there can be an infinte number of cryptocoins, any brand of them is just as good for commerce as any other, and there is no reason to believe that bitcoin will be among the ones that will succeed if they do succeed.
This has been refuted again and again. People want a secure, noninflating coin. Not evapourcoin. Not resourcecoin. They dont want coins for dogs or dope or sex. One coin. Not countrycoin, not citycoin. One international coin. They don't want a coin with more frequent blocks. Not premine. Not centralized. They want one coin. Then why are the altcoins still thriving? Those who buy and use them are not people? Those kinds of coins could be competitors. Maybe one other, maybe two. [ ... ] Most probably, altcoins could ever only reach a small part of the total value.
And it is me the one who states mere opinions, without any arguments? You can have your opinion about the likelihood of bitcoin surviving, but the fact are that there is no justification now to claim that they will die, and bitcoin will not. The "first players advantage" and "network effect", if they were real, should have prevented the altcoins from starting. That they started and are thriving is proof that those advantages are not that significant. On the other hand, some altcoins appear to have characteristics that bitcoin does not have; who can tell whether they won't be decisive? (I hope no one will claim that "bitcoin is now too big to fail".  ) Yeah, I've seen better arguments from you, tbh. The altcoin vs. Bitcoin analogy is probably pretty close to, say, silver vs. gold. In some hypothetical world exactly identical to ours, but in which *only* gold exists but no silver, speculative gold might have a higher market cap than in ours, but the thought is rather shallow anyway: it's simply human nature not to put all eggs into one basket -- cryptocurrencies will be no difference. The (much smaller) valuation of altcoins doesn't take a severe chunk out of Bitcoin's valuation, unless at some point BTC is replaced as the alpha crypto, but that's not the scenario you're talking about. |
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Small problem. Large holders know that market price is currently under the cost of mining. Miners, old holders don't sell under those conditions.
Your strategy loses money unless you know you can buy back in lower. That is less certain the lower market price goes. Also, you could drive the whole market into a prolongued downtrend that would take years to break even. You can sheer a sheep many times, but skin him only once.
Slight problem with your assumption. Cost per coin when mining is nowhere near the current market rate. You keep saying that, but I am disbelieving you. Existing miners don't really matter. What matters is marginal supply, and that is determined by a miner starting today. They face exponential difficulty raises. It costs 3500 USD to generate 1 btc/wk at retail pricing, and the output degrades by a factor of 1.016 every day. If you've already paid for your hardware, yes, you can sell for the cost of electricity. But that's (1) foolish and (2) not a significant fraction of the mined supply. Most hashing power is new hashing power, which has not paid for itself, and may never pay for itself unless the price is over $1000/coin. Bottom line: Most of the mined coins each day are being awarded to people who cannot sell without a loss below $1000. I think it's safe to say that big mining operations (> 1 petahash) operate on a substantially lower cost basis per coin than your quote. |
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Log scale chart of complete bitstamp USD history.  Why might the latest pennant be such a different beast to the previous ones? Because you can have independent, i.e. fundamental reasons to believe the long term log uptrend for BTC will continue to hold, but that assumption is should probably not be based on observing a pattern 4 times and concluding it will hold a 5th time. That's simply not enough of a sample size. @arepo: yes, that's the book. The results are due to some author named Bulkowski, but the way it looks it isn't really an academic study. Still, the Kirkpatrick/Dahlquist is a great book, in case you're wondering. |
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it's interesting to see trading sites and others say that "pattern X is generally bullish/bearish" as if they were citing a statistical study that showed this result >50% of the time. triangle continuation patterns are only continuation patterns until they break counter-trend from my own work in Bitcoin, it seems that these patterns are very sensitive to their price environments (that is if they occurred within an uptrend or dowtrend; near, below, or above the previous high/low; and if the previous movement pushed the price into overbought or oversold territory). once the environment has been factored in, i think that there is something to these patterns having a consistent "context-sensitive" bias. but it is ridiculous to make a blanket statement about them, not only because of context-sensitivity but also because i imagine the behavior is different in different markets (stocks vs Bitcoin). --arepo Interestingly enough, the Kirkpatrick/Dahlquist TA book has a (smallish) section on empirical studies that were done about patterns. I'll have to look up the details, but the continuation patterns flag and pennant seemed by far the most reliable ones *however* they were (IIRC) all short to midterm patterns, i.e. way shorter duration than what was proposed above (spanning from December to now). |
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There has to be a counterbalance to all the cultish posts of the always-bullish people who think that prices are always going straight to the moon tomorrow regardless of any and all TA and that every unfavorable event is always made up.
