Hey guys. I'm new here, and have a question:

Some guy from Sweden (or maybe it was Iceland? I can never keep those countries apart) just sent me a PM. Says he works in the hotel business. He offered to sell me 100k btc for 0.5 USD per coin.

Is that a good price? Should I take him up on his offer?

Only one thing I have to say about this:

Should have bought a Merc.

Hey evolve.

Noticed how I mentioned SlipperySlope as being an exception to the imprecise, thoughtless, irrational permabear evangelist crowd?

Yeah, you understood that one correctly. The implication was that you are one of them.

On to your attempts at refutation:

re: sharp decline

Let's look at the numbers:

2011 bubble. Peak: June 8th, 32 USD. Lowest point after 10 days: June 12th, 10 USD.

Correction: minus 69%

2013 bubble. Peak 263. Lowest point after 10 days: April 16th, 50 USD.

Correction: minus 81%.

I'm sure you will tell me that's hardly different, right?

Like I said, the intellectually lazy approach you chose will always find similarities and ignore differences in order to prove your point.

re: vagueness & falsifiability

Your 16 pages "reasons why the price is unsustainable" are worth exactly as much as the amount you got paid to produce them. Others here (the permabull crowd, obviously) have produced similar "reasons" for why we will reach 300k USD by the end of the day. I ignore both of those pseudo arguments.

The only thing that counts are a) your model and its predictions, b) your estimations of how certain you are those predictions will come true and c) the circumstances under which you consider your model refuted or confirmed.

Doesn't have to be all numbers, this is not a peer-reviewed publication after all. Go take a look at the post history of SlipperSlope, you might learn something: he has been writing both about points that confirm his predictions as well as those that contradict it. In your post history, I see almost nothing like that (a few days ago the mealy mouthed admission that maybe we have a short-term uptrend, but not *really* as you were quick to add).

This is not about the question whether the correction is over. I don't know that (and neither do you). This is about you not providing a single new estimate of a new correction downtrend now that the old one has been thoroughly broken. This is about you equating the 2011 bubble and the 2013 bubble because they somehow "look alike". Your commentary is worthless until you start acknowledging those predictions that you made that were wrong, and adjusting your theory accordingly. And you haven't done anything like that yet as far as I have seen.

(by the way, no need to tell me to do the same... I'm far from being in a particularly bullish mood. I just prefer to describe the market as objective as possible, rather than looking at it through bull or bear-shaped glasses)

Keep in mind, only supanoadz were invited to the event.

Why are you people continuing to feed the vast hunger for drama of that guy? Sure, I enjoy his antics as much as anybody, but please tell me you weren't really worried for him. But okay, we're curious beasts...

Google Translate (pretty shitty translation for this language pair, by the way, but better than nothing) gives me the impression that a) they were defrauded or had their private keys stolen by hotel staff, and b) rptiela estimates the damage to be in the range of 100k btc (or, as he helpfully points out, about 9M Euro).

Sounds like quite the successful conference, I must say. /snark

I gave up on answering that particular question. Too many variables, too much uncertainty. My current lookahead is approximately 1 week, and not much further. And so far, indicators are good that this week will be positive or at least stable. That's good enough for me :)

Here are the results of my recent (mtgox) order book calculations. As always, to be taken with a large grain of salt, since the order book is of course a primary tool for manipulation.

Apart from the obvious findings (rather big ask wall at 120; significant drop of bid/ask ratio over the weekend, from a peak of ~140 to ~120, now slightly going up again), the average of the 'all orders market execution price' is going up again, after going down about 10 USD over the weekend, indicating more bids/less asks and a better price composition. Finally, price composition in the range of the previous bid/ask totals also improved slightly, prices up about 2% compared to 12h ago.

Looks good to me. Word of caution though: with similar, in fact: even better values at the end of last week (my calculations showed a peak of the above values on the 10th), we barely passed 120, and not for long either. So I'm not exactly holding my breath that we're going to break 125 this week, although I'm not ruling it out either.

On the other hand, as I have posted multiple times now, as long as those metrics (and the related money flow metrics) don't substantially change in the coming days, I really don't see the potential for any sharp decline either.

Yes, I have been following that line of thought as well. In my opinion, there is (so far) more evidence in favor of comparing the current correction to the 2012 bubble than to the 2011 bubble. The single most important factor: the SHARP decline immediately after the peak, in both the 2013 and 2012 bubble vs. the slower, more "reluctant" decline of the 2011 bubble.

Yet, the permabears keep on mentioning the 2011 bubble only, because it conveniently allows them to remain vague on the question of how exactly they think the current correction will play out.

"It will take at least 3 months for us to go back to normal!", they say, "And we will go down veeerrry verrry much!", they add. So much for short-term precision, and falsifiability.

(Disclaimer: I exclude SlipperySlope from the sarcastic description above. He is more and more including *falsifying* conditions to his posts, which I greatly appreciate)

I disagree. I see Ripple as one of bitcoin's biggest threats. Not because it is better, but because it is worse, but in a convenient way.

All the points you mentioned (except for the last one) are irrelevant for consumers (and small businesses) who just want some convenient and cheap way to use "digital money".

The marketing of the Ripple team so far is impressive, and they try to position themselves in such a way that they seem to pose no threat to bitcoin.

In fact, they're actively trying to warm up the bitcoin community for their project -- they sort of want us to think of Ripple as "another layer on top of bitcoin". Maybe that's how it really is. No objection from me then. But I suspect the Ripple people wouldn't exactly object either in case Ripple manages to take the place of bitcoin as an actual currency and store of value.

tl;dr There's something decidedly disinenginous about the way Ripple markets itself, and I'm not completely sure the people behind it won't try, and perhaps even manage, to become a "bitcoin replacement". Don't underestimate them.

