When mBTC (.001) = $1 then the SH*T is going to hit the fan. Can you guys imagine that? But, it is just a 10 billion dollar market cap, really not much. Call me when we hit 1 trillion... (Can someone do the math on that one...?)

If the banking crisis continue, and it looks like it will, it can happen this year. Understand, once we start going up there in price (say over the previous high or there abouts), the moves will be violent. 10%-20% moves in a day until we reach some type of consensus price are to be expected. And who knows when that will be considering the state of things.

I think we have no choice but to go to mBTC. As many have mentioned there is a psychological barrier to entry when "stocks" go above a certain price (which is why they split, at least in part) and with bitcoin we have the decimal places and following naming convention to take care of that. When you only have 11 million current outstanding shares, oh boy...

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You know what is really interesting about a BTC ATM? It is like free advertising. Imagine in a large city all the people seeing this BTC thing for the first time and people using it.

This is great news but I do wonder how long the government will let the ATM sit there! Really, I get the feeling they might take it away. The owner in an interview said they already have a legal team and are ready or planning for things. Hopefully those ATM's get to stay out for a while. Will be interesting to see how they are accepted in other countries as well.

Regarding the price going over $200 or $300, it will just take more bad banking news and I have a feeling that is a given...

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Where did anyone say "registration"? Verification, meaning you need to be verified before you can trade BTC, right? That is what I was talking about.
Where did anyone say the verification queue had anything to with bitcoin? It has been pretty clear it takes time for the staff to do the verifications. And, that is the point.

I've heard people talking about waiting to be verified so they can purchase bitcoins. That is my point. I'm unsure of where you went with the thread there and how you brought up things (that you were trying to correct) that no one mentioned???

IF you don't spend your incoming money on BTC's, what will you spend them on? LTC, sure, that is possible, but this queue has been going on long before they announced LTC. And, if you want LTC now there are easier ways to do it than opening up and account here, waiting 2 or 3 weeks for verification and then waiting however much longer for them to offer LTC. Why not just go to an exchange that offers LTC?

That is a good point regarding those cryptocurrencies used for currencies. Further good suggestions. But, don't you think adjustments would be made with those used for things like DNS?

As I heard elsewhere we are in the Netscape Navigator phase of these crypto currencies. There are some bright minds and big hearts behind it all. I do hope it gets to where it needs to go.

Lastly, these crypto currencies have been described as being anti-fragile. Basically, they adapt and become stronger with the passage of time. I find that interesting and hopeful to say the least.

IAS

True, but there have been some pretty good ideas. Enhanced speed, security, etc. Those can just as well be incorporated into BTC but are first "tested" on other alt coins in a sense.

Consider the BTC blockchain to be a framework bed for ideas to grow from.
Look at Namecoin, using the blockchain as a decentralized DNS server of sorts. You can expand that out to be a medium for all kinds of things.
That alone is reason to be excited for just the blockchain. What we can do with that, wow!

IAS

...if the volume and uptick (relative to BTC) is any indication over the last few weeks and months. http://www.cryptocoincharts.info/

BTC is a hard technology/concept for many to grasp, but as they grasp it and get involved, it is my guess they naturally are hedging their bets into other cryptocurrencies (instead of dollars, Euros, etc.) They also would avoid paying taxes on profits if they just move their money around the alt coins (at least in many countries if there are no taxes on currency trades).

Most of the alt coins have patterns that scream "strong uptrend". In a sense this can be dangerous and we experienced it with the internet. (e.g. pets.com, etc.) but it is a natural progression to spread around your statement/"money"/investment or whatever you want to call it.

What are your thoughts on where alt coins stand right now relative to BTC?

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Well said Brushan. It is interesting to think about how BTC is changing how we view and use money. (And it is an education of sorts for many of us). Sort of like how the internet did the same for information and exchange. But, something that remains is "bad and dis-informative" information. It is another part of reality creation, or just plain manipulation of the psyche. If enough people crowd the boards with negative posts, their hope may be to bring the price down to buy more, or just to plain stop bitcoin. But we are talking about a revolution happening here, at least regarding monetary systems. Beyond BTC it is much more than we can possibly imagine, just look around. BTC, to me, is just another step in the right direction. A natural next progression for the internet.

Anyway, to predict a crash in BTC, or a great rise for that matter, is going to take more than TA. Lots of sentiment and world events to consider as well...

