Bitcoin Forum

It's moving up slowly but surely right now.  We're going to be hitting that fake wall soon this morning.

+1  ;D

it does not matter if you call it reversal or rally. Both just say that prices are rising

China is going tone huge.  Once China catches on then S. Korea and other Asian countries will follow. 

Do you have any data how many Chinese are already buying or using bitcoins? Is there any measure available for awareness of bitcoins in China?

I know what you are trying to say. But rally does not mean that the upside is bigger than market reversal.

You can have a rally in a 1min chart and it only moves 0.2% and still can be called rally.

Agree.

Woo!  Rally!

If you search you'll find some charts in this forum showing a sudden increase in the number of bitcoin nodes in China, following a publication in an important press there. That's all I know about "awareness", no idea if they're already buying.

linking this here to make clicking easy for others...

http://mtgoxlive.com

The number of Chinese listening hosts (http://bitcoinstatus.rowit.co.uk/countryHostsWeek.png) is almost back to where it was before the peak. Comparing to the chain status graph (http://bitcoinstatus.rowit.co.uk/downloadsWeek.png) the majority shut down their clients before even downloading the entire chain. Since the decline in hosts is gradual I don't think it's caused by The Great Firewall.

If the Chinese government wanted to crack down on virtual currencies, then Tencent Q-coins etc might also disappear.

Another fast way would be to shut down btcchina for good...

.

Nice to see the rally, but I do agree with the analysts that a mini-rally isn't that useful. Let's see if this one grows to something bigger. I think it's definitely possible.

Holding steady at one price would be decent.

At least the decline has been much slower. It used to fall about an average of one dollar a week. It has been hovering around this price for about 3 weeks.

This means that we are just about at that point where enough interest is coming in weekly to make up for the inflation rate.

If the price can hold steady long enough and maybe start to rise a bit with more use, then it is nothing but UP when the inflation rate is cut in half.

Yay! Back up to $5  =D

$5 wall went poof!

Just like the 5.2 wall will go poof!

I suggest the best source is the only Chinese exchange btcnchina.com

http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/btcnCNY#rg90zvztgSzm1g10zm2g25

There's has been a significant increase in trades in the last couple of months. Though it's still below most European exchanges.

Certainly hope so! We just hit 5.17!

5.2 wall got deleted

what happened to that wall?  :P

Where do you guys see these walls? Is there a good visual way to see all open offers?

mtgoxlive.com is my weapon of choice =D

(clarkmoody too, but right now mtgox websockets are broken)



You can see in realtime a HUUUUGE wall (literally, it shows in vertical a graph of orders), jsut go "poof" and a gray "ghost" line showing where it was... it is amazing.

http://mtgoxlive.com/orders

Looks like

http://www.reply-mc.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/manipulator.jpg

Yes, the wall was bought into a bit and then simply disappeared. Excellent!

I'm going to be the Manipulator for halloween.

The deleted wall is back, divided in more or less equal parts at every 50 cents.

Just ignore it, I am sure the owner of it will also back off if we bite them.

BTC is back to the price it should be!
I see $7 unless someone cashes in 10k or something.

Hello, my name is dellusional.

He saw the price rising faster than expected, so dropped his asks and raised his price a little bit.  It's what i would do if I thought the price had a good chance of going above 5.20.   

But did you see that chance?  In other words would you do that in current (or more precisely recent) circumstances if you had this amount of bitcoins on 5.20?  Just asking.

He did that many times before... it looks like he DOES NOT want to sell, only wants to keep the price where he wants...

In fact in some nights, a bid wall show up too, and keep the price stuck...

I guess that is done so that when the wealthy person/group/bot/whatever is ready to trade, the market is more or less where it was left.

 from http://bitcoinity.org/markets?theme=light 

circled area is a wall; if you mouse over it on the site, it will tell you how many orders are needed to get past that price

http://i56.tinypic.com/pvdp3.png

I just said in the post you quoted, that is what I would do.  The real story is likely someone bought in on the dip in the past couple days, and is now waiting for a mini rally to sell them for a nice tidy profit.  Rinse and repeat.  You know, like people usually do with penny stocks?  All this talk of a manipulator trying to keep bitcoin down just reeks of people new to the markets, who need something to blame.  

