Now, 2 1/2 months of the long, slow slide.

Since the bubble popped in June, we've had 2 1/2 months of long, slow slide. The pattern is clear enough. There is no "crash". There is no "rally". There is just some noise on top of a long term drop of about 20% per month.

There's a lot of volatility because the market is thin relative to the number of Bitcoins outstanding. Any big trade can disrupt the market. But it comes back to the long, slow slide trend line each time.

Each time there's a drop, some recovery follows. Each peak, though. has been consistently lower than the previous one.  This is normal post-bubble behavior.

Many people here seem to be in denial about this. 

Derivatives require a counter-party which can be trusted, or forced, to pay up when they lose. The Bitcoin world lacks any such counter-parties.

Bitcoin isn't like a stock because it doesn't generate revenue. The speculation end is a zero-sum game. 

I agree about the "lot of hype, new paradigm talk, very little economic activity" part. 

Why not? Pyramid schemes normally die out. The only way Bitcoin can have a long life is if it develops substantial use as a medium of exchange. That's not happening. If the Bitcoin world is dominated by speculation, it's doomed.

Big ideas are easy. Execution is hard. Based on this guy's track record...


No. 

Bitcoin/USD, Mt. Gox, last 60 days. The long, slow slide continues.

It's a long, slow slide as the bubble deflates. The market is so thin that when someone does a big sell, there's a big drop. Then there's a recovery, but it's always lower than the previous high.

Look at the last full year:

Bitcoin - a classic speculative bubble.

I've been saying this consistently for months. Time is proving me right.

Has the difficulty dropped yet?  It lags the block creation rate by weeks, but it ought to have dropped a bit by now.

The "productive work" problem is related to the launch. But that's not why Bitcoin is failing. The fundamental problem is that it's not a very useful medium of exchange. It's risky to use for online ordering, because Bitcoin sends are irrevocable. Technically, transactions are too clunky; waiting minutes for transaction confirmation, and sometimes having it fail, is inferior to existing credit card technology. That part has to "just work".

Any successor to Bitcoin has to work better than credit cards or PayPal for routine transactions, or it will never get any customer acceptance.

If only 100-150 people showed up in New York City, far fewer are going to go to Thailand. A financial center like Tokyo or Hong Kong or London or Beijing would make more sense. Sounds like someone just wants to take a vacation.

Getting only 100 or so people to show up in New York is an embarrassing failure. You can get 100 people to show up for anything in New York City.

The Bitcoin conference seems to have fizzled. Pictures show about 40 or 50 people, and many empty vendor tables. There's been no (as in zero hits in Google News) press coverage of the "conference".  The major tech blogs gave it a miss. Nobody announced anything significant.

Why would there be a rally?

It's Monday. No coverage of this conference found in Google News or Bing News so far. Zero. Nothing.   Not even a mention in major tech blogs.

From the pictures of the event, it looks like about fifty people showed up.

No coverage of this conference found in Google News or Bing News so far. Zero. Nothing.  Will check again Monday.

Yeah, right.  The "Bitcoin banks" to date are rather slimy operations.  Two "Bitcoin wallet" operations have failed. "Global Standard Bank" is clearly a scam.  Dwolla reversed transactions after saying they were irrevocable. Mt. Gox has now operated for almost two whole months without a disaster.

The whole point of Bitcoin was supposed to be that you didn't have to trust a central organization.  If the system needs "banks" merely to handle routine transactions, the design is broken.

On the other side, if you have reliable "banks", you don't need Bitcoin.

Painful video links. Redirects, popups, ads that can't be paused. Never got to the content.

Has anyone summarized the first day of the conference yet? Google News has zero press coverage of the event.

It's been tried. See Citysearch, Yelp, WOT, etc. If the raters are anonymous, the system will be spammed. If the ratings influence search results, the system will be spammed very heavily.  See any black hat SEO forum for details.

Most "collectables" are deflationary; the supply is finite and declines over time as some are lost. That doesn't mean they will increase in value. Check out collectable plates on eBay..  Want a Star Trek collectable plate?  One can be yours for only $4.50.  It probably cost more new. Look at all those "0 bids" items. Most will never sell. 

Why? There's nothing in the fundamentals which should cause it to increase. The original run-up was pure momentum enthusiasm typical of a bubble. That's over.



Since the bubble burst in June, Bitcoin has been in a long, slow slide. Every once in a while, there's a week or two of drama, and the fans start yelling "CRASH" or "RALLY". After the drama, the price has consistently settled a little lower. Here's the last two months:



That's the reality. Almost nobody uses Bitcoins for real transactions, and Bitcoin itself generates no revenue. So it's a zero sum game among speculators. That's a pyramid scheme.   

Whether Mt. Gox trades on their own market remains an open question. There have been periods when people were complaining that their newly entered trades were delayed for minutes while trading continued. Mt. Gox may have been front-running the market during that period. (If you can look at the order queue and put your trades in at the head of it, you can make no-risk trades.  This is front-running.)

Bitcoin, last 60 days.

Well, we had two weeks of drama. As usual, when things settled down, the price was lower. The long, slow slide continues.

Their expenses are not huge, but they are not negligible, either. They have to pay for several employees.  They've had some fraud losses they have to make good. The current management bought the business, so they have a capital cost to repay. They've had to give some big discounts to meet competition and to retain customers after their screwups.