I am a bit unclear of your reference jabber?  We got considerable action going on right now that has been building since mid-August, right before (and likely including the $198 low of that time).  The trend has been up since then and the volume up and in recent weeks it only got more explosive with the move to $500. 

Surely this could all die with little to no fanfare, but that is too big of an assumption to make at this point because there continues to be too much underlying rumblings, like plate techtonics... and even we do not see a lot of price movement, the battle is continuing.  No one really can predict exactly which way it is going to go, but after it goes, many will likely be asserting that they called that one.. etc etc etc... yeah, right?  There are too many variables and with this much increase in volume, even the whales may be having some difficulties containing prices in certain ranges. 

I have been thinking about various strategies that they can employ to mostly play stamp.. and surely their strategies can be profitable at various price levels.  I just wished that more ways will evolve in order that it is more difficult for the whales to manipulate, and it seems that the best solution is to cause the price to go up 10 or 100 fold in order that it becomes much more costly to attempt to engage in such manipulations, and thereafter they may decide to just retire or something and let the markets be more free flowing and less dominated by a few insiders.

Since we seem to be having a little bit of a slow time in wall watching  (even though there seems to be quite a bit of volume and up and down price pressure in this $320- to $340 range), Can someone explain the meaning of the new bar below chart buddy? 

What is it?  What does it mean? 

Maybe 24 hour volume somewhere? bitstamp? or something else?

Every day is slow, until





BAMM!!!!!!

I'm getting a little frustrated trying to trade the various smaller swings.

Sure there is money to be made, and it can be a little bit of fun when things are going well. 

On the other hand, it is very time-consuming, and since I am trying to play safe, I am not really playing with enough money at time to make it a very productive use of my time.

I'm thinking about modifying my strategy to only play the bigger swings, yet I understand "bigger" to be relative, and therefore, maybe just a slippery slope that will drag me back down into the quagmire of day trading from time to time.... And, really, since bitcoin remains so volatile, there seem to be a large frequency of "bigger" swings, especially in recent times (the past few weeks).

Also, I am not sure whether I have the patience of Adam, when we were in the upper $300s, and you kept calling $330 etc etc... and really at the time, $330 seemed to be "pie in the sky" thinking.

Good bye.   see you running after the train in the $500s... hahahahaha       

Surely, I agree with you about that point, and surely I agree with you that for a variety of reasons bitstamp could experience an overall new normal trade volume of above 15k coins per day - but the level of trade volume cannot really be explained only by an increased level of adoption....   because the past two weeks we have witnessed trade volume levels on Stamp greatly in the 20k per day range, when in the previous couple of years, the average was much closer to 10k per day.

I do realize as well that Stamp is becoming more and more trusted, so over time, they are likely to attract more volume - nonetheless, I stick to my position that current ongoing daily volumes remain an indicator of short term future volatility - at least until we see the volumes taper off a bit... and sure in the end, we may end up remaining in the current $305 to $330 trading range, but indicators support that we are likely going to see quite a bit more violent outbursts in one direction or the other or both - and to me it seems that upwards has a better chance than downwards  (maybe I would currently bet that in the coming days, 75% chance of upwards and 25% chance of downwards.. more or less).

We are not going to stabilize anytime soon with this ongoing level of insane trade volume. 

Look at the charts, and don't tell me that daily volumes of considerably more than 15k per day on stamp is the new norm... that is just way too high to be sustainable.. in other words, we are going to have movement of one direction or another (and even both) until the trade volumes come down to some kind of more normal level (and I am suggesting 15k per day to be an approximation of a kind of normal daily trade volume).

That's 250 coins... needed to be able to acquire and/or maintain by the time the price reaches $4,000.  I had to use my calculator for that.

Yes imagine that unlikely and speculative scenario.  Pretty fucking unlikely, so why we gonna speculate about such a weird duck.

To lose 6 figures, you have to have at least 500 coins (if we are assuming a $200 drop in price).

Yet if someone has 500+ coins, they are most likely not going to attempt to trade them all at once, and you would have most likely had difficulties both cashing out and exactly timing the top...

That's what I would call a theoretical paper loss, full of what ifs.   



I can feel ya though.   I was certainly feeling a lot richer when BTC hit $500 than i am now with it teetering a little more than $300.

