How long will it be before the long-term downtrend takes Bitcoin below $200 and the price stays there? It's been below $200 a few times in recent weeks, but recovered.

No, no, you don't understand mining at all. The price of Bitcoin drives mining activity and difficulty, not the other way round. All miners are competing for a fixed size block of coins. The cost of mining a Bitcoin for the most efficient players will always be below its price, or the miners will drop out. This does not work like other commodities, where an increase in price causes an increase in production.

Agreed. There's been about ±$25 noise for months.

Recently, we had that crash on Jan. 14, when the price dropped $50 in minutes and bottomed at $152, but that was some kind of manipulation in the middle of the night for both the US and Europe. That mostly recovered the next day. Then there was the Coinbase pump and dump starting Jan 20, which went up and down in a week.

The big trend is just a long downhill slide for the last year. There's no sign of that reversing.

Of course. Bitcoin is zero sum. For every winner, there must be a loser.

Yes, they told users that. Until they publish an outside audit, we don't know whether they are lying.

Remember that Mt. Gox told users something similar months before they went bust.

Well, it looks like Coinbase did a pump and dump backed by heavy publicity.  



Timeline

• Jan 20 - Coinbase announces new VC funding and runs "To The Moon" promotion.
• Jan 27 - First reports that Coinbase is operating without licenses
• Jan 28 - New York Times covers lack of licenses.

Post-Coinbase, Bitcoin is back where it was pre-Coinbase.

The driving force behind Bitcoin is illegal activity. Silk Road drugs, China exchange control evasion, and, in the background, gambling. Without some new large-scale illegal or semi-illegal activity adopting Bitcoin, the overall trend is down.

If there is a "Wall Street pump", you will be the sucker.

Always remember, Bitcoin is zero-sum. For every winner, there is a loser.

If you've been in the game for half an hour and you don't know who the patsy is, you're the patsy.

Well, last night's low was $208.  Around $220-$225 now.

As I point out occasionally, the two Bitcoin bubbles were driven by external illegal use cases - Silk Road drugs, and China exchange controls evasion.  Both of those holes have now been plugged.  Without a new use case that provides a similar boost, there's no reason for Bitcoin to have a value much higher than it had before the Silk Road bubble. 

Trapdoor functions are invertible; the question is how hard they are to invert. There's a long history of crypto functions which were thought to be too hard to solve, but were solved. Sometimes by advances in mathematics, sometimes by sheer computational power, and sometimes by a combination of the two. The ones used for Bitcoin are generally considered strongly resistant to solution, and they're functions which have been examined thoroughly. But SHA-1 and DES were once thought to be highly resistant, too. Now they're routinely solved.

Those guys are still trying to figure out how to unload their Bitcoins. They own enough that they'd crash any existing exchange if they sold. Their proposed ETF scheme was a dump. Their exchange scheme is probably a dump, too.

They would have done better if they'd just been selling steadily all year.

It's getting very close to $200 again. Today's low was $210. Around $215 now.

Partly because the China bubble didn't pop all at once. As with many actions of the government of China, pressure to stop doing something was gradually increased over time. Remember all those posts on here that "nothing was changing in China"? Well, it was. It took a while for the bubble to deflate.

Bitcoin has had two major bubbles - Silk Road drugs and China exchange controls. Both are over. The question is, what is Bitcoin worth if it's no good for getting away with illegal transactions?

I'm asking for only the first appearance of an image to be full size. After that, shrink it.
It has to be automatic. People won't set the size manually, and if they do, they'll probably get the aspect ratio wrong.

Good point. Coinbase's recent advertising:


To the moon!" This will be embarrassing to Coinbase in front of a judge and jury.

Here's how the SEC defines a "pump and dump":

“Pump-and-dump” schemes involve the touting of a company’s stock (typically small, so-called “microcap” companies) through false and misleading statements to the marketplace. These false claims could be made on social media such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as on bulletin boards and chat rooms. Pump-and-dump schemes often occur on the Internet where it is common to see messages posted that urge readers to buy a stock quickly or to sell before the price goes down, or a telemarketer will call using the same sort of pitch. Often the promoters will claim to have “inside” information about an impending development or to use an “infallible” combination of economic and stock market data to pick stocks. In reality, they may be company insiders or paid promoters who stand to gain by selling their shares after the stock price is “pumped” up by the buying frenzy they create. Once these fraudsters “dump” their shares and stop hyping the stock, the price typically falls, and investors lose their money.

Sound familiar?

Getting venture capital and opening a US-based Bitcoin exchange is fine. Coinbase seems determined to promote it wrong. The "to the moon" hype, the false claims of being licensed and regulated, and the free trading to get volume are all bad signs.

How about having the forum system shrink pictures to thumbnail size when they appear within quotes?  That way, each image appears in full size once in the original post, then in miniature in each post that quotes the original. That would eliminate walls of giant repeated images.

All the alts, with the possible exception of Ripple, have already crashed.

Don't make excuses for flaky Bitcoin exchanges. The track record in the Bitcoin exchange industry is so awful that any compliance or withdrawal problem has to be considered a red flag.

Back in the forums for mid-2013 there are lots of postings along the lines of "Mt Gox is fine/great/safe/not a crook".