Well, I can confirm that I did that. Cashed out a big chunk of my holdings a few weeks ago to invest in ASICs. And there will be more selling as soon as the ASICs arrive, because people will want to recover their investment ASAP.

Exactly.

1) I've been able to withdraw from MtGox without any problem before and after the crash
2) How can you say there wasn't parabolic growth? I'm speaking about THE crash (April 10th, crash from $266).
3) The floor cannot be $80 because RIGHT NOW Bitcoin is traded at $75.19

Yes, at 15,000€ x400GH/s. Not saying is not worth it, but all this pre-order stuff is very tiresome. When the potential profit is huge, then its ok to take a gamble. But when the price is adjusted to its expected ROI (as Avalon did with batch #3, and as I assume punin is doing by selling the "August delivery" at double the price of the "October delivery"), IMO the only way to go is immediate delivery (less than 7 days). Otherwise, we know how the story unfolds: a two weeks delay already throws your ROI expectations to the garbage bin.

I strongly disagree. The bubble popped just because all bubbles pop (otherwise it wouldn't have been a bubble in the first instance), and during the last week before the crash Bitcoin entered on a crazy parabolic growth that would have led to a 100% increase in price every week. That's unsustainable, you don't have to look for "external reasons" like MtGox incompetence, that kind of growth is a crash indicator because that's how market psychology works.

People sees their money doubling every 5 days, they get hyper-emotional, as soon as a deep crash happens for "natural reasons" (people selling to realize their profits) the herd panics and sell en mass, triggering the bubble burst. This is what happens over and over with all bubbles, you do not need to look for any "rational" reasons because the market is irrational.

Update the OP with the following info, please correct if something is wrong:

What is the fundamental difference between your coin and other Bitcoin clones?

I agree that many ASIC miners that joined the "gold rush" will be eager to sell ASAP to recoup their costs, which will lead to selling pressure throughout this year.

But, I disagree on ASIC mining being profitable at US$2 each. That's way off, with the current difficulty projects an exchange rate lower than $50 will make ROI  in $ very difficult for the vast majority of miners, at least for those that are not hashing yet.

As it happened in 2011, this "gold rush" will end up with people mining at a loss and/or turning their rigs off.

The reason for Bitcoin to go up again is for it to reach its bottom, becoming undervalued and thus a good investment again.

Oooops.

Pirate didn't fail at all. Pirate did a very successful scam, he did steal more than BTC500k and now its filthy reach. How is that failing?

Let's see how quick fiat disappears from the order book.



Pre-bubble, fiat on Gox's order book was around $2M. That quickly escalated to $23M, which is a x10 increase on the market depth for the bid side.

We're now at $10M. What will be the "fiat on order book" bottom? I expect something between $4M and $6M, maybe a tad lower during the last few moments of panic once the bottom is finally reached.

I don't see how "people building things for Bitcoin" (infrastructure, services, etc.) = get-quick-rich schemers

The get-rich-quick folks are speculators that want to press "buy" and then press "sell" when the price is x100 higher, and their wet dream is that will happen 3 months after they pressed "buy".

Well, they can keep dreaming. Luckily enough, Bitcoin is not a get-rich-quick scheme.

Pretty obvious, isn't it?

Better for the people believing in BTC. Better for those who decide to enter the market, and do not have to buy at over-inflated prices during the top of a speculative mania driven bubble. Better for those who are building things for BTC. Better for everybody really interested in this experiment, its only worst for the get-rich-quick guys that invested what they couldn't afford to lose.

Yes, indeed this thread is a perfect example of how much denial is still in the air. But I would add that all this aggression against bearish analysis is also an indicator that fear is starting to spread.

When I said "this bubble needs to pop" before the crash from $266 to $50, people just mocked me.

When I said "bottom will probably be around $50ish" after the April 10th crash, people just replied "keep dreaming about cheap coins"

Now they seem to be getting nervous and edgy, that means something.

No, I don't see how anything that I can or cannot say may be better for Bitcoin. And, BTW, I don't think that an exponentially growing exchange rate is any good for Bitcoin. As I said the day before the pop:


And I still think it: before this bubble fully deflates, the better for everybody.

I'm not trying to instigate panic, as I said many times: you need to be a delusional fool to think that posts on these forums may talk the price up or down.

Then, why panic because the price of an asset is crashing? That's an over-emotional reaction that will be very bad for your investment. Just watch the trend and act accordingly


I really don't see why. I spread the Bitcoin word, I think it has an enormous potential to change the world, and I introduced many of my best friends to it, and they are all of them entering the BTC economy in one way or another. Some started to give me their money for me to buy them BTC (that started to happen at the end of March), and obviously I didn't buy a single BTC yet for my friends. I think I made the right choice, and I will keep waiting until I see a price that makes BTC again a good investment. That price for me is around $50 and below.


I call BS on that. The price is not low "because of the influx of BLAH BLAH BLAH". You seem to do not understand basic market psychology.