You may be correct that these extremes are not over, especially considering the ongoing high volume being traded, but it seems like we already witnessed some pretty extreme moves in about the span of a week to 10 days to go from upper $200s to $500 and then to lower $300s... woofta.

I don't think that any of us really knows for sure about how the rest of the week is going to play out because, we do not know for sure about the amount of fiat that is available or whether the bears have exhausted the bulls. 

It does seem to be fairly apparent that the bears were holding more coins than a lot of us had anticipated them to have to be able to dump... and accordingly, we cannot be sure whether they are done dumping yet or if they want to dump some more.

There could be considerable profits to allow this thing to return to the upper $300s before resuming the dumping efforts.

I believe that it is possible, but really it seems too much too assume that to be the case.  There are ways to play the system without necessarily assuming that there are so many bad players.  For example, there are a lot of scenarios, even where a real wealthy whale may consider in his/her/its interest to manipulate the BTC market downward, even though he is losing money because he makes money in other areas by keeping BTC down.  In this regard, you need  not assume that every single exchange has some bad actors or foul play going on at a grand level.

Surely, most exchanges likely have some profiteering going on at smaller scales, but that kind of inside profiteering does not necessarily conclude that they are in bed with some of their highest rollering customers.

Well, they frequently say that the trend is your friend, but I believe that the same rule does not apply if you are a whale or a market manipulator.  If you are a whale/manipulator, then you want to maintain some control over the rises and falls, and of course from time to time, even the manipulator will have to let the trend go when the momentum is working too strongly against his/her/its ability to control it.  Ultimately, keeping the situation in control is going to be much more profitable for someone with a lot of capital and moving the market...... and if the price goes up too much, then it takes more capital to control it...  and then there would be a problem with new entrants and other whales trying to get a piece of the pie.

Actually, what this whale (s) could do is put like 10k coins on stamp, and bring them into stamp at any time that s/he wishes, since BTC is so easy to move, and push the price down on stamp while accumulating coins on other exchanges and through other channels.  Therefore continuing to profit and continuing to be able to accumulate more coins than he is selling on stamp.  Something like that.

I don't really buy the theory of selling into your own buy wall on the same exchange to be profitable or even reasonable conduct.

Regarding your point about more money on the upside than the downside.  Surely that is the case for bitcoin bagholders, like us, and yes, we definitely want bitcoin prices to go up in order that we can benefit from the price rise.

On the other hand, for a market maker, manipulator, there is likely a considerable advantages to manipulate against trends and cause others to play into your hands in various ways.

And, if you want to get out of BTC, that should not be too difficult so long as you identify the time to get out before mos tof the other BTC bagholders.

My recent history, and reluctance to sell my BTC at a loss would likely signify that I would be hanging onto my BTC much longer than a lot of other folks.

Regarding the downward price pressure on stamp.  It seems that sooner or later this whale or group of whales is going to have to run out of coins.  It seems that there just are not enough others following suit in order to make the ongoing selling to cause any additional BTC price downfalls.  Having a lot of difficulties getting others to follow and getting the price to go below $351.20.  S/he / it does not seem to be giving up, yet, but at some point (hopefully soon) is going to run out of coins.

I'm kind of new to trading with about 4 weeks-ish of practice, and over those 4 weeks, on several occasions, I have executed buys when I meant sells and sells when I meant buys; however, my amounts are generally fairly small. 

I really suspect that the Gemini situation from today was kind of a fat finger mistake and with fairly thin order books, the ramifications become much more significant than if the order book had more participation.

About several days ago, I had created various staggered limited buy orders on Gemini from $329 and down to $301, and with my available cash in that account, I had intended to put a couple more limited buy orders down to $285 or $290, but for some reason I forgot to put the remaining one or two orders.

This morning, I was notified that ALL of my outstanding Limited buy orders on Gemini had been filled down to $301, and it looks like such limited buy orders would have been filled down to $243, if I had placed them...

Fuck...   I shouldn't be greedy, but it would have been nice if I would have at least put my available cash to work a little more than I had.. ... I had just gotten distracted and forgot to verify that I still had some cash being held in that Gemini account.

Bitstamp does not seem to be done dumping, yet. 

I think we gotta wait for Bitstamp to be done dumping, before we can declare that we are in green territory.  no?

That's crazy, unless you have already bought most of it back.