IAS

Actually, I found the amount and was way to conservative above. It is not just new accounts but overall the CEO of MtGox said that 5-20 million dollars is flowing in every day and that is 17-20 times the outflow. http://www.btcpedia.com/video-inside-mtgox-bitcoin-exchange/ So, lets just take a middle number, say 12.5 million dollars in purchases made daily. At a $150 BTC, that would mean 83,333 per day bought. Volume numbers on a low day is in the 40,000 BTC range and on a high day was 600,000. I don't know exactly how to make sense of it all, but that is a large amount for just getting going.

IAS

Great post bitsalame,   I do use a little TA when looking at BTC but not a whole lot, maybe just for entry points to pick up more, but not much even then. I traded stocks for quite a few years and TA was usually a very successful way for me with swing trades of a few weeks to months (I used candlesticks). But BTC is not a stock (only). We can argue that it is a currency/payment system/commodity/"stock"/technology/protocol/etc. so if we rely on something as narrow as TA we are doing a big injustice to something so complex. And, BTC is being partly (or is that largely?) driven by sentiment.

Relating to that last point, sentiment, consider the state of the world economies. If one more economy pulls a Cypress, you will see BTC double or triple in short order. NO TA IS GOING TO SHOW YOU THAT COMING. Countries all over the world are being tight lipped on the actual situations, so don't expect much of a warning if any. They will say everything is ok until your $$ or Euro account has been "adjusted"  

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Well, the queue has held steady at that amount, it is not only a recent number, if you look at old threads it is a fairly steady one. The link above in this thread shows that one week ago the waiting list was about the same.

Now, you may say 10,000-20,000 is a very small number. But what would you say about a future currency/stock/commodity/payment system that currently has 11 million "coins"? That, relatively speaking, is probably smaller than that small town you brought up.    Really, if BTC succeeds you will just need one. Very very likely at some point this year, maybe next, we are going to be talking mBTC or the like.

I don't have any idea what the average deposit is at MtGox, but if it is as small as $150 (say 1BTC) then that is 15,000 or so BTC purchased. If it is larger then maybe it is 30,000 - 45,000, maybe a few hundred thousand if it involves only a few VC's looking to buy more. We can only guess. The point is, the "float" is nothing and that is why you are seeing shortages reported by some. Do you realize that at some exchanges you have pools and you can only buy 1 or 2 a day if you are lucky? (I heard that on a podcast a couple of weeks ago.) Someone correct me if I'm wrong but the man (Cliff High of halfpasthuman.com) said he was hoping to be able to buy one or two if they were available. I emailed him and mentioned some other exchanges.

Any of you guys ever trade low float stocks? Explosive is an understatement and now you can add to that that the "stock" in question is global.

It's all about sharing (at some point anyway)...

Again, I'm a bitcoin fan. But it will not be good if it becomes illegal. (Which sounds crazy but that is the world we live in.) Trading them is one thing. But do you think someone is going to risk getting thrown in jail using an illegal currency? (Again that just sounds so crazy.)

I don't think we are close to making it illegal, that would really suck.

Where do we spend it? It would become a person to person exchange if possible.

Exactly. The thing we will always have on our side though, is the incredibly small float.

Right now and for the next few months I think we are ok. In that time the Sh*T may hit the fan with many currencies all over the globe though.
If that happens, we will probably be ok. If we aren't ok, we have bigger things to worry about.

We can't compare downloading movies and music with currencies. Banks make wars. Controlling money is there bread and butter.

If they make BTC illegal in just a few countries it goes underground. If that happens it will be hard to sustain any kind of price.

It isn't that governments can end bitcoin, but for it to be viable we have to be able to spend it. If it is illegal, where are we going to spend it?

I'm all about BTC and what it stands for but we have to hope that currencies continue to crash. If that happens then the people will will BTC into being another currency.
If we stay in between for too long, they will attack us. Luckily, their currencies are collapsing all over the globe. We have a chance. We have God on our side...

I basically got out of the stock trading business back in 2002 or so as the manipulation of the markets was just becoming annoying. It made the TA just too complicated. It was like a matrix that pulled you in deeper and deeper.

