When you say 'volume way down', just to give it a bit of context it is already on $2,684,177.60 so even with almost half the the day to go it is the 23rd highest volume day to date and 3rd highest weekend day by volume?!  Just sayin...

But with Bid sum on Gox still over $10,000 and Ask sum still below 70,000BTC there's potential for things to happen

You'll find it here:  http://news.sky.com/story/1071652/cyber-currency-surge-amid-eurozone-crisis

My favourite quote from Simon Smith, an 'Economic Expert' from FxPro gave me my laugh of the day:

"It's totally unsafe. They might as well burn their money in a pile as far as I'm concerned. Yes, Bitcoin has doubled in value over the last month but it has every sign of being a bubble."

 

fcmatt you appear to me to be conflating three things here: the risks associated with others selling, those of us (me) selling and an evaluation/estimate of BTC right now.

I'll cover them separately:

i) In the case of the risk of others (a whale) selling I agree with Holliday
Given past performance which is more likely: a selling whale or a buying whale?  Of course if you believe we are at a peak and due for a significant reversal then basing your evaluation on the instance of the seller whale will better reflect your belief.  However, without presenting your reasoning behind dismissing the opposite it seems odd to me to only consider one side.

ii) When it comes to the evaluation of my own BTC holding of course doing the multiplication based on last price is ludicrous especially if a bot a lot of the time is giving us a figure with zero depth.  So yes, without doing the math into the bid depth for an actual calculation based on slippage it is probably not a bad means of estimating, depending on how much you'd be selling, to make a subtraction based on depth.  Personally I wouldn't use MtGox for a major sell because don't trust that a significant chunk would make it out of Japan in a timely manner without additional costs and questions.  Instead being fortunate enough to be in a district within many LocalBitcoin buyers (London) I do a screen scrape of them all to do a calculation based on advertised available amounts and prices to get an 'including slippage' evaluation.  Of course unlike with an exchange I have to assume sellers have the amounts they say they do and that they would honour my order.  However, given that, I don't think clicking 'Sell' for the max for each of the top sellers till I've sold all my coin then spending a day or two driving round London to do the transactions is the worst way of putting a price on my holding.  In actuality I have no intention of buying pounds in any great numbers with my Bitcoin for a very long time if ever - and if I did I would explore the options to try and get the best price preferably from one seller - but if I want to put a provisional figure on it I don't think my method is that unreasonable.

iii) I don't think basing your current evaluation of Bitcoin (irrespective of your own holding) entirely on the assumption of a potential selling whale's actions is likely to give you anything realistic.  There are so many factors to take into consideration, most of which would in my book have a bigger part in my estimation evaluation than your scenario, so I would venture to suggest you may be doing yourself a disservice if you're using your described scenario alone to justify not taking the current price seriously.

Being neither an economic principles expert nor a statistician I am not well placed to answer this but given that nobody else has I'll just throw in my inexpert opinion/impression that the swings we're seeing aren't that much bigger as a proportionate shift than they were when the the USD/BTC price was much lower e.g. a 5% swing at $80 of $4 is much bigger than $0.40 at $8.

Also that was really not that long ago and many of us are really neither used to trading a commodity as valuable nor have we been 'settled' around any price recently long enough for people to be able to 'get a sense of' where it 'ought' to be leading to panic buys/sells when it looks like someone with more money than us thinks the price point ought to be somewhere else!

Another record broken today:

Highest green volume day at $7,382,080.86 and 4th highest overall



Not bad for a day in which not much happened!

Thanks for this mccorvic.  The only thing I would change about it (making it look even more bullish) is to show the currency in USD so it looks like this:



Incidentally, that chart is particularly relevant to me because that's the timeframe over which I have been involved with Bitcoin.  I had taken a look at it a few months prior but decided (partially due to the Wired Rise & Fall article) to wait and see.  But when the first GBP doubling (since I first looked) from £4 to $8 came I decided it was time to jump on board.  Since then of course I've seen it double again to £16, then again to £32 and yesterday to £64 though it has slipped back a bit since then.  Next target: £128   (well, next target is actually the last target of £64 again )

Erik, Just a quick one to thank you for sharing your thoughts on this.  I appreciate your giving us an update on where you are with these matters and an idea of what's going on behind the scenes.
TF

... aaaaaand the fun starts again....



Roll up, roll up ladies and gentlemen, how far will she fall this time?


... and how high will the lag get?

Thanks for sharing your the reasoning behind your decision.  I suspect, as has been discussed in the SD threads, that you are not alone in coming to similar conclusions - hence, as you say, the price drop - and that those who have not done so already may follow suit.

