I remember when the same thing happened with a 3k wall at $108 when it was on its way down from the $115 spike after Gox announced the hiatus on USD withdraws. A few hours after that wall got sold into the price never came back up.

The problem with buying right now is that wall at $80 was tested and was neither bought through nor was it pulled. Market is too scared of dumps for real upward movement. Plus, if you ship the price back to $90 how are you ever going to trigger fear and capitulation and collection tens and tens of thousands of coins sub $50-40-30?

The walls were large enough that it looked like it was likely it would have been the hammer, but they only stayed up for a few minutes before being pulled, so no.

That is absolutely not the applicable logic, nor is it what I'm saying. This is a basic fact: Bitcoin is not a fully functional, usable currency at the present time. The reason is simply because you cannot buy very many things with it right now, and of the things you can buy, almost none of them can't _also_ be bought by fiat. It is not that Bitcoin itself is not a fully functional, usable currency, it is the material fact that a currency is only valuable when it can be exchanged for goods and services. Otherwise, minor currencies are only useful to convert into the major currency. This also applies to today's precious metals. Nobody is taking gold or silver as consideration for real world goods, but they still have value because you can convert them into the presently universal fiat.

If you don't believe it, then convert 100% of your fiat into BTC and let me know how life goes for you. Right now Bitcoin is only worth anything because it can be exchanged for a non-insignificant amount of fiat, and is very likely to appreciate in the medium-to-long-term future.


I neither have nor do I profess any such implication. It sounds like you take the insinuation that Bitcoin isn't an economic messiah a little too personally. How close do you think the world is to accepting Bitcoin in place of or as an alternative/equivalence to fiat, exactly? You should be realistic. It's nowhere close. The mere fact that BTC isn't even measured in mBTC yet is a major indicator of how little large scale adoption there is. The mere fact that BTC can barely sustain $100 should also enlighten you a little to the realities of what you're dealing with.

Also, there is a real question of whether or not BTC will be worth anything in five years. There's a question of what it will be worth in even twelve months. One single 51% attack, one hard fork, or one more huge speculative bubble that costs newcomers their shirts can/will severely damage or destroy Bitcoin's long-term prospects.

Bitcoin is never going to liberate mankind from the realities of the ruling system. If it ever does, it will be exclusively because the ruling system chooses to use it, and then it will fall under the rule of that system. Once Bitcoin poses a real threat, all manner of techniques and approaches will be used to eliminate it. Subversion that is hard to detect will be the real tactic that is used, and it's a tactic already being used. I have no idea how people develop such massive pipe dreams, but the world would not be what it is if people were smarter.

That's truly, truly not accurate. It takes large amounts of fiat to buy meaningful amounts of Bitcoin. Buyers have to be in the market, parting with a currency that can buy pretty much _anything_ in the world right now, a currency that is _very_ difficult for most people to acquire, in exchange for a number on a Bitcoin-qt client that _possibly_ will be worth more fiat than you bought it for in the future.

Unless you really believe people are hording Bitcoins for the day that you can use it to buy anything in the world like you can fiat. That day is a minimum of 3-5 years away. Whether Bitcoin even survives that long at all is absolutely not certain.

Until Bitcoin starts to see some widespread, real-world use as a currency, you'll never have any natural uptrend in the market because there's no reason to buy it unless you're in a parabolic bull phase or have done the analysis and found it to be a sound investment long term. The only people buying it are speculators, and people with less than six figures cannot move the market at all. Even 10 people coming together with $20,000USD a piece to invest will barely move the market. They can buy at their leisure and instantly get dumped on by an early adopter or a whale.

On the other hand, a lot of people have magical internet money sitting around that they can exchange at-will for real-world currency that they can buy food, pay rent, go on trips, buy cars and clothes, start businesses with etc. There's very little reason right now for _anyone_ to buy a Bitcoin in exchange for fiat unless they are buying for the exclusive purpose of selling them back for extra fiat in the future. People who disagree will feel very, very different when their dreams of $10,000BTC or $1,000,000BTC, or their pipe dreams of Bitcoin replacing fiat across the globe and being an unregulated, anarchistic global Internet currency never come to fruition.

With no widespread use for Bitcoin as a currency, the market will always trend down rather than up, unless it's being pumped. There is no other reason to dump a half mega or a mega into BTC to move the market $3 otherwise, while coins are always being mined, and the ones people are holding are always at risk of forming a cannon to fire at the bid side of Gox once fear and capitulation start to grip people's hearts.  

The entire market is manipulation. There's little natural buy/sell pressure from cumulative moves of small positions. Whales do what they like. The last rally at 75 got killed almost instantly. If this really goes up and stays up, it is, without exception, a result of manipulation.