Well, not exactly - you guarded it with 'if I thought the price had a good chance' - my question is did you see that chance?  This is just me being curious.  I think that 'The Manipulator' meme is entertaining.

Oh of course, you're right.  No I didn't, but I wasn't watching either, I am reading all this after the fact.  Just conjecture on my part!

No legs on this rally so far.

It's almost a slow steady rise opposite of the slow steady fall we have been experiencing for weeks.  Sucks, cuz I just went short on Bitcoinica to test it out.

The 'rally' let me sell off some bitcoins at a nice profit when some silly sausage decided to spike the price to $5.35.  Well done, sir  :D

I think it was quite a few sausages, haha. Now lets continue this slowish climb, or have another rally.

This rally better get somewhere... we can't possibly be headed down again :(

I think it will keep going up, but it shot up so fast I think a lot of people just on board the sell bandwagon. Rather then panic buying, people started selling to take advantage of the sudden spike. Hopefully it shall continue its climb, and/or have a less sudden spike like rally.

And this is why it's going to take a loooooooooooooong time for the price to recover to the previous high, if it ever does.

My asks were too high, none of them got taken.   Bulls make money, bears make money, but pigs like me get stuck with bitcoins instead of money.

I attack any spike with sells simply because the spikes do not last.  I'm sure others do the same.  If you know the price isn't going to hold but you can make a tidy profit, you take what you can.

It is normal in a bottom forming process to give many false signals and kick out the weak hands, like you

what rally? ???

What is a "bottom forming process"?

Someone (or some persons) have repeatedly tried to start a rally by initiating a buying frenzy.  No news about new innovative bitcoin products that people want to use, no major retailers taking up bitcoins, nothing to support the rally.  The smart money sees through the hype and knows when to take advantage of the situation.  If I'm wrong then all the low Asks will be pulled much higher and stay there the next time someone decides to get frisky with their trading.  

Squats

It's someone sitting at McDonald's sucking down Quarter Pounders like they're going out of style.  Their bottom is forming quite nicely  :D

Look for example on the USD index botton forming recently. It was a long process of ups and downs until finally it shot up.
http://imghaven.com/images/23976/DXY20110110.png

The thing about looking at graphs and trying to predict the future is you can only do it after its happened, by which time it's too late to trade.  Using the example graph, the US dollar is like the least ugly girl still available at the school formal.  She's the best choice of a bad bunch.  The other currency rocketing up in value right now is the Japanese Yen, a currency issued by the most indebted first world government in the world (GDP ratio wise) with a rapidly aging population and one which would be instantly bankrupt if they didn't rely on their own citizens to buy out the debt and pay very low interest rates.

Bitcoin could well be forming a 'bottom'.  People have said 'it can't go much lower!' for the past few months but I agree that much below $5 would be getting a bit silly.  The question is, is there anything to push us up to $10, $20 and beyond?  There are moves to make payment for goods via bitcoin enabled mobile phones available, but the idea is one converts the bitcoins to dollars as soon as possible.  Merchants aren't currency traders and generally don't want to take on the risk.  I have yet to see an honest idea that truly signals bitcoins are poised to head much higher.

Why would only an obvious connection be able to cause a rally? Bitcoin capitalization at present is around 35 Million - that's just 0+Epsilon

• Rumors that Greece is returning to Drachme can do it any day now (I am really wondering how the Greek can be so thick as to leave their Euros in a bank account within grasp of the Greek government)
• Bitcoin adoption in Cambodia can do it (remember, Cambodia does not have a national currency that is worth the name, but Java capable cell phones are ubiquitous in Cambodia)
• Any billionaire deciding to add a tiny number of Bitcoins to his portfolio as a hedge can cause it
• Even normal growth of the bitcoin economy could cause a rally at some point

I agree that BTC going down much further would be ridiculous, but there are thousands of non-obvious reasons it can be at EUR 100 by the end of the year. Or still at 3.70.

