETF will do the trick.

Inca, how about an updated rich list?

I am a little short on time but this is lifted from bitcoinrichlist.com and seems up to date in terms of block count. Note the complete lack of selling in the recent 'crash'. Business as usual from the largest commodity holders.

https://i.imgur.com/m4xrsr6.jpg

A quick update on the price is needed. We continue to rise upwards in a stairstep fashion.

https://i.imgur.com/ut1KqmO.jpg

But though shorts fell back with the move upwards from 160 to 259 (61% up from low) they are still at 18000. Looking back on the historical one year chart there is still a LONG way for them to drop back to a typical level.

https://i.imgur.com/Clegyq7.jpg

Cue lots of gnashing of teeth from bears. I suspect we are in for a typical bull market trend change. We may spike upwards towards 280-300 then flounder for a time before continuing back upwards over the next few months. When the short interest falls back to 10k we can say perhaps the price may reach a temporary plateau. Also of note the long interest remains low at 16 million dollars and lending rates on BTC and USD are now low. This suggests to me that at least some of this price rise is new buying.

I don't know why you keep talking about the number of shorts. 18k is not high at all considering that their USD value is a lot less what it was when price was at $500 or $400.

Longs are still A LOT higher, as always...


And technically what you are referring to is not "short interest" but quantity of BTC swaps. The short interest is how much you are getting if you are lending your coins (0.005% or something, haven't checked that in a while), and that is not an bullish/bearish indicator whatsoever.

lol?

This is BTC wall observer, not doge wall observer.

And the inflation problem will be solved within some years(but I bet when it happens you will say that the problem with BTC is low incentive for miners)

Because the number of short swaps are heavily correlated with the price movements. Please look back through the finex all time chart and find higher short interest than the last three months, thanks.

I know you have to be pedantic because you have been wrong about double digit coins now for 61% and counting from the low.

"Short interest". Again, this is not short interest. And again, shorts are not that incredibly high considering the decrease in their USD value and especially considering the quantity of longs.

LOL never said double digits were gonna come overnight or without prolonged bulltraps.

I know you are trying to sound clever. But you really aren't.

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/shortinterest.asp

Aight, you win on this one  ;D

Never heard of the expression "short interest" for "number of shorts" or "BTC swaps". I would have used "short interest" for the actual interest you get on coins (just checked, it's 0.033%, the flash return rate on bitfinex). But yeah it appears you are right with the term then.


Still, number of shorts don't seem that high to me. Until strong signs or reversal, the bearmarket is not over, and longs have to be sold exactly as the shorts have to be bought back...

Right this is playing out as expected. Price at 300 on finex  and shorts down to 15k. Entire recent manipulation retraced!