Both of you are the epitome of the kind of blinkering that I was referring to in my post above.

If bitcoin is to be a currency in and of itself, it's value should not be pegged to ANOTHER CURRENCY!! And an inferior one at that. It has to be valued based on the hard assets, goods and services that people are willing to exchange for it, just like the USD is today. I am in no way saying that bitcoin is a hard asset. Read my post again, as both of you glaringly failed to understand it.

Like you said cluster2k, gold is priced in USD (and other fiat currencies, but primarily USD because of the global economic hegemony of the United States). We need it to also be priced in bitcoin independently of the bitcoin:usd exchange rate, and the same goes for other hard assets. That can only happen when people trust it as a medium of exchange and have a rough idea of it's purchasing power in their minds i.e. I can buy X loaves of bread with 1btc, or Y gallons of gas, or Z oz's of gold etc. Wide adoption is first necessary for this.


I had to quote this for fear you would go back and edit it out of shame. How would we value gold if it were not priced in USD? Are you actually serious cluster2k? This illustrates a conspicuous lack of fundamental economic knowledge on your part. Gold used to be the medium through which other things were bought and sold. Gold has purchasing power and intrinsic value not because of the fact it is priced in usd, but actually in spite of it! It used to be the other way round you silly person, the USD itself only had value in the first instance because it was pegged to the value of gold. And the value of gold comes from the reliable forces of supply and demand. The supply is very low, while the demand is extremely high. That is why it has purchasing power.

Yes bitcoin will inevitably be compared to other currencies by speculators, but without any hard assets in the bitcoin economy i.e. people willing to exchange these assets for bitcoin, it is a pointless comparison. YES there are 'real' costs associated with any bitcoin business that needs to be currently paid for in fiat, but they don't have to be paid for in fiat. Once people are willing for these costs to be paid for in bitcoin, then the exchange of bitcoin for fiat will not be necessary. This is why it is so crucial that we begin to offer goods and services in exchange for bitcoin, independently of a manipulated exchange rate.

Then, and only then, will bitcoin be a currency proper. As it stands now, the bitcoin economy is FAR too heavily reliant on fiat exchange services. It is almost akin to getting paid in USD for your goods or services, but having to pay all of your costs in cheese wheels that must be purchased by trading your USD for cheese on an usd:cheese exchange. Until businesses can pay other businesses in bitcoin for the majority of their expenses, it can only be a speculative trading vehicle with some very limited utility as a currency.

It's pretty difficult to understand their true motives. I've been trying hard to understand the psychological games they are playing.

The bullish manipulator wants price increases so he can ultimately SELL high.
He puts up bid walls, sells, then pulls his walls and causes panic to buy back lower.
Meaning he is actually a bear in bulls clothing.



The bearish manipulator wants price decreases so he can ultimately BUY low.
He buys a little, puts up ask walls, sells then drives the price down, and buys in again at a cheaper rate.
He is likely in fact to be a bull at heart.



And then again, it could be just as likely that NEITHER of them care one way or the other about the long term direction bitcoin will take, and instead are doing this solely for fiat profit, slowly sucking market capital away while retaining their existing bitcoin holdings.

It's so damn confusing.

If you want bitcoin to be a currency, then stop buying and day-trading it and start exchanging goods or services for it instead. Provide some REAL value! Complaining about the commodification of bitcoin while actively trading it for profit is utter hypocrisy.

If people are withholding from the market, it means they are unwilling to sell at current prices or else they have no interest in selling it in the first place - at any price. Does that mean the price is being artificially inflated? Whoever is giving away these incredibly rare tokens for $2.20 a piece is absolutely insane.

Basing the worth of a bitcoin on a manipulated rate quoted on an extremely thinly traded commodity market with very few participants, is an absolutely horrible way of valuing it. Of course the exchanges are going to be open to manipulation, of course people are going to get screwed by people with large amounts of purchasing power. The best way to deal with it and to move bitcoin into the realm of an actual currency is to just ignore the exchanges completely, to stop depositing bitcoin with them, and let the value of a bitcoin be determined by real world assets instead of fiat. Money is cheap and abundant, hard assets are expensive and rare.

The btc:fiat exchanges are blinding people to the true utility and value of bitcoin.
We are all getting blinkered by MtGox, and failing to see the forrest for the trees!

+1

Very cool.

You are more worried about the quality of the users than the bitcoin adoption rate? For serious?
Unfortunately, idiots are the primary drivers of all economies as they account for the great majority of the population.
Would you suggest we prevent people from using the USD because their IQ is too low? Talk some sense please.

I would agree. It is unlikely to be due to cumulative market actions, as the walls disappear and reappear too quickly and neatly in their new positions for it to be caused by smaller individual traders.