It was us cultists who kept this project alive when it dropped from $32 to $3 and stayed there for a year. The fraction of investors like me who will willingly go down with the ship are the support base that gives BTC what some call "intrinsic" value. Without us, this really would be a Ponzi Scheme. Contributing to positive change in the world is just as important as ROI. You know what? I give you that. I think it was Rampion who put it as something like "the hardcore (cultists) provide the base value, the traders/speculators add the volatility/spikes". So, yes, those of you who are willing to go down with the ship, I pay my respect to you... But this is the fucking speculation subforum. And, as you would expect by the name of it, speculators are not, by and large, interested in going down with the ship. And that's what pisses me off: not that the "cultists" are sitting this bear market out, but that they're shouting down those who discuss how to profit from the market conditions. |
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Yeah, never really thought I'd join that illustrious "perma bear" crowd, you know the one I mean, Blitz, ElectricMucus etc. But the reactions of the Bitcoin cultists are just too frustrating to stomach sometimes: on the faintest sign of good news anyone who cautiously asks for a source or verification is shouted down, while on the emergence of rather well-established bad news (like China right now), a majority is calling it FUD and feels bears are only trying to piss into their cryptocheerios. I remain as optimistic about the long term prospects of Bitcoin (or at least: of cryptocurrency as a whole) as I was, but that delusional subset of the investor crowd in here is getting on my nerves. Majorly.
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I can be corrected on this one, in case I misunderstood something, but the entire discussion in here seems to miss one point:
The IRS decision (guidance?) applies to capital *gains*, i.e. the difference in value per unit at time of buying said unit vs. selling it. Correct so far?
If, at some point in the future, BTC/USD more or less stabilizes, the problem disappears (or at least become negligible, except for very large amounts traded).
tl;dr This decision might hurt current speculative value, but it doesn't really harm BTC functionality assuming a more stable exchange rate in the future.
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while i still don't see us retesting $400, there is little price action between these two price points to help determine what kinds of supports we can expect. i have to say this took me a little by surprise. do you think that the "china ban panic" on the forums contributed to the severity of this movement?
Good observation on the smaller bearish flag. I'd say the 'china ban' panic helped trigger what we see now, but is not the cause. I still see a severe lack of consistent buying pressure at this price level. Sure, there are short bursts when we touch the lower levels of support, but in between volume and price action is nothing that inspires confidence in this level (>500) in my opinion. Daily CMF confirms that view, I'd say, it's not comparably at all to mid July 2013 when we turned around for good last time... actually, it starts looking like June 2013, right before the final leg down. i figured that the recent bullish action was a "bulltrap", for what it was worth, because we did not have the necessary volume to overcome the askwalls on bitstamp, and FIGURE 1 from this week's issue still showed a little bit more of consolidation space before a breakout, but to move nearly straight down from the upper resistance straight through an important month-scale support, all within 18 or so hours! the daily-scale CMF and MACD do both look pretty grim now. i expect more downward movement from here, possibly to as low as $400. i'm not too sure about your comparison to June 2013, though, as the "factor 3" model still suggests that the final capitulation is far off, but we'll see. --arepo No, sorry... I should have phrased that differently: I'm not saying we're in a similar situation to June 2013. Just that CMF resembles more June than July last year. Other than that, I don't see many similarities, even though I would now say that in my 2nd most *optimistic* scenario we have about one month of bear market left (i.e. the larger triangle). |
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I would say there's more and more evidence now that we have to look into the larger triangle for support from now. Which would also mean, another month (approximately) of sideways/downwards movement.