Should be interesting if we really see sustained dump volume to send it through $50 in a cataclysm attempt. I can only imagine if you want to trigger capitulation that you need to depress the rebound even at $50 so as to provoke the requisite sense of hopelessness required to get tons of people to dump tons/all of their coins at the absolute bottom.

Literally every other rally so far has been followed by little/no volume and then killed within a few hours by selloffs. Hard to believe this one would be different when coins sub $67 are so easily achievable by manipulation.

Volume sucks because every mini-rally/bounce has been killed very early on so bids are stacked hard in the 50s (26k to $60 and almost 92k to $50) and asks are stacked up with people trying to get out alive/ahead. The last time the market swung down hard and touched 79 from 165 it acted similarly, albeit the volume wasn't as bad, and only reversed when someone bought $20 points worth of coins from 80 to 100+ after the Chinese Communist Party's propaganda mouthpiece aired their little non-effectual segment on Bitcoin one fateful Saturday morning.

3k wall just up at $70.

People are freaking out and not buying because every single mini rally since the original 100-92-98 bounce has been killed within three hours by one/multiple 3/4k selloffs.

On the other hand, that 88k BTC in bids between here and $50.00 will certainly go somewhere should that tendency reverse.

88k BTC to $50 on the bid side, while there's only 143k BTC total on the orderbook. 25k BTC just to $60. Not that it's really all that indicative of anything since when shit really goes down, walls tend not to mean anything at all.

But 60k BTC in bids from $60 to $50 appears somewhat bullish. A lot of buying pressure may just be waiting for "cheap coinz", which may never materialize.

Just read all five pages of this thread. I feel stunned at some of the comments. Those people are exactly why the denial --> fear --> capitulation phenomenon exist, and are a major source of profit for profitable traders.

$50 won't be the bottom. However, how big the $50 bull trap is will influence how hard the drop sub-$50 is. People who think this is a scare tactic are simply not thinking rationally, although it's almost disadvantageous to try to change people's thinking around since it requires people making mistakes in order to make money in a zero-sum system.

The whole point of this downtrend is to break support at 50 and have the market be depressed so thousands and thousands and thousands of coins can be bought to pay off on the mega as $100+ is approached again. None of the big players, especially large miners, benefit from a long-term sub-$100 price, so the market will always be pushed back up.

Would not be one bit surprised to see $35 though.

Probs right. The swong from 90 to 71 made people feel really miserable, as if they wanted to exit the market forever.

60 and 50 should be even more violent.

42K BTC to break 60 on the bid side.

No buying pressure even in low 70s makes it hard to want to buy at 65 though.

I would be cautious of thinking we're "holding up" here. Volume has been atrocious even in the 70s. The first time there was real buying pressure after the drop to 90 was after 71, and that was only for 3-4 hours yesterday before it got shit on hard after touching 84, followed by no-volume all day.

If it stagnates in low 70s you can pretty much set your watch to dumps. If it falls into the 60s, real panic could set in, and 50 may end up being a monster bull trap.

The market is not the same as it was in April when it touched 50. Both demand and buyer confidence have diminished enormously since May. On top of that is Gox losing market share and so many people cashing out that Gox had to find new banks to process the volume.

Long term, though, you can buy anywhere right now and just hold and make a fortune. 60s seem inevitable right now though. It's just a question of how violent the red candles are going to be because of the psychological factors involved when 71 falls and the buys still don't come in.

I'm of the opinion this downtrend is simply manipulation so whales can scoop up thousands of cheap coins and replenish their inventory. Sells have come to kill every rally attempt since 90s, while BTC had equivalently little/no trading volume when it was 110-135, but continued to be pushed up by periodic large buys.

The downside is it's apparent that between Gox troubles, post bubble, and manipulation that a ton of the new blood that entered the market has either left the market or lost their shirts. Whales get rich by breaking novices, after all. In a zero-sum game, your +500% profit is paid for by the counter-party to your winning trades. Thus, short of betting on manipulation raising the price, I have no idea where bullish momentum will come from until the next bubble phenomenon.

Cryptos look very bleak right now, and are very, very far away from any sort of meaningful mass adoption. People who think BTC will be $300 by December are most likely fantasizing. Revisiting $150 again this year is also rather unlikely to happen.

BTC needs new blood that doesn't get auto-bankrupted in order to bloom. In a tiny market like this, any early adopter or speculator with 7 figures can absolutely trash smaller positions at-will, with only the people who are buy-and-holding not being affected.

Great post. Please post an address I can send BTC to so as to subscribe to your preferably bi-daily newsletter.

You _could_ short on BFX, routing to Bitstamp, but Bitstamp market depth is nothing like Gox, so....