You say '...I'm surprised [a decrease in BTC profits due to the rapid increase in usd/btc] hasn't happened already...'

I have been pleasantly surprised by this too but thinking about it, for as long as SD remains one of the first things a significant proportion of newbies come across, I suspect it will  be one of the things they play with just to 'do something' with their newly acquired new toy.  The steady increase in expected profit we have seen is consistent enough for me to remain confident this is not likely to change enormously in the foreseeable future.

Also whilst the share evaluation based on profits and other fundamentals may (and should) be central to serious investors' decisions I suspect a higher proportion of BTC share investors than average (SD shareholders in particular) are not so meticulous.  I guess a significant number are and will continue to be SD players who buy when they realise they can own part of the 'house'.

I also would like to see more development of the games and more promotion to keep the market lead and make it more attractive to potential takeover.  However, I believe there was some legal stuff that needed to be sorted out as well as some technical stuff that was being looked at so with that done, once you and your like-minded investors have got out, providing Erik doesn't bring a whole load more shares onto the market my guess is we'll start seeing a slow but steady rise in share price again - especially if we see a few months of near-expected profit.

I was a latecomer to this party so paid a fair bit for my shares meaning I'm at a significant loss now but I'll thank you nevertheless for the opportunity to have brought my average purchase price down by buying some of yours

So every lottery/raffle/game that does not have a negative house advantage should be banned from stating 'WIN xxxxx' and instead should say 'LOSE xxxxx (though there is also a chance you may win)'? 

My understanding is it's a metric to show how much bitcoin that has been sat in the same address for over a year has moved.  The longer it has been sat dormant the bigger the impact it has on the chart.  So lots of activity on the chart indicates a lot of 'old money' is coming into play implying distribution

In contrast to yours which is full of knowledge-based wisdom of course

What's with the aggression?!  It's just another point of view.  I've tried a number of times to ask you and the couple others on your trip to substantiate what you're talking about but no, you'd rather ignore those posts and just spout more vitriolic bollocks.  WTF?!

It seems the USD vol @ end of play was a record breaking

$12,257,633.95

That was a massive amount spent by the bears to get us to....

...not far off where we were this morning!



Night all - and thanks for all the fish

Don't get me wrong I like and use LB and even use the sell prices to calculate the value of my current holding including slippage were I to lock prices then take a day driving around London cashing out!

But at times like this flash crash it's not so good.  I just tried to buy 20btc for my brother for GBP after he failed after finding blockchain.info/pingit is down and he couldn't get his head around LB himself.  Then after that by the time I'd found my first choice was actually out of coin the price the opportunity had gone within the price range he wanted to pay .  In the UK the problem is even worse than the States I think!

Yet despite all this enough buying pressure  is getting through to the markets for this phenomenal growth.  Surely that tells us something!

So seeing as the insults are still flying but no explanation let me ask:

If the holders of Bitcoin who believe it to be worthless (or worth much less for the foreseeable future) have just been holding on till they think it has peaked before profiting and getting out won't they have just done that now?  If they did my guess is they wouldn't have been the first with the buy-back-in trigger when there were others amused at the dagger waiting to play catch.  So who is left with masses of coins ready to drive it down?  Don't try and tell me it was early adopters because far as I can tell they wouldn't have adopted early had they not believed this had some potential - and if what's going on now isn't re-affirming that then I don't know what will.  So with so many people apparently ready to have a laugh at the daggers and take advantage of them to buy back in (or to buy more) then please give me an example of the thinking of these holders of masses of coins who are going to take it as low as you believe?

Awesomest quote of the day for me thank you - just SMSd it to my diving brother!

Normal?  The bottom of my MtGox Live chart is looking like a child scribbled all over it with crayon!

as I was just saying...

ATH: $10m USD traded on MtGox today!!

Just broken daily volume record too with an hour and a half left to break 10m that's looking quite likely too.

I don't understand why but although I'm all in I was delighted to see what just happened (other than the ridiculous MtGox failing to keep up*) - and would have continued to even if it had taken us all the way down to my average buying in price.  I'm just fascinated by the behaviour of traders.  I was looking at it thinking 'beatiful'.

* and the vindictive glee of some bears.  They seem to have gone quiet again now though!

The jaws close as the bids get eaten up resulting in the plummeting bid/ask ratio.  Not saying anything by that, just that it's about the only tab (other than bitcoinity) that's giving me anything to see at the moment!