This... this is hypnotic. I've been watching it now for 5 about minutes straight. In not entirely unrelated news, I have the weirdest boner right now.

Sorry to dig up a slightly older post (posted earlier today, already 4 pages in o_O), but this is a pet peeve of mine:

No, the "January-March trend [...] doubling every 30 days" is not per se, as you say, "unsustainable". What you're doing there is repeating the worn-out mantra "exponential growth is not sustainable". Unless of course when it is, either in finance, or in nature[1].

What you probably should have said would have been something like: "a given exponential growth function, causally connected (however losely) to something of finite quantity, will eventually reach a point at which it drastically outgrows said finite quantity".

This is not just some empty semantic nitpicking. The difference in wording here amounts to the difference between lazy repetition of half-understood claims about the world, and a meaningful statement about the sustainability of growth.

Please note: I am not making any claims about the correctness of the January trendline. I just refuse to let a lazy statement like that slide by, that at face value claims that exponential growth is somehow an oddity, and its usage as a way to model reality ought to be rejected.

If you think that a particular exponential trend is not accurate, present your arguments (for fairness sake, in other threads you have been doing that. Sort of.). But the statement as it stands, in its unconditional form, is not fundamentally different from a perma-bull's battle cry "We'll inevitably reach 300k USD/btc next week". Both claims are devoid of information.

* * *

[1] A common rebuttal to the Apple case is "But now the price comes crashing down! So exponential growth is unsustainable after all". The fallacy here is of course that just because at a certain point exponential growth of a given magnitude must end, does not imply that up to that point the growth was not accurately described by a particular exponential function.

Actually, he had about 6 hours to sell it again with a profit. Not saying he did, just that he could have.

I don't need no big bull leading the charge. I went all in about an hour ago. ^___^

aaah, yes. that's more like it. :)

Apologies for quoting a day old post on a topic that moves as fast as this, but I wanted to say thanks for a very interesting analysis. By all means, keep on posting :)

"false sense of precision". nice way to phrase the concern I had. But your "smoking hot girl vs. godess" example is spot on as well, conciseness is a virtue. Guess there's not much to argue about actually, seems we have pretty similar opinions on this. In my own ramblings ("Dear diary. The loseness of my stool today was a solid N.") I tend to use 1-10 scales, only integers, no fractions. Precise enough to avoid the pitfalls of pragmatics, without broadcasting too much unjustified precision. ymmv.

EDIT: haha, did you just edit your post this second? was about to ask what 'srt' is. My best bet was 'The Singapore Repertory Theatre'.

uffz. wer lesen kann... und so weiter.

danke :)

Sorry if I sounded more confrontational than intended :/

I personally think estimates of likelihood *and* confidence are a good idea, but maybe because I'm a mathematical pedant, I prefer to express them in words, or at least words+numbers, rather than pure numbers if the model I use (intuitions, chart reading, etc) is not numerical either. Something like "Slightly more likely we'll go up than down, but I'm comparably uncertain at this time". On second thought, your style expresses the same, but shorter... well, pedantery then, I guess.

Hallo.

War bisher am group buy von ragingazn628 interessiert, aber der fällt wohl gerade auseinander. Überlege jetzt ob ich hier mit ca. 40 btc einsteigen will. Aber erstmal eine Frage: ich weiss, das hier ist das deutsche Forum, aber gibts eine *englische* Fassung dieses Threads, oder wenigstens eine Zusammenfassung? Grund ist offensichtlich, oder? Das Ziel ist es, den Kauf so schnell wie möglich abzuschliessen, und wenn Forenmitglieder aus europäische Nachbarländern miteinsteigen wollen wäre das mit Sicherheit gut, nur sprechen die eben meist kein Deutsch :)

Haha, I really like your argument, also completely agree with your 3 salient factors, but you have to teach me how you get from that argument to not only a likelihood estimation in percentage but also an estimation of your confidence interval. Black magic!

re: 6. sure, pretty weak point, only relevant right now where we're a bit ahead.

re: 5. true. but, given current information, I'd say there's slightly more evidence for the downward trend than for the upwards one.

none of the points is really strong individually. I'm as undecided as anyone else here seems to be :/

No decisive movement yet, eh? Alright then, summary time. (sorry for the sloppy style, this is more or less stream of consciousness)

Ignoring the possibility of continuation of the horizontal trend (that'd be boring), what are arguments in favor of continuation of the correction, i.e. downwards trend (red line in my previous chart) vs. continuation of upwards trend (green line)

(1) forum sentiment: cautiously bullish ("I'll buy for sure when we get lower") seems to be quite prevalent

(2) post bubble, volume on the way down was significantly higher than on the way up. suggests selling pressure, but could also mean sellers are running out of ammo.