Why the price went from $14 to $266 in a few months? Because price goes up -> media says price is going up -> people hurry to buy -> price goes up even more and faster -> more people hurries to buy more and more -> WASH, RINSE AND REPEAT.-

Why is the price going down and will keep going down? Just because we are in a downtrend -> people sees the price going down and sell -> that causes panic and more selling -> selling causes the price to go down -> WASH RINSE AND REPEAT.-

Nothing more, nothing less. The "regulatory uncertainty" of BTC has always been there. If the prices were still going up, people would still be buying. Despite of all the good news about China, Cyprus (if that can be called good news), the Winklewoss ETF, Germany giving legitimacy to BTC... The price is still going down. Don't you see that the only thing that drives the price of a speculative asset, is precisely the price action and its current trend?

Well, I had a bid at $71ish that wasn't filled for a few cents (unfortunately, the bounce from $72 was very profitable for those who caught it), and I pulled it. Didn't catch it the first time, I won't be trying to catch a falling knife for the second time in the $70s for sure.

I may play a bounce in the $60s, but with a smallish position. Its risky.

I will for sure play the bounce from the $50ish with significant money, that its going to be nice action indeed.

I still see too much denial for the very bottom to be close, but it's also true that these forums are über-bullish by nature (its bitcointalk.org), so I don't really know how good indicator they are.

Well, that's the eternal discussion between keynesian and austrian economists. Keynesians despise a currency like gold (or BTC), because for them money is just a "commonly shared illusion" that serves a very concrete purpose, which is moving the economy through spending.

The worst enemy for Keynesian is deflation (as the one that happened in the USA in the great depression), where prices go down while "the money go up", which leads to hoarding and a halt in the consumer economy (nobody buying today because tomorrow they will be able to buy more, wash rinse and repeat). For a Keynesian, that's the worst possible scenario, one that leads to "the most painful recession".

For the austrian economists, the worst enemy is inflation, as they consider it a way for the Govs/Central Banks to "seize" people savings, which is a quite accurate description of what inflation is. Austrian economists do not see anything wrong with "hoarding", and they call it "saving".

Obviously the Keynesians economists won the battle (for now), and are very proud that their "techniques" (Government spending, inflation, etc.) were used to "heal" most of the recurrent crisis so typical in the capitalist system (expansion -> contraction, wealth spreading -> wealth concentration; wash rinse and repeat).

TL;DR: I won't be surprised at all if the bottom is at $30ish, and I consider it a sweet spot where to place consistent bids. I don't discard a bottom of $50ish, and I'm sure we will have a huge bounce from there, but each day that passes the case for a lower bottom is stronger.

----

During the bubble inflation, I speculated about a very bottom of $30ish after the burst. Why? Most of it common sense, plus some TA.

Some context: the 2011 bubble peak was $32, and then the price adjusted for a long time to $10-$15.

The situation was more or less stable (for BTC standards) until we hit $20 in January 2013, when Bitcoin made headlines in all mainstream media. I remember it clearly: "the hacker currency is now traded at $20", and thorough articles about how this currency worked followed.

Things started to get more steam, the hype machine started to move, and as soon as we broke ATH with almost no resistance the shit hit the fan: "Bitcoin broke ATH and its going up uP UP" was a big headline everywhere, economic supplements in mainstream newspapers took it to their frontpages, and the speculative madness broke through.

The week before the crash the price doubled, and the forum was bloated by both maniacs predicting $300k per BTC this year, singularities and so on, and people writing about how imminent was the crash.

A copuple of examples from the day before the pop:



Of course we were slaughtered and called trolls, but that was short lived as the day after (April, 10th) things went back to reality.

During the bubble inflation, I saw the following:

• People was buying like maniacs just because the price was going UP - the more it went up, the more they bought
• We were in a parabolic growth trend that was completely unsustainable
• Nothing had fundamentally changed in Bitcoin, apart a huge media exposure, which led to the speculative mania

Taking into account the above, I believed that the media exposure brought some people that is going to invest in BTC long term, but they are an obvious minority. Most of the "new people" is here for the get-rich-quick thing, and as soon as they see the price going down, they sell, which triggers more downtrend and the downtrend causes panic, more sell offs, etc - and there you have a contrarian, negative cycle that won't stop until the bottom is reached and a sustainable growth trend is resumed. Don't forget this was a bubble, and the same psychology that inflated the bubble will deflate it.

Then, there are some technicals like Elliot Waves analysis that support a $30ish bottom:



4 (bottom of second bubble) is usually very close to 1 (top of 2011 bubble). Plus, common sense indicates that once the speculative mania fades, we will benefit from an expanded user base that came following the media exposure, and this expanded user base could support $30ish as the pre-bubble user base supported $14ish.

After the pop I've been trading actively, looking at the short term (days/weeks). That made my "bottom prediction" dynamic, and for many months I was convinced the most likely scenario was a bottom of $50. Why? Because we had two consecutive ATH volume days just after the pop, hundred of thousands of BTC were sold, and this did not happen in the 2011 bubble, in which at the beginning the sell off was moderate. This was not the case for the current bubble, in 2013 the post-pop action was the highest we have ever seen in this market with two consecutive days with record volume. Therefore, we could argue that pigs has already been slaughtered, and the big sell-offs already happened.

Nevertheless, the more the time passes, the more I think that the cold-minded, pre-bubble analysis I did while I was just holding and not trading may still be valid. We had absolutely no support at $88 and $79, and bubble bottoms are always lower than most people think.