I tend to find that S3052 does an amazing job of predicting. People make jokes about tea leaves, but for the last couple months nearly every major movement has been stated ahead of time. At first I didn't know what to make of it, but I researched TA, and started paying close attention. I signed up for the subscription and found it has been worth it.

Chart analysis works for me as well. Of course, you have to know what you are doing..

I still remember back at 15, "Future looks bright for bitcoin!"  ooops.

The biggest thing in my opinion that is going to make the price go up quickly is that as soon is we get some "market confirmation" all the sharks who sold out for a drop in price back at 15 will be buying back at 6 - 7.  Seems to me a large part of the market is just people sitting out, getting ready to jump back in. I think that will take us past 20. Just my guessing though.

A quick bubble to 20 (or hell, even 15) would be awesome.  We'd see another immense growth in hash rate, and another slow crash.  I won't need too many cycles like that to turn my bitcoin pocket change into enough dollars to ... not be invested in bitcoin.

We already had people buying back at 6... except someone with 10k coins stopped it instantly :(

grod, don't wait. Sell now.

I typically sell on sunday nights and tuesday evenings.  Have been every week (except the time I missed one at $8) since $24.  Pains me to dump at $5, but it also pained me at 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13...  You get the picture.

I'll "buy back" (through mining of course) once I see a sustained up trend.

cycles come and go. there will be a time when tuesdays and sundays will be very different

I don't see any rally, bitcoin is just above $5, though I must say that the bitcoin has been relatively stable of late.

That's Elliot waves for you.  Early on I noticed the rally/consolidate/flatline/drop cycle repeated over and over and over.  A long "stable" period at the same (or slightly decreasing) price makes me nervous.

Right now, if you look at the charts, we have a quadruple bottom (!!!) forming, with volume going steadily down and successively smaller highs.  What does everyone make of this?

Of course the timespans in which the waves complete seems to increase logarithmically/exponentially so it makes sense that this flatline should last longer than the ones which preceded it. If BTC ever does see use as common currency it will likely be within extremely long flatline periods so it's probably a good thing to see log/exp increases in the cycle length.

Your "quadruple bottom" is actually a trading range, with a slight negative bias.  In order for this to be a reversal pattern it'd have to have a convincing breakout utterly smashing several resistance levels.  If that happened I'd switch from bear mode to bull mode, like I've briefly done in the past.

Have to disagree.  It *could* flatline with decent volume if the bots are the main traders.  We've seen that before.  If the market maker is bigger than the entire market then prices aren't going anywhere.

Also, "very long" is relative in bitcoin time.  We're talking days to weeks here, not months to years.

What makes matters worse is there's no real way to hedge against bitcoin volatility.   Bitcoinica and its insane margin requirements doesn't count.   A market cap of billions could provide stability, but even a smaller market cap could be stable IF we had options trading on a regulated exchange to create hedges with.  Oh, and the exchange rate wasn't $5 but more like $50.

Merchants could go long in the money puts and be secure knowing bitcoins they take in won't drop far enough to kill their margins.   Miners could short calls to go long puts, locking in long term income and planning operations with time horizons measured in months or years instead of days.   All sorts of stabilizing options (pardon the pun) become possible if you have reasonable margin requirements and a prayer of actually assigning your options.

That Bitcoinica has high margin requirements and takes positions very cautiously is encouraging. The big problem with options in an unregulated market is getting paid when the counterparty takes a loss.

Loans, bonds, options, and investments, all of which require payback, require enforcement to be viable. Anonymous finance only works for immediate transactions.

Maybe people are starting to realize that bitcoin can be traded for goods instead of USD or other fiat currencies.  Hence the stability.

How many alpaca socks can you use?

Depends on the region.. In the Mt. Everest region, you'll need a few...

I've got muskox wool (Qiviuq). You'll only need one pair and your neighbors will be warm.

This stability is quite impressive.  Bravo bitcoin, bravo!