i'd mostly agree. what is most troubling is that we broke under the $530 support, and are now consolidating in a very bearish flag pattern directly below it: [...] while i still don't see us retesting $400, there is little price action between these two price points to help determine what kinds of supports we can expect. i have to say this took me a little by surprise. do you think that the "china ban panic" on the forums contributed to the severity of this movement? Good observation on the smaller bearish flag. I'd say the 'china ban' panic helped trigger what we see now, but is not the cause. I still see a severe lack of consistent buying pressure at this price level. Sure, there are short bursts when we touch the lower levels of support, but in between volume and price action is nothing that inspires confidence in this level (>500) in my opinion. Daily CMF confirms that view, I'd say, it's not comparably at all to mid July 2013 when we turned around for good last time... actually, it starts looking like June 2013, right before the final leg down. |
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The chart I posted consisted of 2 (or maybe 2.5) descending triangles. The question exactly how "arbitrary" they are is valid in principle, but if you look at it you will note the lines aren't drawn completely out of the blue: the major descending line has 6, maybe 7 points of contact with daily price candles, to a pretty remarkable degree of accuracy. You can certainly question the validity and staying power of that downtrend (since the December ATH), but trading on it sure turned out to be profitable in the past weeks. At some point that trendline *will* be broken, I'm sure, but so far it hasn't happened (with any kind of volume as well). The lower lines that form the smaller triangle run through the pretty well established support at ~520, slightly ascending perhaps. I said "2.5 triangles" because to me it looks like there are 2 levels of support running close to each other, but they aren't much apart, so many in this forum put the two lines together as one lower trendline. The trend lines of the smaller triangle are about to touch, and we either have to go up or down (breaking out towards the upside, or the downside), that's the trivially true part. Now, today, we broke through the 520 support trend line (that marked the smaller triangle), although we're currently resting above it, which is not a bad sign. My chart was intended to raise the question: will we "break" the smaller triangle to the downside (i.e. go below 520, then 500), or rather: did we just break out to the downside, and will we perhaps, in the following weeks look for resistance/support in the larger triangle (that lasts into May 2014). Here's the chart again:  Thanks for that explanation, and in essence you are suggesting that there will be a sort of force that causes BTC to gravitate towards these kinds of trendlines, despite a potential exponential growth curve... In other words, even if there were an exponential explosion of BTC prices, there would be a force pulling the price back down to the trendlines... unless the trendline were to shift upward or downward.. depending on if there is enough evidence to support drawing the line in a different way based on the number of connection points. I don't really have any problems with these kinds of analyses... b/c they seem to make sense.... even though you may NOT bet the farm on it.. but they could guide you absent other news. More or less. I think the most basic idea behind analyzing trends is that there are several trends that govern the price function, shorter term as well as longer term trends, but not all of them are active at the same time. So the validity of a long-term exponential upwards trend isn't necessarily questioned because of a shorter term downtrend. The shorter term trends can still /influence/ our assumptions about the long term trends. |
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Cool! Will definitely donate... however, can you point me to the exact place on the page where it adds up the bidsums on each orderbook? I kind of see them displayed individually... sorry if I am missing something obvious. Also, does anyone know the size of Vaurum's orderbook? Ah, I see your point now. He started only with bid/sum *ratio*, so for that purpose he only has 'average' view over several exchanges. But if you head over to his thread I'm sure there's a chance to convince him to add 'sum over exchanges' as well. |
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Very unlikely... ~400: quite possible we'll revisit it. 300-400: could well be, in a final moment of despair. Falling below the previous ATH on a functioning exchange: not something a trader should bet on, in my opinion.
You think Silver Stacker circa 2011 ever thought he would see $18 Silver again? Bitcoin is now looking every bit as unhappy in the $500 range as it did in the $600 range in the days prior to the $400 crash. oh and btw....even if Bitcoin hits $299.99, then my call was right. I am saying $200 range, but what I really mean is lows that will shock everyone just as much as $400 seemed unthinkable when we were 'getting ready to break out from $800 range back in Jan 2014....except 'shock' may not be so appropriate as the fatigue and boredom will have set in by then......Was anyone really 'shocked' by the time Bitcoin ground down to $2 in 2011? 400 "shocked" only those strawmen we collectively seem to be in your head. 266 halved, then halved again. 1200 went to 600, didn't touch 300 yet, but it'll only be below that you should start worrying. But what am I telling you, you're immune to reason (right now, at least). |
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So... we finally looking into the bigger triangle yet for support?
[...]
