Bitcoin Forum

Has anything fundamentally changed with Bitcoin in the past 72 hours?  The last time I checked, MTGox was signing up 20,000+ people a day, and our biggest problem was that people can't get coins fast enough.




  

People are marginally more cautious now. Also we are getting a lot of "i told you it was a bubble." Growth will be a bit slower. But will happen.

I know personally several people ill enjoy laughing at when bitcoin breaks $200 again.

Not that I know.  A lot of people realized a centralized exchange is a big issue but that's about it.

An 80% drop makes potential investors skittish.  Some will simply exit.  It'll take weeks, possibly months, to get back to manic.

Could be a good thing.  Gives us time to work on scalability issues, better exchanges, better wallets, etc.

Weak hands looking for 1000% EAZY MONIE OMGZ! GIVE ME COINZ!! will be thinking twice.

I think in a normal environment, gathering together more investors would indeed take a while to win over.  However, BTC is emerging from the backpages (literally if you look at ABC News, MSN Money, etc).  Not that they should, but having successful folks like the Winklevi say they arent worried about the volatility at all, its just growing pains..... well, that'll be all the validation a lot of fringe mainstream investor wanna-be's need.
People love emulating the rich and famous, and if they have and believe in Bitcoin, and I should have some as well, so I can be like them.  Not to mention, it only costs me ~100 to get in?  How cool am I to have a fancy bitcoin wallet...

Now, you get a single mainstream celebrity to endorse it... forget about it.  I can just see commemorative customized Justin Bieber Bit's being like crazy come the holiday season.... absurd, yeah.  Possible?  Entirely.  

Mind you, Im not necessarily in favor of these things, because I do truly believe that it can serve a better purpose, but rest assured, we havent seen anything close to resembling what this beast will be when it fully grows up.

 

Well on the downside...

People may be more hesitant to buy in, because of the big crash.
MtGox lag has made trading impossible at times, and creates panic.
Our exchanges in general are susceptible to attacks. Btc-E, Btc-24, Bitfloor, and Gox have all had problems recently.  


On the upside...

We're at an all time high on Google trends (double from last week)   http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=bitcoin&date=today%201-m&cmpt=q (http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=bitcoin&date=today%201-m&cmpt=q)
/r/bitcoin had over 30% growth this week. http://stattit.com/r/bitcoin/ (http://stattit.com/r/bitcoin/)
Almost 9k forum registrations so far this month. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=stats (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=stats)
Tons of media coverage, and surprisingly positive overall.
MtGox queue continuing to rise (over 28k).
Merchants continue to accept bitcoins. Check out https://www.foodler.com/user/Bitcoin.do (https://www.foodler.com/user/Bitcoin.do) if you're in the U.S. Order food from 12,000 restaurants with bitcoins :) Just started accepting.
Number of users on blockchain.info is increasing at a faster rate, passing 200k. https://blockchain.info/charts/my-wallet-n-users (https://blockchain.info/charts/my-wallet-n-users)

Bitcoins move from weak hands who panic sell to strong hands.

They could be either people willing to bring USD to the site to buy coins, or they could be all the people holding the 10 million of passive coins wanting to sell them. The second seems more likely to me.

No, although the massive amount of decent press has now taken the narrative that Bitcoin is probably here to stay and could be a very disruptive technology, which is better than 'bubble, bubble, bubble'. I think this could lead to much more thoughtful analysis instead of outright dismissive action.

While the Bitcoin technology is certainly the same today as it was before, this huge drop will have an influence on investment behavior. At least those people, which were only in for some quick $$$ will be more cautious not to get burned (again).

I would be happy if the market would cool down for at least some months to allow for some fundamental bitconomic development.

The infrastructure build around bitcoin has been tested and found lacking. Arguably this is a good thing, this is something that most certainly can be overcome with technical solutions. Hell I've allready lost count on how many new exchanges are being developed and how many new merchants started accepting bitcoin this week alone. These are great times we are living, alltough it may not seem like it if you cannot see beyond the current exchange rate. Which in itself is nice, what other investment has seen this much gains in just slightly one one quarter ?