Wow, it hardly moved!  Almost as if it's acting like a currency..

this is boring as hell..mtgoxlive sucks these days..ah well back to porn for now

don't be fooled. "stable" also means that it counter-reacts to applied forces and balances back to its state before the event. in the last weeks, there was no force to the price - just look at the low volume! once (if ever) the volume rises again, we will see if it is stable. for me, right now it is just "dead" and boring.

Wait, bitcoin is dead??  SELL SELL SELL.  Then again, contrarian traders like myself have done very well on bitcoin recently.   BUY BUY BUY.

Which direction?
I feel that people are becoming more confident now that the price is holding steady, and good news in the next couple weeks may spark a rally. Gut feeling.

Actually the MtGox price seems to be lagging atm. Even some of Gox's own currency markets are out performing the USD/BTC rates. To say nothing of quite a few other markets around the world.

With the dollar appreciating and flight from the euro, a stable USD/BTC might be an attractive hedge.

Right, and the same thing will happen to btc betties that happened to the franc.  If a lot of people start using them as a hedge, the price will rise. Then people will be wanting to hold betty not only because they have a stable value...but because they have a rising value!   ralley.

The BTC market is too small to be a hedge of any kind.  But stability will be good especially for merchants and sellers using bitcoins.

A betty is the BTC:USD pair? I don't follow what you're saying, the Bitcoin central bank will peg the BTC to the Euro? Or you mean before Zurich threw the wrench into the rally? Yes, this would be an ideal scenario, if it's easy to sell your european currency (euro, kroner, swissy) for btc (because it's seemingly pegged to the dollar) then it will appreciate even against the dollar. This would be an excellent development ahead of a Greek default.

Due to lack of interest, the rally has been cancelled.

No Nagle, this is just the brief calm before the storm and then it's up, up, up TO THE MOON!

Is anyone still this delusional at the moment? I need some entertainment.

Just remember, when we quickly rise past 50 you should sell big. Then you will be like the suckers who sold when we went from 1 to 4 before going up to 30.

I'm not exactly seeing what will be lifting BTC up to $10 again, let alone $50.

Trust me, bitcoin will be worth $100 one good day !

I would like to see a similar graph with some darlings like AAPL or gold.

Be thankful.  If they held on and dumped at $20 you may never have seen $30.

Although your advice is good.  While it's good strategy to sell at any price (as you receive mined BTC) when a stock is trending down it's a good idea to hold and simply adjust your stop losses when it trends up.

Were you able to see what was lifting BTC to $30 a few months ago?

Absolutely.  Wildly optimistic speculation combined with hoarding.  But most of all: silkroad.

Of those hoarding is back with a vengeance.  Silkroad is still around, but not acting as much of a demand on the supply.  All we need now is another catalyst for the wildly optimistic speculation and we're off to the races again.

But probably not until after the holidays and capitulation.

Stop losses could hurt you if its just a temporary bounce...as happened in May.

I don't agree, but its just speculation. I think we will see rising prices in the next 45 days.

I have quite a few grand that finally transferred into Dwolla a week or two ago. Usually I buy right away, but I'm now one of those waiting to be convinced it won't move before I help move it...
(The Dwolla lady that called me, wondering what the heck, and verifying my identity, sounded very nice. I just hope Dwolla doesn't get Goxed)

I know! I have met dozens and dozens of people like you! I love your type...all waiting on standby. The slightest up move, and BOOM! Up we go. How much will the number of people invested in bitcoin grow?  10x  maybe. 100x??

But you are not selling what you have yet?

If BTC does rally again, how fast *can* it rise? There has never been anything like bitcoin before. Jumping to $30 for a day was interesting, but climbing from $0.008 to $5-10 in a year was more interesting. Can it climb 4 more decimal places in the next year?

Bitcoin is currently rallying to $4.60 from about $4.90.  Seems to have found some support for the time being.