Some manipulation:
For years now the Fed has been pumping money into the stock market.
For years now the Fed (or some banks there of) have been "leasing" the gold in the bullion banks to suppress the price of gold.  In addition they sell tons in puts against gold.
The list goes on but those are three of the big ones as examples. Interesting enough, manipulation eventually catches up with you. The Fed selling those puts might bring the price of gold down, but when it pops it will pop lounder.

Anyway, as you get deeper into TA (and have an understanding of fundamentals) you really start to see the manipulation. I'm no longer the expert though. You start to say more often "What? That doesn't make any sense."

But the short answer is that price manipulation really does kill or at least twist TA. It depends on how they do it and the form of manipulation. If the manipulation is at all regular (pumping money into the markets), it then becomes a part of TA (just like fundamentals do).

I really really hope they do not allow shorting of bitcoin. Look at what it has done to the gold markets (The Fed sold 500 tons of puts in one or two days before the latest gold "crash" two weeks ago or so). If we make shorting allowed (and some sites like MtGox inevitably will), BTC will be open to manipulation of price. That said, when you only have 11 million shares, the manipulators will probably not have the last say.

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Do you know how to read a chart? I traded professionally for years. Look at the volume of those big down days. (low). Now look at the volume of those two days where we spiked down to 50ish, the day after the 2nd down day and then 4 days later. Both formed huge "hammers" in candlestick charts on very high volume. We ate right through that resistance like butter (coming back up to where we are now). What I'm saying as a technician, that the road back to 260 is NOTHING. The large resistance is behind us. We probably have to form a base first. We are sitting on support. Though, even though we can use technical analysis with the charts, BTC is not exactly a stock, currency, commodity, etc. (not to mention the world state.)

266 to 50 was DDOS driven, throw in thousands of micro trades and fear and panic. The DDOS successes seem to be passing quickly.

Bitcoin is an anti-fragile technology and you can see it adjusting and becoming stronger.

The volatility describes the state of the world economies and the world more than it describes bitcoin. If you don't believe that ask yourself this simple question "If things were good and our currencies were strong, what interest would people have in bitcoin?"   I say it would be next to nothing, quite obviously. Bitcoin is a sign of the times.

Think about what you are saying here. MtGox does 70%-80% of the BTC trades and has a 2-3 week waiting list. The run-up in price perfectly coincides with the waiting list really starting (that is not to say it is everything, but it is something we must look at.)

Now, I'm not saying the waiting list is the price of BTC or even that it is the main factor in it - clearly there is BTCe and a host of other exchanges, but how can you say there is not link given the obvious factors and correlations? They are obviously linked, the question is just how much.

Now, of course if the price is tanking your 10k is probably going to be carefully injected into the market by you. But the volatility is a part of the game, the key is calling the bottom, looking for an uptrend, etc. So, when you have $10k and the high is $260 just a couple of weeks ago and is now at $130, there are only 11 million outstanding shares (now), currencies around the world are either collapsing or getting closer and closer to collapsing, gold is being suppressed in a variety of ways by the Federal Reserve (which is a private bank), etc. and on and on - It is pretty clear you are not going to want to wait too long as we are in an acceleration phase of something here on planet earth. That is why BTC is here the way it is now. You can see it and feel it, but being that we are within it (the eye of the hurricane) and that information is still largely controlled, it is sometimes hard to see the obvious. They tried to hide the information from us in a variety of ways (e.g. - highly manipulated stock market price, lower prices of precious metals, false unemployment numbers, etc.)

I am not trying to sound strong here, please don't take it as such. But we are at a very special time in human history.

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empoweoqwj - Can we really say the price is not increasing? The big DDOS attack that brought (at least in part) the price from 260 to 50 in a day has been the only one to date that has really been substantial. Since that time ($50) we have moved back up to $135. Looking at the year as a whole, we are clearly in an uptrend. I think you are confusing a steady price rise with a volatile one. Without a doubt the BTC price instability is just as much connected to currency sentiment than it is BTC sentiment, supply/demand, etc.

Further, the DDOS attack are not having the same effect. That is clear. The last few really caused nothing. I'm sure something new is on the horizon but we need to be tested. Even though the thread is talking about price, it is not the end all here. BTC adoption is and that is happening. There are so many projects going on that this bad boy is going to sneak up on people just like the internet did. Our own Black Swan.

Also, DDOS attacks might not have made people money the way we were told. When do those that do them buy back in? When it was at 260 and went down to 150, do they get back in then? It dropped another 100 bucks the next day. I just think the DDOS attacks are too dangerous to consistently make money from.