Sure. But like I said, we're not only oversold, also money flow is positive, and has been for a week now, and the order book totals were getting better each day (not entirely accurate, slightly went down since yesterday). Any of these three facts alone is worthless maybe, but together they look like pretty good evidence to me that we won't see a big slump in the coming days.

That statement, in it's unabashed generality, is plain retarded. According to your hypothesis, stock markets fell preemptively before 9/11 because "maybe they knew the reporter". Or "maybe they simply used their deductive power".

I'm not buying the doom and gloom ("106/107", "80-90").

Bullshit, I say.

Maybe we're not going to see a major upward breakout over the weekend, but I don't see any real chance for a downward breakout approaching 100 at the moment. Not with an order book filled to the brim, money flow continuing to be positive and 3 different oscillators saying we're oversold.

Not sure if "false" breakout is the best way to describe it, but yes, I expect price to go up somewhat shortly, oscillators say we're pretty oversold.

engaging story. thanks

And in a way, it sounds like a slightly unluckier version of my own story. Difference no.1 is that my fiat took a few days longer to arrive, so I saw the 26x bubble pop before I could buy in (and to be honest, I probably would have bought in :/). Difference no.2 is that I had narrowed down the possible exchanges to bitcoin-24, bitcentral and bitstamp. I was lucky to pick the third. (although I am aware that no exchange is really secure)

Mine is actually interested. which is even worse:

me: [long-winded explanation that explains why I expect btc market cap to be at least as big as market cap of a company like Paypal in the medium term]

she: but from what you described, btc is a like a currency. then why do you compare it to the market cap of a  company, based on share price?

me: damn woman. why do you ask difficult questions? can't you just cheer me on?

That's a kind of mealy-mouthed response. Stay intelectually honest, or you're no better than rpietila when he's high on power silver polish.

Anyway.

The fact that we didn't break 125 yesterday shows that any hypothesized uptrend is far from certain. I admit that much.

But the fact that we're not even getting close to a new lower low, or even anywhere near 100, firmly puts the ball in the court of the "the bubble is not yet over" evangelists to explain how they believe the correction will play out from here.

tl;dr The original correction down trend is simply broken now. The original (mid january) growth trend is not confirmed, but still plausible.

(aside: looks like I'm developing a habit to dig up older posts. oh well)

That's the million dollar question, I'd say. Here's a somewhat related observation I made during the last days:

Take the order book. (ignore for a moment the objection that some/many/all of the orders are fake). The last days saw a rather drastic increase of the bid sum/ask sum ratio (visualized nicely on blockchained). There's another calculation I make routinely, seeing how far the price would go in either directions if the entire bid sum or ask sum (or parts of it) were executed as market orders. Don't know if that technique has a fancy name (maybe 'market execution price'?), but it takes into account not only the order totals but also the price distribution.

Okay, here's the observation: the average of that execution price was rising even more sharply than the bid sum/ask sum ratio lately. Which means not only did more money enter the order book (and/or coins left it), but that order prices appreciated as well.

The conclusion I draw is that a big reason why we saw the current upward breakout is that a) new orders were placed (duh!), and b) buyers adjusted their existing orders after realizing that their overly optimistic price setting for entering the market won't be met anytime soon (less of a duh). And I suspect this trend will continue.

I really hope this upward breakout didn't come as a huge surprise to anybody. I understand that there is still a lot of - justified - reservation about the question if the post-bubble correction is really over, and users like evolve and slipperyslope certainly like to remind us of that reservation on a daily basis (no offense. I appreciate the posts of you guys), but any serious look at the recent order book totals, the money flow of the past 6 days, or the sentiment on this forum ("I'm gonna buy *so hard* once price hits 90") should have convinced you that, at least short term, the only way was up. What will happen in a longer time frame, next weeks/months, is another question.

You've missed the point I tried to make. Then again, I have a habit of writing those huge walls of text in which my original point gets lost, so I'll try it again:

There is nothing "unsustainable" per se about the price doubling every 30 days. It is factually what happened for a brief amount of time. Then it stopped. Everyone who was cautious, realizing that such growth cannot possibly go on for long, sold shortly before the crash, and was rewarded.

But actually following the logic of the (unconditional) statement that doubling every 30 days is "unsustainable" would mean you would have sold long before April 10, and would have missed out on a lot of profit.

Point is: any growth, no matter how outlandish it seems, is appropriate for the time during which it occurs (what a delicious tautology). Adding a qualifiying statement, why it probably cannot occur longer than some duration X, for some reason Y, is informative. On the other hand, the unqualified statement "this growth is unsustainable" is similarly fallacious to concluding that nobody can win the lottery from the fact that each individual ticket holder is extremely unlikely to win the lottery.

* * *

I am probably just ignorant of the pragmatics of the word "unsustainable". I blame vague, self-diagnosed "autism". Yeah, that should work.

I'm quite sure short-term fake walls exist. We've all seen them in action. But a lot of people seem to have this idea that a large portion of the total mtgox order book are "fake" as well, put in there only to give a skewed impression of the market.

Problem is, all orders in the book are funded (or should be, in principle), meaning that whoever wants to manipulate the market long-term in such a way better has a few million USD lying around that he doesn't mind sitting in the mtgox order book, week after week. Gaining no interest whatsoever, when they could be put to use in other markets. And taken care of by a company that has a more than spotty history of reliability. Yeah. No way that could possibly be a bad idea to do.