Bitcoin Forum

When is this tight trading range going to break out to one side or the other?

move towards $6 BTC again ?  :D

There is a speculation thread in economy.
Some people are saying soon.

I guess that depends on your position.  If you have a large holding, it would be good.

It would happen if the buy side or sell side became imbalanced.

Anyway,  I guess I will move this to the trading discussion, but thanks for the replies.

It'll happen when less people are selling and more are buying. There's no 100% certain way to know

I am a fan of bitcoin also, so on another topic I believe these things need to happen for bitcoin to succeed.

  1.  There needs to be a lite and quick personal client.   When the client has been offline for a bit, it can take way to long to catch up. 

  2.  There needs to be an ability to recover from bank error.    In the history of banking, banks have made many human errors and many computer coding errors.  If they were bitcoin, they would fail.  These errors are non-recoverable in bitcoin and this includes any faulty code that gets launched.  If it is severe enough, it would result in bringing a bitcoin institution down.

  3.  And actually, contrary to my prior post, I think bitcoin price needs to stabilize because those using bitcoins in commerce cannot keep up with exchange rates when they fluctuate wildly. 

I'm not sure if any of these are being addressed, but in my newbie opinion, these are the biggies.

While there are ways of reducing the initial blockchain download, the client still needs to download new transactions that have been made while it was offline (how else would it know if you've received coins?), and I don't see any possible way of avoiding this. However, since bitcoin does not depend on the Internet specifically, but rather it can use any kind of network connection, it is possible that some kind of specialised high-speed network infrastructure could be developed for broadcasting bitcoin transactions, though that's a long way off, if it ever happens at all.

Providing a way for banks to "recover" from their mistakes is a bad idea in my opinion (but it's not possible given the way bitcoin is designed), because it encourages banks to take greater risks which may eventually lead to the banks making a mistake so big they can't recover from it, causing a global economic collapse. Sound familiar? But because bitcoin transactions are irreversible, bitcoins banks will have to take great care to ensure no mistakes are made, since mistakes are costly. If, for example, a bitcoin bank gives too much money to someone, then the bank has lost that money and they can't get it back. If they give not enough money to someone, they have to make up the difference from their reserves to avoid getting sued, again losing money they'll never get back. (If the bank doesn't have enough bitcoins in reserve to pay the debt, then they (and their depositors, unfortunately) are out of business.) Ultimately, I think the fact that bitcoin banks will suffer mightily from every tiny mistake will force them to develop sufficient security that big mistakes don't happen, thus ensuring greater stability in the long run.

The price will stabilise as more people start using it.

Very tight range yea. Good way to play it is after a breakout get in on retracement to former support/resistance.

I understand people are working on such things. See Electrum (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Electrum), for example.

Also, the mechanism that the official client uses to download the blockchain is ridiculously slow. I've found that it takes over 24 hours to download the whole thing on a fresh install of the client, and I can get a TV show of the same size in under ten minutes from iTunes. I have no idea if there's something about the technology that requires it to be that way, but it's not the size of the data being downloaded that makes it so slow.

Try the latest client.  I read they've got it down to an hour or two, but I haven't downloaded it from scratch with the new code.

There's a subforum for speculation as well, quite active generally.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=57.0