The price rise has forced a lot of media attention onto bitcoin. This in turn has led to it to be critiqued and studied a lot more. Now its strengths are more known, as well as its weaknesses. Investors will be investing based on a renewed analysis of their position in light of the better analysis of Bitcoin that have been made in the last week (its no longer just being seen as a ponzi scheme by most newspapers like it was when it was first covered)

I am not sure I would call it fundamental but I think something has changed. Even though bitcoin can't be hacked it can be demonstrated that with DDOS'ing mt gox and causing trading lag a predictable lowering of the price occurs. It only takes a few scared people to sell, and other people will simply sell because they think the scared people will sell and they want to capture the highs and lows. Mt gox, however, have taken some steps to defend this. They threw hardware at it. They are writing a new trading engine and I think they are already changing some trading rules to help with the lag. THat is a good sign. I don't think the entirety of this last crash has to do 100% a pure bubble of speculation. Surely some of it must have been caused by attacking gox so much.

72 hours? No.

24 hours: it may be that any panic sell-off is mitigated or even negated due to Mt Gox being ready to halt new trades on a lag spike as they've successfully done several times now.

The lower threshold and shorter periods of this allow only a limited amount of reaction to the lag and imminent panic sell-off.

This is the single biggest reason I am bullish for the next few days and am holding coins and no cash.

Are you serious? That's not even a debatable scenario, that's categorically untrue. Do you think the massive amount of largely stagnant coins (mostly held by early adopters and big investors like our friend the Reptilian Overlord  ;)) is held by THAT many people? Enough people to fuel a 20,000 account PER DAY sign-up rate? Not to mention that the queue for $1000+ deposits is well over 16,000... There weren't even 20,000 people TOTAL involved in the early days of bitcoin. Even if you consider that a portion of the passive 10 mil is recent small holders, there STILL aren't anywhere near enough to fuel the recent boom in accounts and deposits.

You, my friend, are not paying attention  ;D

1) There are not anywhere near enough early adopters/big holders/small holders to fuel a 20,000 account-per-day sign-up rate that's been going on for quite some time (you are wrong by many, many orders of magnitude)
2) Queue indicates that people are verifying for large deposits at record rates.

QED: The second option (people holding passive coins logging on to sell and causing the ridiculous number of signups) is not in any way, shape, or form "more likely."

So strange to see something dropping dramatically in price without any foundamental having changed. Just as if it was... a bubble? Oh no, that can't be...

Would like to see some one take another look at those locations/addresses where satoshi is alleged to have stashed all his coins, to see if there are still there or have been moved to gox. IMO someone caused this crash by selling a huge amount of coins all the way down (maybe a million or so). Gox will know, but we should be able to work it out from the BC

>Has anything fundamentally changed?

Yes, nagle is back after a 1 year hiatus!

Is Nagle just like proudhon? i.e., a contrarian indicator?

In that case, we should be good to go, folks. Fire up the rockets again! This time let's shoot for X^7  ;D ;D ;D

At most 180k coins were sold as per the MtGox volume of that day, but realistically, much less than that because volume includes both buys and sells, and any day trades.

If someone indeed sells 1 million coins, the price would go down to $0.1, not $50, not $30. There is not enough depth in the bid side to accommodate a 1 million selloff.

QFT

Nothing fundamental but for a learning opportunity for those who lost money and a strong signal that we are in the new wild west.

To add if people haven't considered it yet I would be skeptical of MtGox lag, it conveniently allows them to manipulate the difference between buy and sell prices. (Coincidentally the crash was preceded by this unsubstantiated claim of manipulation which featured prominently on Reddit the day before the crash.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fvSYT7vhQY&feature=youtube_gdata_player

What has fundamentally changed that Bitcoins had to go to 266? The infrastructure is shit, the client is shit, the network scales like shit and the first serious possible future Bitcoin competitor has emerged.

There's SR, and now there's SD. Anything significant besides that?

Indeed. Not much has changed since the last bubble at 17 to 8. It has been celebrity hype that drove this last bubble. That seems to be gone.

What has fundamentally changed since January when bitcoins were fairly valued by the market and media at 13.50?

• More people know about bitcoin
• Most people who bought bitcoin between April 1 and now have nominal losses unless they sold
• There will be no more All Time High media announcements, and sentiment has reversed from euphoria to skepticism

It's hard to say though. There's been a lot of media on things other than the price. Most of what I've been seeing lately is about the benefits of merchants accepting it.

Also, many people were skeptical because the price kept rising. I saw multiple posts every day on reddit, about people convinced they were too late to buy in.
If we get a slow price rise after this crash, it may feel safer for them to buy in.

I'm also still seeing quite a few new merchants accepting bitcoins every day. We may need some more big names to come out soon, but it still helps.

Increased faith.