Pardon, but what?

https://i.imgur.com/3lDr0.png

(accurate within a minute of this post date)

So it moved..it was bound to..i just turned off my miners since i cant stand the noise anymore..i could at $5 but lol not at $4.5 :p..anyway its not surprising though..the price always falls a little after some bad news(another exchange getting hacked)

Which exchange this time?

bitcoin7...they lost the entire user database+2 of their 3 wallets...and i wont be surprised if the price gets pushed down further due to the stolen coins being dumped

Did they say how many bitcoins were stolen? damn! Price is DOWN!

i sold out at $4.9..ill buy back when we hit the new low

Lower than 4.18? Bluff?

who knows...im sure you've noticed how the bid walls just disappear after getting hit right?

That's a shame, I thought bitcoin7 was a definite scam at first but they turned out to be an alright site. Still, not surprised they eventually got hit. Their professionalism wasn't on the same level at all.

It's a shame that a distributed, controlled by no one currency has a real Achille's Heal in the exchanges.  Every time an exchange gets hacked and its coins stolen we see a mass sell off of bitcoins and a hit to investor confidence.  If someone would manage to gain access to MtGox's stash then it's all over red rover, the thief would have enough bitcoins to keep the price depressed for years.  They've tried before, I'm sure they'll try again.  It's only a matter of time.

You have a point here. But so far MtGog is not emptygoxed

Actually Mt Gox is starting to look slightly like a Tsunami waiting to happen  ;D

What do you mean?

It's gone.

A few minutes ago the bid side had definite tsunami like qualities with just a piddly blue line:

https://i.imgur.com/REnQ3.png

How to lose money on bitcoinica:

Put a stop loss at 4.76

Change your mind, and remove that stop loss.

Get a surprise sale liquidate your position at 4.4 :(

That's a pretty big image, here's an easier to read one:

https://i.imgur.com/Ty0q8.png

For those who don't get what this means, the green line shows how many bitcoins would have to be sold to hit a given price. Or, for the bitcoin price to go down to 4 dollars, about 44k more bitcoins would have to be sold than bought. Whereas for the price to go all the way up to 5.25, 22k more bitcoins would have to be bought than would be sold. So the buy/bid side is definitely shallower than the sell side, which basically means it's easier to make the price go up by buying than down by selling. Doesn't necessarily imply anything though, since investors probably don't feel like buying right now. :P

Except those walls are generally fake (my money is on gox), so saying it's more likely to go up cause of that is a fallacy.

The current bid wall at 4.48 is just peanuts with what was there a few minutes ago - there was a bid for 50k bitcoins.  It probably stoped the downturn - but why was it removed?

Because someone wanted to prevent the crash, not to actually sell...

No, I'm not. Whatever I put into it over the course of the Summer I'm still holding on to, and have no plans to get rid of (even if I overpaid)

So it is not bottom yet.

Don't take this personally - but you are the 'long investor' with what I judged the most honest posts - so I like to take you as a representation of this type.

We've bounced on $4.6 for 4 weeks, a very similar pattern to the month of July, when I expected $13 to hold.
http://genaud.net/bitcoin/2011/20111006-1200-28days15minS.png

Long investor/not worried if I lose the money I put in. If it drops to $0, I'll just shrug it off, but I believe that it won't, and so keep holding. In other words, don't use me as a barometer for whether this thing will die or not. I'm pretty bad at predicting bottoms, too, and I hold because I can miss a rally just as easily as I can predict another drop.

Bitcoins value if nothing else even simply as a transaction tool should price it quite a bit higher than it is now.

Heck even "American Banker" is talking about bitcoins and in loose terms comparing it to a bank.

http://www.americanbanker.com/morningscan/Morning-Scan-1042905-1.html (http://www.americanbanker.com/morningscan/Morning-Scan-1042905-1.html) Under the heading elsewhere. I know it's just a reference to the New Yorker piece but still shows we're far from dead.

We speak about rally and bitcoin drop from 5 to 4.6...weird rally is weird

People speak of USD rally after ten years of declines. It's the rate-of-change curves you need to look at if you want to predict where it is going.

omg... ...  .. IT'S a RALLY! ... .. no?

Actually, it makes sense. Bitcoin is big news in China recently, with many more people buying now, so it's a rally to China (down)  ;D

The China news is mainly just one province atm Guangxi (at least in terms of tv coverage) just wait until it goes national.

