Jup. You're right. Mixed them up, I guess.

That's an answer to the question I raised myself in the same line

@Kipsy89. I'd actually say WSJ has been on "our" side for more than a year (remember the Kashmir Hill pieces about "living on Bitcoin", from 2013?). Just thought the above is a nice illustration of it.

Sweet mother of jingo!

It wasn't exactly a bad period for the US economy when the Euro traded a lot higher than the Dollar... wonder how the poor Eurozone will deal with this terrible, terrible blow ^_^

Personally as well, I'm pretty happy with the rate. My trading account is denominated in USD, so I profit twice, and I think I'll be able to survive the marginally increased cost of the occasional vacation to the US.

Same story. Two outlets. Two ways of spinning it:








"a shadowy company called 21 Inc" vs. "... some of the biggest names in venture capital".

CNBC is just one among many papers spinning Bitcoin news that way, NYT is probably even worse. WSJ is the exception, really.


Bonus question: Which of the above two publications' reader bases do you think has the higher average net worth?*

If it sounded like I'm anti Bitfinex or anti OKC/BTCChina... I am not. Don't think they're more likely to run fractional reserve than Stamp, for instance.

My point was really just about what I think is a qualitative difference between one kind of volume and the other.

In a way, I think the people on the "traders/bots exchanges" occasionally glance at what's going on at the "grandma exchanges" as a way to gauge what "outside money" is doing.

At least, that's my explanation why Bitfinex (and to a lesser degree, Bitstamp) still have an impact on the market, despite the substantially higher volume on the CNY exchanges.

You know the reason. The one I've been regurgitating over and over like a broken record*... all other things being equal, non leveraged non-zero fee volume has more impact than leveraged zero fee volume.

Doesn't mean Finex or Chinese volume doesn't matter, obviously not. But it means, Finex matters despite OKC's or BTCChina's volume being higher by a factor of 2 or 3, and even Bitstamp matters, despite volume being 1/10 of the big Chinese exchanges.

"Matters", for a brief moment, that is. Don't think it'll change the course, just delay the arrival a bit



* Yes, I like my metaphors mixed, not stirred

Name of the startup: 21 Inc. ...

Total number of BTC ever to be mined: 21 million

It all makes sense now! They are true believers of the Church of Satoshi! /s

(EDIT) oh, nevermind, they actually say that much themselves >_<

Meh. People have no class. If you enter a bet, you honor it, simple.

Course I did. Complained a bit (about how easy it is to game the system) but didn't really mind it.

Then proceeded to ask a few questions about Bitcoin basics and got an extremely detailed answer by amazing users DeathAndTaxes and DannyHamilton, which, unfortunately went straight over my head but I was too proud to admit that at the time

Seriously, I get your objection, I can see how posting restrictions for newbies are a bit off-putting for some, but I also don't think it's unreasonably "elitist" to demand of newcomers to educate themselves for one or two days before they're let loose on the public.

The Newcomer forum, where you're expected to ask a few questions to learn the ropes, doesn't seem like such a bad idea to me.

Ibian said it best a few posts above: Even if the exact method is up for debate, the survey result of this thread speaks for itself.

Ignoring en masse, newbie jail, etc... those are all blunt tools, sure, far from ideal for dealing with the problem at hand.

But as the survey shows, there is a wide-spread perception among members that there is a problem^*, and that the forum administration should try harder to find ways how to solve it (ideally, with the help of the community).


^* The problem, in one brief phrase, being 'low signal-to-noise ratio'.

Precisely what I said.


I doubt that.

Like I said, they need to re-open accounts all the time because the old ones get ignored, so it means at the very least they now have one additional task (keep "grooming" a new batch of accounts for later posting).



Now we're talking. So the forum I mentioned is just a bunch of idiots posting anyway, and little of value is lost if it's drowned by trolls.

Talk about "watery shite" arguments, huh?

Thanks. Didn't even know they exist. Looks good (but, well, volume...)

Don't call it 'newbie jail' if you prefer, but re-introducing some probation period for new accounts is highly desirable in my opinion.

On some days, the entire speculation forum is flooded by useless drivel of new accounts, and moderation isn't the solution (since mods remove spam, but not troll posts).

I've asked for reintroducing the probation period before, and it was clear to me that there is no interest from theymos' side to change the status quo, so I'm skeptical it'll be different this time, but, that said:

I support bringing back posting restriction for newly registered accounts. 'Restriction' being in the form of a short period during which they are only allowed to post in the newcomer forum, and with the possible exception of leaving "jail" earlier if they write a few particularly good posts (good questions, good answers to other newbies' questions, etc.)

To be clear: the goal is not to make newbies' lives harder, but to make it slightly more costly time-wise for high powered trolls and spammers to open new accounts on a regular basis, which they need to do because their old ones are getting ignored after N posts on average.

Fun fact.

Think of billyjoeallen as our forum's resident Crypto Bukowski™, and his posts become pretty entertaining. Sometimes even insightful, though I'm sure he considers that a non-essential byproduct of his efforts.

What exactly are you looking at, OKC futures? Didn't know they have 6 month contracts :/

The guy's loaded. Early adopter and all. I'm sure you can work something out with the help of some donation address

Well, I disagree with that assertion.

Except for the chosen few that already (completely and honestly) think of profits in this market in terms of this market's underlying asset, the most common measure of profits (or losses) is in terms of your national fiat currency of choice.

Practically, this means you might withdraw USD profits from an exchange in case you feel like "cashing out", or, if you have money to spare, and feel the price is right, you "cash in" by wiring money into an exchange. This will either remove USD from or add USD to the market.

My claim that some types of trading volume are indicative of this flow in and out of the exchanges is obviously up for debate, but questioning the above process itself I find rather silly. Price per coin is not only determined, on the demand side, by what USD holders on the exchanges are willing to pay per coin, but also by how USD balances on the exchanges are changing over time.

If you don't want to call this process "money entering or leaving", fine, but I'd say you're semantics lawyering now, not really saying anything descriptively interesting.

>On chinese exchanges (why didn't you put them in there?

I'm skeptical about comparing zero fee volume to non-zero fee volume.

To be clear: for short to mid term trading purposes, I absolutely don't doubt the relevance of CNY volume.

But for the longer term view of market volume, in my opinion, the "costly" volume of the three big USD exchanges is a good measure of how much money is "flowing into the market". (Sidenote: I really need to include Coinbase from now on)

That said, I know just discarding CNY (or permanently zero-fee USD) volume is not ideal. I have been trying to come up with ways to 'discount' the Chinese volume by some factor to make it comparable, but nothing ever really came out of it that looked satisfying to me.


Anyway, I didn't put the monthly average in the above graph (which shows it more clearly), but the point I was getting at: in terms of both BTC and USD volume, we're doing better now than during the previous period that can be considered to be the closest attempt of the market to leave the bear market behind, the May/June breakout - the last time we closed above weekly SMA20, for example.

I take that as a cautiously bullish sign, as in: I don't take it for granted that we're leaving the bear market this time, but I do think chances are higher for it to succeed now than they were in June 2014.

Not the volume you had in mind I guess, but this made go back to look at long term volume... Short version: doing pretty well currently, both in terms of BTC volume and USD volume, though the latter is still far behind the peak in late 2013/early 2014.

The following is Bitstamp + Bitfinex + BTC-E, BTC and USD. BTC volume is now the highest it has been in about a year (and even in USD terms beats the mid-2014 period). Compared to the late stages of the 2013 bubble however, it's still behind (and that's excluding mtgox volume that was a major factor in late 2013).