"Xmas is always a downturn" looks like one of these Bitcoin myths that people blindly spread around without regard for historic price data.

Here's what really happened in Christmas 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014. Some great rises, some sideways action, and not much in the way of post-Xmas downtrends.

tl;dr - I am not saying BTC/USD will necessarily go up. I am saying that the post-Xmas downtrend is a myth.

Sort of. The amount you can get away with is small, and declining arbitrarily. It used to be that if you withdraw just under 0.1 BTC you could get away with it - have a read of recent posts and see what the new "limit" is, I'd guess somewhere around 0.7 BTC. You'll also get hit with a (fixed) withdraw charge - in the old days this was a maximum of 1%, these days - because there's a lower limit to the fee - it'll be over 1% (I believe - I've not seen any change to the 0.001 BTC fee, but it may have been increased. The ToS still say 0.001 BTC, but you can probably take that with a grain of salt...)

tl;dr - make lots of small withdraw requests, and accept that you'll lose out to withdrawal fees.

Don't forget to thank the admin for kindly letting you have some of your own money!

Edit: watch out for "autoreinvest", too - there's a workaround for this that avoids your withdrawal requests being magically converted into non-withdrawals, and the funds being reinvested in hashing. You may have to trawl through a lot of posts in this thread to find details, however.

Hmmm. I feel some supporting evidence might be useful. Here's January 2011 on Gox and January 2012, January 2013, January 2014 and January 2015 on Stamp. With the exception of January 2015, every January has seen a rise between the 1st and 31st. Now, five years' worth of data isn't really enough to make assumptions about future performance, but I am going to assume that "January has been murder" is hyperbole, unsupported by the available evidence.

Back to $400?

I'm still waiting for $320.

Is this a Kwukduck prediction, or a Kwukduck's analysis team prediction?

It sounds like your end goals are broadly the same as mine. I wouldn't short.

What I would do instead is either sell call options or buy put options.

Buying puts, you spend a fixed amount of BTC and then profit when the price falls (or lose all of your initial investment if price doesn't fall). There's a saying in options trading - no one ever got rich buying options. Which leads me to...

Selling calls, you immediately make a fixed amount of BTC. However, if price rises you can suffer a theoretically infinite loss. However... you can prevent this by buying an equal number of puts, with a higher "strike price".

As an example, right now BTC/USD price is around $460. Let's assume that this is an ATH (willing suspension of disbelief required - forget about December 2013!) and we expect price to fall. The current asking price for a call with a $460 strike price (on Coinut) is 0.001446 BTC - that's for a contract worth 0.1 BTC. You sell 10 of these, making 0.01446 (minus a commission to the exchange). That looks like instant profit, but if the price rises that "profit" will evaporate. To prevent this, you also buy a call, this time with a higher strike price. A call with a strike price of $475 costs 0.001292 (that's the asking price - you could place a lower bid and hope a seller accepts your bid). Buying 10 of these will cost you 0.01292 - meaning you've made 0.00154 BTC. If price does rise, then your losses are limited. This is obviously just an example, and I am not saying that this is a good idea at this time! You might also want to trade more than 10 contracts - or less.

I like options because I can enter a position knowing exactly how much I could lose (or profit). I like that I can hedge like this, and holding an opening position doesn't give me sleepness nights. I couldn't say the same about shorting!

What I don't like about (BTC) options is the lack of choice with respect to exchanges. Coinut is currently the only exchange offering "vanilla" options (the kind I've discussed above). Other sites offer "binary options", which seem to me to be much closer to gambling - win a fixed amount if the price goes up, regardless of how much it goes up. There's an exchange called Quedex which is opening "soon", and has been so for several months. Coinut has been controversial on BCT recently - they messed up their signature campaign payments, and were slow in rectifying that. I left the campaign, and withdrew my BTC from their site. I'm monitoring things, and may well trade there again - until the recent problems I'd not had any problems there.

I'm fairly certain the large Chinese mining operations weren't around when I was mining, back in 2010-2011. I don't recall Chinese miners being a significant factor until 2012-2013. Maybe they were solo mining like the rest of us, in Slush's pool. They certainly weren't large enough to register on the mining pools radar.

Incidentally, any response to my "skyrocket" question?

I'd be very cautious about anything that involves passing your BTC to another party. In particular, I'd recommend the following:

• Don't invest all (or even most) your BTC
• Spread your risk - don't invest in one place, but invest smaller amounts in a number of different places
• Research first - make sure the place you're planning to invest in is as reputable as it appears to be
• Remember that while you're not in control of your BTC, they're not your BTC. In other words, any investment exposes you to "counterparty risk", the risk that the place where you're investing defaults or "does a Gox"

In the past I've successfully invested some BTC at Bitfinex, and it was quite profitable. However, I actively managed my investment - the interest rate at Bitfinex tends to be very low, but occasionally spikes quite high. I moved funds into Bitfinex when rates were high, and moved them back out again when the rate dropped (typically, high rates only last for a few days. I loaned out my BTC during this period, with 30-day terms. The loans never lasted that long - they were usually paid back quite quickly - but for a few days at least I received a high rate of interest.

Personally I'd be very wary of investing anywhere that claimed that they were backed by a mining operation. It's way too difficult to assess whether or not the claim is true, and too many cloud mining outfits have turned out to be either scams or incompetent.

If/when quantum computers become a threat to Bitcoin, the same threat will apply across the financial sector. I doubt that that threat would stand for long: even if Bitcoin devs don't invent a solution, others will and it'll soon be implemented in Bitcoin.