Anyone have that MtGox waiting list time?

IAS

This has been a pretty interesting thing for me to consider. A few weeks ago the waiting list for account confirmations at MtGox was around 20-30,000. Now, there is no shorting of BTC's. So basically, those are new buyers. (I hope there never is shorting as that can be dangerous e.g. - see gold). Did they say they can process 1000 new accounts a day or something like that? I mean there is basically a 2 or 3 week waiting period.

Does anyone know where/what the latest queue for MtGox is?

There are around 11 million BTC shares outstanding right now, and if you understand stock markets even a little, that is NOTHING, especially for a currency. My idea on Bitcoin is pretty simple, if it really succeeds, you will just need 1. Think about that. 

I remember in a recent podcast that the CEO of MtGox basically said that incoming money is something like 17-20 times that of outgoing money. We also should weigh this into the equation. A picture is starting to be painted. And, when one considers that most people are still not in the know here and that VC money is starting to move in, uh oh...

There are of course many other factors to consider (e.g. - day traders, DDOS attacks (which are meaning less and less), etc.) regarding the price.

What are your thoughts on how that Queue, money flow, # of shares, VC money coming in, etc affects the price, considering that they are mostly buyers and that MtGox is still what, 70%-80% of the market?


IAS

I think as another mentioned we need exchanges to be a bit more professional and to follow the sometimes rules as closely as possible. In a sense some banks are protecting us from fraud but in a sinister way some banks are indeed probably trying to limit bitcoins effectiveness. I don't think it is any coincidence that England, a banking powerhouse, is trying to limit Bitcoin.

But, in the meantime for those exchanges without bank accounts (or with them), as I mentioned in another thread a very effective method (which is used at bitcoin.de + requires 2 factor Google authentication) is to just have account holders register their bank accounts and when coins are bought/sold they are frozen in an account until the money is transferred and received by the buyer. It is slower and not without pitfalls but it is also very very effective. It is a terrible setup if you want to daytrade as you can't, the coins are essentially frozen from 1 - 4 days or so (however long the transfer takes). You basically have 12 hours to mark your transfer as sent and then the receiver marks it as paid once the money is in their account.

So, a typical exchange looks like this. I buy bitcoins from a seller. But before I confirm it I make sure they have a good record (just like on Ebay, etc.). Likewise, the seller can make sure I have a good record before they sell to me. I check my email and send the money via an online transfer to the recipient, noting the transaction code in the online form. I have 12 hours to do this and then mark it as sent. The receiver can't use the bitcoins they sold me, they are frozen in "reserve". Once the money arrives and the seller marks it as such, the coins are tranferred into my account. Both a German transfer or EU Sepa transfer are accepted and FREE. (at least at many banks).

In this manner the banks are not dealing with bitcoin exchanges directly. Rather, sellers meet buyers. There is mostly low risk and the biggest problem is that the exchanges are just overwhelmed right now. I have had one person not transfer the money as the price dropped after I sold them and he chose to just get a bad star rating. (He will have to deal with the Karma of that.  ) Bitcoin.de changed the wait time for sending payments from a then 24 hours to a now 12 hours. It would be nice if they change it to one hour but that would then mostly rule out paper transfers at banks and require things to be done almost exclusively online, which they probably are anyway.

Anyway, the banks can't stop person to person transfers. There is nothing in the transaction associated with an exchange and no mention of bitcoin, just a random code.

These "growing pains" are to be expected, really, does anyone expect a revolution in economics to take place without a struggle? The thing we have on our side is that currencies all over the world are collapsing as we speak. In the process (for years now actually) central banks are selling gold puts to artificially suppress the gold price so that people think things aren't too bad with paper money. They have also been "leasing" gold (actually selling it as it is never coming back) to make up the supply demand difference. Cypress actually has to sell like 400 million of their gold due to the "bail in" (theft), at now lower prices! That will probably follow suit in other countries... Spain, Italy, Ireland, Portugal, Greece, etc. are on our side. The people are on our side for the most part. Those that aren't have just not yet been effected. As more banking crisis happen, the banks will have problems trying to control bitcoin, and letting it survive might actually help save their lives as there are going to be many unhappy people wanting at those criminals.

No more banks, no more wars...

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