The existence of a bearish manipulator is often not considered though. I think it is a huge oversight to dismiss this possibility, because that would mean that some of the downward movements could well be due to bearish manipulation and a desire to buy coins more cheaply, in the same way that the bullish manipulator has a desire for price rises because he wants to sell higher.

Anyway, I try not to worry too much about the manipulators' pathetic games because I am of the opinion that the long term movements will occur independently of what they do. Smaller traders just need to have balls of steel right now, bears and bulls alike, because large upwards movements spook the bears and large downwards movements leave the bulls paralyzed. And these large movements can be achieved easily at the moment. This will change over time as bitcoin becomes more widely adopted and coins are distributed more evenly among market participants.

It is likely though that there is more than 1 manipulator in the game. There is at least one bearish manipulator and one bullish manipulator and they seem to be playing a high stakes tug-of-war game.

If you watch mtgoxlive when there are big movements, you can see large asks being pulled as the price rises in the same way that you see large bids being pulled when it falls. It could be the cumulative result of individual actors hoping for better prices though... but equally, that could explain some the bid-side 'manipulation' too.

I'd be willing to bet that a few of those ask walls also belong to manipulators. Did you cut those down at all or just leave them the way they were? (edit: nvm, just checked mtgoxlive. you left it alone). This could mean that the supply might be overrepresented too, meaning an even healthier overall situation.

I think this would actually be a halfway decent indicator of medium to long term price movement. Or at least as good as any of the technical indicators anyway. The manipulators are all about the short term swings. The long term movements will occur independent of what they do.

Maybe there could be a way to quantify the depth of any market manipulation by analyzing with some kind of bot the size of any walls that are actively moving as they are pulled and replaced. I think you might be on to something...

Haha. I did something similar a few days ago to estimate non-manipulator demand.
It looks healthy enough to me to be honest, if we are excluding manipulation in either direction that is.
Slightly higher demand than supply - would suggest a slow upwards creep.

I'm not sure what you mean. Why would you not want to have anything to do with bitcoin if the exchange price were to rise?

That's actually a good idea.

An unexpected attack.

In the context in which I used it, an unexpected price movement that would trigger your stops. But since you said in another thread that you don't use stops, more likely it would cause a margin call or liquidation, wouldn't it? My meaning was the folly of being certain in the face of uncertainty.

As I said, if people are fearful after reading my post, then they are either trading at levels they really should not be trading at, or else they are more uncertain about their positions than they would care to admit.

If what I said seemed to you like an attempt to induce fear, I think you might need to re-evaluate your market position. If uncertainly induces fear in anyone, then they should not be trading at the levels they are trading at.

Most miners are not mining hundreds of coins per day and racking up huge electricity bills that are so enormous that they need to urgently liquidate their bitcoin positions. How many of those 7200 coins do you think actually NEED to be sold to pay bills? Very few I would imagine.

Also, how many people do you suppose are mining because they actually want bitcoin rather than fiat? Mining is the most inexpensive way to obtain coins, and if you wanted to invest in bitcoin but not pay the premium charged on the exchanges, mining is the best way to subsidize the cost you would otherwise pay.

This is of course speculation. I am far from certain because there are too many unknowns, but what I want you to admit is that you cannot be certain either. So stop pretending that you are. We all know that you are shorting on bitcoinica. Might I ask what at what position you are shorting from?

EDIT: I just saw your title text. Ok, so your posts consists of opinion and not fact. Still, opinions that are not based on fact should never be held that strongly. And my question still stands.


You might be right. This has happened a lot, and the trend IS your friend...
Except of course when it's not, and you get sucker punched in the face.

Once those 10 have sold all their coins, what then?

Hamburgers? Not bloody likely. Surely you mean hotdogs!!

Depending on your view of the future, those memories may be of the time some of us missed out on the bargain of the century.
And they may not be so fond.  

My fingers work faster than my brain sometimes.

He's a popular guy around these parts!

How likely do you think it is that we talk to him in this subforum on a daily basis? I wish we would stop using the term manipulator though (singular, perjorative) and instead use the term 'big players' (plural, only perjorative depending on your views on economics). I have to admit that 'manipulator' has a better ring to it though.

I made a net 22% bitcoin profit over the past 5 days. Thanks bears! It was originally 30%, but I lost some in last nights spike. I am happy now to call it a day at 22%. I am going to hold these coins hard now given the situation we find ourselves in and the apparent 'bear fatigue'. My withdrawal from MtGox is waiting to be confirmed.

I would much rather be in bitcoin at the moment, because while further small falls may indeed occur there is a lot more potential for upwards movement than there is downwards movement. If the big holders did not sell when the price was high, I think they will be even LESS interested in selling at this price.

I'm not willing to take the risk of missing the boat for another few percentage points.