Edit: the FAQ on the wiki discusses QC, its risks, and how they're mitigated.

Could you explain when and why the transaction fee will "skyrocket"? Will it skyrocket when the block reward drops to 0, or will it (and this is my suspicion) increase roughly in proportion to the reduction of the block reward for each block reward reduction up to and including the final block reward reduction?

That's great to hear. So it's possible to go to the site and withdraw all your money, say 2 BTC, and have it sent to you with no problem whatsoever? How long would it take for someone to receive their hypothetical 2 BTC, and what fee would be levied?

I wonder why people are complaining that auto-invest prevents this happening, even going so far as coming up with workarounds to bypass the site's auto-invest "feature"?

I wonder why people are complaining that they're unable to withdraw all their money, even going so far as coming up with workarounds to withdraw a fraction of their money by making tiny withdrawals and accepting that they'll lose out to withdrawal fees?

Edit: in case it's not clear, if you're considering investing in scrypt.cc - read the numerous different PSAs above before you do so. And then don't invest.

(Disclaimer: not read Yrpaper's contributions, so apologies if this has been covered)

I agree up to a point - evading capital controls, sure (step forward, China). When it comes to Lambie and illegal transactions, the wee soul has an obsession with drugs and kiddie porn. At least with drugs, cash is king in my city - people wouldn't risk drugs being posted to them and tend to scorn Silk Road and similar. And they'd point out you can't roll up 20 BTC to hoover a mirror, waiting for a BTC transaction is frustrating in a crowded, dark nightclub, etc.

Maybe kiddie porn is different, I dunno. The folk who get caught seem to get caught through their use of the Internet, so maybe. The British paedophile Jimmy Saville apparently never owned a computer because he thought people might see through his mask, but he's possibly the exception.

Yrpapers? Dunno, I've started putting any new posters here on ignore - I feel guilty about the false positives, but not that guilty. There's been a couple of times I've been drawn into a conversation and half way through had my ovine suspicions confirmed and ended up sticking the wee lamb's latest alt on ignore.

Ah, so not the EU criminalising BTC at all? Instead it's some member states expected to urge the European Commision 'to come up with measures to "strengthen controls of non-banking payment methods such as electronic/anonymous payments and virtual currencies and transfers of gold, precious metals, by pre- paid cards"'. I accept the article title was misleading, but you read it, surely? And you understand the difference between the EU, the EC, and EU member states, right?

Got any links that show the EU actually legislating (or even proposing legislation) for "new laws criminalizing the use and posession of all non government/bank digital currency"?

Any links, references, articles? I can't see anything on europe.eu that suggests the EU will criminalise digital currencies. The EBA are being naturally cautious, and advising the finance sector against adopting digital currencies until the EU has a regulatory regime in place. That's pretty far from what I want to see, but it's even further from criminalising digital currencies.

And, let's be realistic here, you don't have a great track-record with this stuff, Kwukduck.

OK. With gambling (of the random variety, not the sports betting variety I put in the bucket shop grey area) the punter has no way of knowing what the outcome will be - the roulette wheel could stop on 1, 4, 17, 0 - or even 00 in some casinos. Even attempting to hedge (betting on red and black simultaneously) will see the punter lose over time (because 0 and 00 are neither red nor black, neither odd nor even). With trading a good trader can assess the likelihood of various outcomes - price goes up, price goes down, price goes sideways and decide whether the reward justifies the risk. They could even hedge - make trades that profit if price goes up or down. If they're good at what they do (analysing the market) they won't be condemned to the inevitable loss that the punter accepts if they spend time at the roulette table. The same applies to miners, albeit with a different market to analyse.

I'm not saying that it's impossible to gamble using an exchange, or gamble by buying mining gear. I am saying it's a bad idea, and that gamblers who do this would be better off acknowledging that they're gambling and finding a cheaper way to lose their money. And I'm definitely saying that real traders and real miners are not gamblers (except, of course, when they enter a casino).

If you're gambling when you believe you're trading or mining you shouldn't be trading or mining - you'd be better off dispensing with any pretence and just gamble instead. At least you'll have some fun, even if you know you're almost certainly going to lose.

Traders and miners - real traders and miners - aren't gambling. They've analysed the market, assessed risks and rewards, and have taken steps to minimise the chance of losing their investment.

I do appreciate there are grey areas - sports betting, for example, takes skill (knowledge of the teams/players/etc) and isn't down to sheer luck like roulette, for example. And "investing" in shares from a bucket shop is much closer to gambling than real investing. But comparing BTC traders and miners with gamblers is, in general, indicative of not having a clear idea what it is that traders and miners really do.

Why do you feel the next resistance is at $700? I'd expect resistance around $500 and $680 because we've previously encountered resistance at those levels (last month for $500, and June 2014 for $680). I'm also thinking that where we are now - around $450 - is a resistance level (~$450 was the November 2014 high point).

tl;dr - until we get clear of $450 I think it's too early to think about $700.

What are those counters (or at least some of them)?

It's not necessary for everyone to "like" Bitcoin. What matters, and what the OP showed, is that a deflationary asset (like BTC, gold) has a "head start" over non-deflationary assets (like USD, CNY, EUR, etc) - even if demand is static, supply is still diminishing:

But the beauty of it is that those rules are "baked into" the system - supply falls over time, regardless of the investment strategy Joe adopts. Note that whatever approach Joe takes, the graph still shows the daily supply of BTC decreasing over time.

$15 to $170 - sheeeeeeeyit, that's an 1100% increase in only 20 months. Or an average of >50% every month.