Bitcoin Forum

So Bitcoin is soon gettign 4 years old and it's generation rate will be halven. In the other hand, the ASIC foundries are getting their machines running hot. I am just a student from Hong Kong, which I don't really have much ideas on how will the Bitcoin prices goes in the near future, while I am being a tiny portion of the Bitcoin Economy, I would like to know your predictions towards it and the reasons behind.

Hope I could get some replies and have more clues on it.

Have you given it some thought yourself?

If all things remain equal, halving the production of BTC against the same demand would necessarily lead to higher prices. Under that assumption, that would be my prediction.

It's already in the price.

Markets are always ahead of you.

This.

Fact: Markets are made up of many individual humans.

Ergo: In order to be ahead of someone, someone else in the market must be ahead of that person.

Conclusion: Everyone being behind the market would be logically impossible.


In 50 years global oil production will likely have been cut in half or more, yet prices are not yet very high despite oil being rather easily stored. In fact considering we still burn some oil and gas simply for heat suggests the price is very LOW in real terms.

Why is this? Because markets react most strongly to supply and demand and cannot do so until those change. Demand depends on purchasing power and if it remains static while supply cuts in half in a single day prices must climb.

If we assume A: SOME equilibrium exists between positive and negative speculators which is ABOVE the current price ($ inflow), B: people who MUST sell BTC to survive ($ outflow) and C: miners producing new coins (inflation - $ dilution).

1. Assumption A makes sense because if speculator equilibrium was below the current price the price would instantly crash.
2. B and C are both downward pressures and are inflexible.
3. C will halve in 26 days.
(A-B-C = total deflation/inflation rate)
4. How big is B? Not that big - not many people subsist only on BTC that I have ever heard off.
5. How big is A? A must be: A=B+C for a maintained equilibrium. If we can agree B is small A must be about equal to C.
6. C is currently 25% yearly inflation so without it and current levels of $ inflow, deflation A would be the same.
7. When the equation "breaks" it is because money is moving INTO/OUT OF BTC and the is equilibrium shifting.
8. If C is cut in half roughly - total BTC deflation will rise 12.5% until B rises or A lowers.

The equilibrium WILL shift upwards when that equation says 25% = ~0% + 12.5%.

How much?
1. "A" is $ moving in while C is BTC dilution (against $).
2. If price doubles A will no longer be 25% of BTC total value yearly, but 12.5%! (since the $/BTC will have increased while the $ flow would be the same)
3. This would fix the equation to 12.5% = 0% + 12.5%.

Market anticipation:
1. In the summer/spring this was all well known so presumably the market moved all ready cash into BTC - the jump from 5-10+ perhaps?
2. With no further stash to move in current price levels MUST be sustained by NEW money - a constant flow "A" to match dilution "C".
3. If "A" was "Supercharged" (extra $ inflow S -> new inflow = A + S) and then dropped off after the expected halving price increase would be hit though.
4. How big is S? Personally I have boosted my investments perhaps 20% TOPS. So lets say that A = 20 and S = 5 = 0% + 25%. We assume S disappear after the halving.
5. In this case total price increase factoring in market anticipation is: 20/12.5 = 1.6.

1.6 is not a doubling, but I will take it ;)

man, ppl like you make ppl like me call themselfs idiot :D

Is Zhou Tong your older brother?

Is your name Zhou Tong? (FTFY)

I hope you dont take your own "equation" too seriously. It certainly has some truth in it, but there are so many factors that you have not yet incorporated and valued that for whitch ur and possibly any such equation will always be imperfect. Take for example the daily amount of bitcoin that are bought on mtgox for drugs or other products and services (VPN tunnels, torrent trackers,..) This number provides some constant upward pressure.

Some Events in the near future that will have some significant effect:
- ASICs (price should first go down, then back up because of increased supply for 1 week or so before difficulty adjusts)
- Reward halving (already priced in? Maybe, otherwise I can imagine some ppl want to get their hands on some bitcoins before that event, "just in case")
- increasing bitcoin adoption (ogrr.com + other online communities, more services, some financial investors, bitcoinstore.com,..)

Which is then offset by the service providers/drug dealers converting back to fiat. They aren't speculators!  ;)

Yes I highly doubt internet drug dealers see the huge potential in bitcoin or want to keep their profits in a currency that is difficult to confiscate.  ::)

If we knew that we'd all be rich in a few months time.

My thoughts are that the price is either going to go up or down, probably up in the short term.

So, sell on news?
This is your though?

No just trying to make sense of things using the biggest most known values - "A" may also fluctuate wildly, its not a constant and then there's the whole psychological element of what rising prices do to speculators etc. etc..

The buy-in would be part of "A" and the amount of this coin that was sold for $ outside the pure BTC economy would be part of B so it is kinda in there.

However I estimated B to near 0, but if drug trade is a significant part of BTC economy (and this drug trade will likely have dollar costs that MUST be paid) then B is much larger than 0. new_price = (25-S)/(B + C/2) AND B+C = B + 25% so if B is say 10% of total BTC value yearly then new_price = 20/22.5% = 0.888 - a price decrease caused by possible anticipation error of the market "S".

Anyone know the exact size of the drug trade? ;D

If it's not a scam ;) Anyway that is a maximum of 100.000 new coins arriving slightly faster than normal - I think the effect will be close to nothing.
I also assume that these ASICS will not all go online in one day. In fact lots of people will keep going with FPGAs and GPUs so difficulty could be climbing slowly for months.

That would be more A and some more B to match it, but this would be over a longer time - not the ~2 months the halving will affect sharply.

Impressive and probably accurate enough.

Nevertheless :

Economics is no strict maths. A few individuals will be ahead because they got the good informations before the others (and some will go the other side because they have been misleaded) when about 20% of the people have made the good move, it's too late for the remining 80%. That's what "the market is ahead of you" means (it's called 'clever money' by some). Maybe it would be more correct to write "the market is always ahead of you if you are not an insider trader"

And yes, what I meant is that the raise from $5 to $10 was the consequence of the halving. In this case it was not an insider job, since everyone knew about it long ago, but noone could predict when it would hit the market.


You are probably right. This may happen because the bitcoin market is quite illiquid (and because I wish it does ;-) ). Many other things may happen ...

I think when the block reward halves and ASICS still haven't been delivered the difficulty will probably drop by up to 20% as people switch off their mining rigs. Of course when ASICs hit the scene the difficulty will go up 30-100x. We also could see a continuous slide until the new year as we did last year with the drop to $2. It is Christmas time and people who may have tied up money in Bitcoin might want to use that money for vacations and Christmas presents. Hopefully WalletBit will be able to make buying Christmas presents with Bitcoins a reality before the new year.

1.) your mixing talking about difficulty and price as if the price was dependant on difficulty, which is false.

also: last year the price fell down to $2, but that had other reasons than christmas presents. It started rising again a week before the conference in prague, which was on November tewenty-something. So by your logic, price should start to rise now, +200% until new years ;).

You are right, I shouldn't have mixed the two. The difficulty will drop after the reward halves but the difficulty will increase significantly when ASICs are finally delivered. At the current price/difficulty ratio many miners will switch off at reward halving. FPGA's and a few remaining GPU miners will remain but I think we will only lose about 20% of network hash rate. This will be short lived as ASICs will dominate network hash rate leaving only the rogue FPGA miner.

The price is a craps shoot and we could see anything happen. The price didn't really do much until whatever holiday shopping would have been done. I think we could see a bit of an annual cycle and $20 is a real possibility by mid January.

Now this I can agree with ;>. It'll be a great time for people wanting to manipulate the market, there will be uncertainty and the may be panic (either way).