Hey Piggy, Is it common for Chinese sites to use .com or primarily .cn? I see bitebi.com is for sale.

I'd go with .com

All .cn domains require registering here in China and I'd not be willing to do that with a bitcoin site until it has some kind of legal status. I'm hoping that the court case in France might push some stuff in that direction.

Both are fairly common though often large corps do .com.cn

Hovrdan gaar det forresten paa Greonland?  ;D

Do you see bitcoin as being useful in China or just for geeks as anywhere else?

På toppen af ​​verden, tak.

你玩围棋吗 ? (looks like you could throw a stone to Korea)

I see bitcoins as being a fantastic medium for small-midsized businesses here gaining access to the world.

I've managed to do substantially more business and product sourcing from here using bitcoins, than I would have without it and bear in mind that this is solely using bitcoins as a method of payment.

Og ja jeg spiller skak  :P

Could you elaborate on what you are doing, if you don't mind?

围棋 go weiqi baduk

My bread and butter job is doing English and quality systems (mainly HACCP and IFS with a bit of six-sigma thrown in for good measure) training for a range of different companies here and designing courses and materials for use as supplementary coursebooks in public schools from grades 1-12.

Apart from that I do product sourcing and quality inspections for a couple of European companies from here mainly seeds, nuts and that kind of foodstuffs. As Dalian happens to be a fairly large transit hub for that kind of product. This is NOT a very lively business atm.

As to my own business I do a tiny bit in different types of handmade paper for specialty artists supply shops mainly in Scandinavia atm.

What bitcoin has enabled me to do is to take quite a few extra contracts where I suddenly have to jump all over China to do onsite inspections. I've had companies pay me retainers or upfront expenses in bitcoin instead of waiting for SWIFT to get it's act together. This is usually done using personal $$ by some of their staff and I haven't got a clue as to how they put it on their books.

The last contract I did of this type was for a small German bakery-wholesalers that had a container of sunflower seeds that the shipper found an infestation in (yup bugs). I got paid an advance of 280BTC to cover airfare etc. and then I jumped on a plane to Qingdao looked at the container and declared it good to go with the addition of a fumigant.

The advantage for the client here is that I could go with 2 hours notice, I made a killing (by local standards) for an afternoons work. And they saved 10X the amount on non paid demurage compared with going via SWIFT or sending someone out from back home (in this case probably more savings). This is make or break money for lots of small-medium businesses.

It's not something that I'll get rich of but simply the value of this service compared with the banking system should push the price of bitcoin WAY past it's current levels.

This is probably not applicable on a large scale yet, as lots of companies need bitcoins to become legal something for them to be able to put this kind of expenses properly on their books. The handful of companies that I'm currently dealing with have know and dealt with me for years and are willing to bend the rules a little to get win-win deals.

This is a great post of bitcoin being used in real life.  Thanks for sharing.

Awesome!

See? Bitcoin is really usefull...

Thus, Rally IS starting!

GO GO GO!

Hm, Bitcoin is not exacly faring better than USD at the moment, but it seems to hold its value against EUR fairly well. This latest drop in the USD/BTC might actually signify the strengthening of US dollar rather than weakening of BTC, in the grand scale of things.

The USD is gaining some strength as of late; however, this does nothing for the average consumer, in terms of prices of things lowering, so to an average person looking at bitcoin for the first time, it looks like bitcoin is loosing value...

Yup, the dollar vs euro doesn't affect my power bill.  As far as I'm concerned it's only another $.7 "rally to the downside" to go until most of the US is in the unprofitable to mine with existing GPUs camp.

By this time next month we should see if people believe in bitcoin and will stop mining to buy it (which has downsides of its own) or if they, like me, only got in for the free computer hardware.

its a good time to buy!

Thanks Bigpiggy01 for t.h..a....

Holy shit
http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/chart.png?m=mtgoxUSD&v=0&t=S&c=1&s=2011-10-8&e=2011-10-8&i=1-min&width=964&noheader=1&height=264

Are we starting a rally after the double bottom?

Rally!