Quickly, draw more lines... draw also ones that point up.. that will surely make the price rise! This has been the general sentiment in this forum, so it has to work! That's a fancy way of saying you don't understand my chart, or which conclusions you should draw from it. I certainly would NOT claim to understand your chart, either.... or any of the charts that are frequently depicted in this thread b/c I remain unclear about frequently why a chart would start at some seemingly random place in the middle.... Sometimes, however, there is some explanation about the chart that makes sense b/c it is merely describing past recent performance... and of course, I am NOT doubting that there can be some valid contributions of the chart to provide some perspective in that regard - even though it may NOT spell certainty about what's coming next and approximately when it will be coming.... The chart I posted consisted of 2 (or maybe 2.5) descending triangles. The question exactly how "arbitrary" they are is valid in principle, but if you look at it you will note the lines aren't drawn completely out of the blue: the major descending line has 6, maybe 7 points of contact with daily price candles, to a pretty remarkable degree of accuracy. You can certainly question the validity and staying power of that downtrend (since the December ATH), but trading on it sure turned out to be profitable in the past weeks. At some point that trendline *will* be broken, I'm sure, but so far it hasn't happened (with any kind of volume as well). The lower lines that form the smaller triangle run through the pretty well established support at ~520, slightly ascending perhaps. I said "2.5 triangles" because to me it looks like there are 2 levels of support running close to each other, but they aren't much apart, so many in this forum put the two lines together as one lower trendline. The trend lines of the smaller triangle are about to touch, and we either have to go up or down (breaking out towards the upside, or the downside), that's the trivially true part. Now, today, we broke through the 520 support trend line (that marked the smaller triangle), although we're currently resting above it, which is not a bad sign. My chart was intended to raise the question: will we "break" the smaller triangle to the downside (i.e. go below 520, then 500), or rather: did we just break out to the downside, and will we perhaps, in the following weeks look for resistance/support in the larger triangle (that lasts into May 2014). Here's the chart again: |
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In fact, I can't and won't give you credit for being "right" unless we see 250. That's your call. So until then, why don't you go do something else or stop beating your chest for things most other people know too.
$250 wasn't my call! $200 Range is my call! Maybe not tomorrow, nor the day or week after that....But Bitcoin will grind painfully down over the course of time, interspersed with the odd 'spirit rekindling' counter trend rally of course. My sentiment couldn't be more apathetic right now, but when I put my mind or energies into anything, I generally find myself ahead of the trend. MatTheCat is calling $200 range Bitcoin! Before any further ATH can ever be seen, if indeed any ATHs are ever seen again. If this doesn't transpire, then everyone can quote this statement for truth to eternity whenever I rear my head on this forum. Quoted, for my personal amusement. Very unlikely... ~400: quite possible we'll revisit it. 300-400: could well be, in a final moment of despair. Falling below the previous ATH on a functioning exchange: not something a trader should bet on, in my opinion. |
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So... we finally looking into the bigger triangle yet for support?
[...]
Quickly, draw more lines... draw also ones that point up.. that will surely make the price rise! This has been the general sentiment in this forum, so it has to work! That's a fancy way of saying you don't understand my chart, or which conclusions you should draw from it. That's me saying that your charts are meaningless. Start creating charts in a way, that they could predict the right outcome at least 50% of the time, and there would be some meaning. It may be a shock to you but drawing lines from the bottoms and tops at bitcoinwisdom isn't exactly an advanced method of prediction, that would be hard to understand to anyone. It's just a way for some people to rationalize their gambling habits, so they could call their gambling as "investing" to girlfriend and friends. Jup, suspected that much. And because you don't draw those silly little charts you're posting one bitter comment after another, because you either missed the train, or jumped off too early, or whatever pathetic trading decisions you made in the past, while I can afford to look at the price in a more, hm, relaxed way. But good luck with your approach, whatever it is. |
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So... we finally looking into the bigger triangle yet for support?
[...]
Quickly, draw more lines... draw also ones that point up.. that will surely make the price rise! This has been the general sentiment in this forum, so it has to work! That's a fancy way of saying you don't understand my chart, or which conclusions you should draw from it. |
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I would say there's more and more evidence now that we have to look into the larger triangle for support from now. Which would also mean, another month (approximately) of sideways/downwards movement. |
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So... we finally looking into the bigger triangle yet for support? |
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It looks like overlaying price action with previous years rallies is become a bad way to predict things now. In fact, every trading decision I made based on this was a mistake.
Had the same problem until about a week ago. Since then, I've given up on direct comparisons to mid-2013 (or 2012, or, for contrast 2011) and switched over to "smart" momentum trading (i.e. momentum with a modicum of predictive analysis), on a substantially longer time frame than before (3 days view mainly). So far, it works much better for me, but ymmv. Practically, this also means I'm now pretty much completely agnostic about whether the corrective cycle is about to end for good now, or not. |
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