(3) EMAs: D1, H4 undecided (just crossed over from above), H1 still bearish, but tendency towards crossover from below.

(4) total trading volume (in USD) is maybe on the low end for what is necessary to support the long-term upwards trend. (pointed out by WackyWilly)

(5) re: converging trendlines, as pointed out by 100x, me, and others: post-bubble, bit more evidence for the downward trend (3 vs 2 points of contact)

(6) If supporting trend (green line in my chart) = January 9 long-term expon. trend, then we're a bit ahead, should be hitting 100 only mid-May.

(7) order book (yes, I know, fake walls everywhere): total bid/total ask: 105. average of price if all sold at current prices, all bought at current prices: 120.5

pro bull: 1, 7
pro bear: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

Hmmm... I don't like the way my own summary looks. My gut tells me we should be going up, but my little collection of evidence points to continuation of the correction.

/pseudoscience

mmmmmh... those are by far the *best* wedges.

Let's get back on topic maybe?

Like I wrote in SlipperySlope's thread, I think we're at a critical point where two trendlines are about to collide.



Any relevant movement upwards, crossing 120, is evidence that the post-bubble correction trendline is broken, or at least getting weaker. Any sharp decline, 90 or lower, would be evidence that the mid-January growth trendline is no longer valid or weakened.

No idea where we're going from here, but I believe that whatever direction it is will give us a good idea where we're going in the coming weeks.

I'm going out on a limb here, but it looks like a TV screen cap. Probably some TV station ran an interview with him, or just him for a short insert about trading, and asked him to "show" that he trades in silver. Combine that with Mr. Reptile's megalomania and you get a picture like the above /speculation /offtopic

He trades silver. Gold as well, I think. Oh, and he runs a very profitable chauffeur service, in case you need a limo for a wedding.

I would be in favor of doing so, but unfortunately the Finnish reptile man is a proponent of that solution, and I'll be damned if I will look like I'm following his advice.

Hey, SlipperySlope, you'll let me know if my contrarian posts get on your nerves. It's your thread after all.

Okay, so I don't find the support line (hypothesis or not) particularly convincing. Doesn't fit the rising lows. How about those two converging trends instead? (I tend to use typical price, but it also works when I graph candles instead).



Not *much* evidence, I admit, 2 points of contact only. Then again, the down trend you draw looks like it has 2 solid points as well, and a third one if I squint a bit :P Anyway, I'm not the first one to point out that it could be the case that there are two trends running towards each other.

But they're getting close, so we'll see soon: anything above 120 in the next days puts your prediction into question, anything below 90 mine. Interesting times.

EDIT: Prefer a log chart, actually. After all, both the upwards trend and the correction are most likely exponential. Doesn't change much, number wise: below 90 is a problem for me, above 120 for you.

That's fucking deep, man.

Also, I tend to agree. What many people seem to forget when they talk about "fundamentals" vs. "market craze" is that, in the real world, there are two possibly outcomes wrt. bitcoin usage (I'm simplifying, in reality there's a near-continuum of outcomes, but follow my line of thought for a second): 1) bitcoin succeeds. 2) bitcoin fails.

If 2), our investment is toast anyway. But if 1), well, then at some point even the most bearish market participants will agree that it's being adopted, and will start buying, thus drivin the price up.

Now, we have no influence on the question if it'll be scenario 1) or 2) (another simplification. the whole thing is a feedback loop, so our market actions do actually influence fundamentals/adoption). So the only question to answer for us is how is the market sentiment now, and in the near future?. And I think you described it accurately: it's not so much that most people think "Damn, we're going down", or even "I hope we're not going down any further", but rather "Even if we go down, my long term conviction is we're going up, so I'm going to load up on coins at the lowest possible price.", or at most something like "I hope we're not going down *too* much, or recovery will take too long."

Let's say that's an accurate description of the market sentiment.  Then the price won't really have a chance to slide down in a slow trajectory like it did in 2011. Hit bottom a few more times? Maybe. Test 50 again? Sure, could happen. But any correction still necessary won't take place at such an indifferent speed like back then.