No disrespect, but I'm not completely convinced you manage to stay out of the game that long. Once we're back on the road to da moon (next days? next year?), you'll be back :D

Well, in defense of the idea: There's no arguing with market participant's psychology, is there. If enough people somehow feel it is a milestone, then it is a milestone.

In fact, there's also no particularly deep reason behind the powers of 10 price steps (10, 100, 1000), and yet they act as major support/resistance points.

What's the deal with this "gold parity" fallacy? I can understand why the media is picking it up, it sure sounds catchy, but it's completely meaningless except for that rather shallow psychological reasons (I'm not dismissing psychological reasoning altogether, just pointing out that this one is really rather dumb and easy to see through). If we ever reach parity with tradeable gold market cap, now that would be news. But I'm pretty sure it's a long way til we get there, if ever.

I don't get it either :/

enlighten us, oh salivous one.


EDIT: guess I get it. you're amused by the price expectation behind the refund policy, huh?

The problem with your analysis is not that it's invalid per se, but that you're kind of sloppy in executing it. Even a cursory glance at your own chart will show you that a very similar pattern actually appeared on November 10 and 19th: volume (and momentum) declined as we recovered from the hit (and approached the respective ATHs). And seeing where we stand now, I wouldn't put too much weight on that signal.

In my opinion before a real correction happens (one that we don't recover from within a few days) buying pressure needs to lessen substantially. There's a very mild decline of it on btcny perhaps, but I don't see it as substantial enough to end the rally quite yet.

Well, it's a tempting thought for me sometimes, even if I have other reasons to believe in Bitcoin's long term success. Seeing your fiat value stored in BTC increasing 10-fold or more kind of makes it hard for me not to condescendingly lecture others about it

I know, I know: lies, nothing but lies.

But I like Married to the Sea (from Toothpaste for Dinner's Drew), and I felt it's both funny and not completely unlike the feelings I sometimes have myself.

Original Link.

The site didn't hold very well under the intense load this weekend, I guess you noticed.

Do you have plans to increase your infrastructure? I know, it's not a cheap thing, so how about the following idea: if you need to invest in more bandwidth/servers, you could make a "donation drive", say: you tell us you need x BTC to buy another server (or upgrade whatever is necessary), and we can track how far we are with that goal, so we can donate towards that end.

Makes sense?

It ain't over till the fat lady sells.

Didn't want to sound too hash, I like your new serious style. Plus, we're going into a correction (how small or big unclear yet), so you're not entirely wrong.

One thing though I forgot in my earlier post.


Right. After posting my critical remarks I realized I didn't address your main point (about the uneven volume distribution across prices). Then I thought of a brilliant answer for that point, but was too tired to post and went to bed instead

So here it goes, with a bit of delay: I don't think that part holds up very well. I'm pretty sure that you just describe what is basically a "natural" distribution (of volume) that thins out as you get to fringes of the price.

In other words: the time interval you picked contained prices from 200 to 1200. The lowest point isn't a fringe point, because you cut off trading history before that price. So we've traded around 200 much longer. Same for everything in between 200 and 1200. The further you go away from the middle though, the lower the volume gets, as is to be expected since 1200 was the ATH at that point.

I guess to really make my point I'd have to do a quick history analysis myself. I'll see if I have time for it tonight. But my basic claim would be: If you take *any* time interval where the beginning point is at a price that has been traded regularly before, and the ending point is near the ATH (up the end of that period), then volume will thin out getting closer to that ATH.

If that's true, then the point would be then that you can't really conclude from volume thinning out as you get near the then-ATH that we've reached the end of a rally... Usually, on the way to the "final" ATH of a rally, several smaller ATHs are broken in the meantime, without a major interruption of the rally (see Januar to April this year for an example)

Rpietila, your analysis is bad and you should feel bad.

You're either trying to prove a point and cherry pick your data accordingly, or you're honestly too naive to see that in late 2013 you simply cannot take data from one exchange alone and then draw grand conclusions from it.

Here are two charts, daily btc volume over time and daily USD volume over time, summed up over mtgox, bitstamp and btcchina (where the CNY exchange rate for btcchina was fixed at 1/6.1).

I'm too lazy to draw in a nice moving average, but I trust you can see the rough trend yourself: there were indeed two spikes in btc volume compared to which we are somewhat lower now, but not drastically so, and certainly we're not lower in btc volume than in the beginning of the month. In simpler terms: btc volume is stable or slightly going up.

And USD volume paints a stronger version of the same picture, as is to be expected with the hugely increased per coin value: two spikes earlier this month, and we're slightly below them now, but overall it's going up.

That's all there is to say. Looking at those charts and concluding that we are rallying up on "decreasing volume" is wishful thinking at best, or wilful deception at worst.

Read my sig

A quick note:

After being very sceptical in the beginning (the name "bitcoincrystalball" still makes me roll my eyes), I signed up after some additional communication with them.

I can't say much yet for the TA itself, but after 2 days of being in contact I can say that they are one of the most helpful, fast reacting and friendly services I've ever had the pleasure communicating with.

That's all for now.

I don't think I've ever been this bearish. This video is seriously depressing.

Just posting to show off my new sig.

You're such a clown. Go buy back at a loss already. I have nothing against bears, but you're so obviously driven by an agenda (probably because you'd prefer *not* to buy back at a loss, but at the price at which you foolishly sold), it's not even funny anymore...

Here's the paragraph from the letter in question:


You get that this is Bernanke's letter reply to the question: "Yo Berni baby, what do you think of this Bitcoin thing?" So anything he writes in there, whether it's a quote or not, is probably carefully chosen, not just some random collection of words. So this line, about innovations and long-term promise, is one of the few statements that are not completely noncommittal (like the part about how the Fed can't regulate shit because btc isn't issued by a bank). He's quoting somebody else, sure, but the key word here is 'key point'. This is, in the clandestine way of phrasing shit that politicians, diplomats and CEOs like to employ, *exactly* what the press has called it: a cautious endorsement by Bernanke (emphasis on cautious), followed by a big honking "and it's not my business anyway".

Kind of disappointing, coming from the Economist. It's a good paper, in my opinion, on most topics, but that's a pretty pedestrian analysis of Bitcoin.

What are your decisions based on, in such a short time frame? Very fast moving average-based indicators?

The shortest window I personally see as "tradeable" is something in the range of selling/buying back within an hour or two.

Hehe, guess I'm lucky that my gf actually is impressed when I tell her about it. Both because she gets the math behind it and can relate to the geeky thrill of it all, and because, in her words, she wants that private swimming pool ASAP :P

Huh. Only found this thread now. Guess I'm late to the party.

Sorry for not reading through the entire thread, but what's the current plan? Selling tickets starts in 3 days (that seems to be the countdown on the webpage), is that right?

What's next? Are the details of the party known already? It will take place in Frankfurt, for sure? Personally, I also would have preferred a nicer place like Berlin, but I guess Frankfurt makes sense logistically.


EDIT: One other thing... I know many in the community are at least somewhat critical towards fiat money, etc bla bla, but for now it is simple reality that btc is extremely volatile, while fiat (Euro or USD or whatever) is not. So I think it would have been a much wiser choice to define the entrance price in a common currency, and then ask for the corresponding btc value on the day of reservation. The way it looks now, the already pretty high entrance price just went up another 20% in fiat terms. Maybe I'm just a frugal bore, but much as I'd like to join this party (really would like to meet a bunch of you guys), I'm not too happy with the pricing model.