How? Why?

You have, as an example, $1000. BTC/USD is $1, you buy $1000's worth of BTC (yielding 1000 BTC), BTC/USD rises 5% - you make 5% (i.e. $50).

Alternatively, BTC/USD is $10,000, you buy $1000's worth of BTC (yielding 0.1 BTC), BTC/USD rises 5% - you make 5% (i.e. $50).

What's the magic price at which people are somehow mysteriously unable to buy BTC? 1 BTC is subdivided into 100,000,000 smaller parts ("satoshis"). The cost of one satoshi right now is vanishingly small. Wake me up when 1 satoshi is over $1000 - then we can talk about unaffordability. Until then this "unaffordable coins" nonsense is just nonsense.

More people trade USD/EUR than BTC/USD (USD/EUR is the most actively traded currency pair). Do you think USD/EUR is more volatile than BTC/USD?

Hint: https://btcvol.info/ - it's not.

Someone posted yesterday that the price yesterday was the same as the price 24hours earlier, 7 days earlier and 1 month earlier($420) - that certainly looks correct. When will this rise you're predicting start?

Also, why will a price below $300 be a good thing for people that want to buy coins? Surely it's the direction the market is moving in (i.e. the relative price, positive or negative) that matters, not the absolute price? If price hits $300 my decision whether to buy or sell is going to predicated on direction, not the fact that price has hit $300. If price is falling dramatically there's little chance I'm going to think "well, price has hit $300, time to buy" - I'm going to wait and see if direction turns around.

Other currencies are more stable, yet have many, many more speculators. Speculators aren't a bad thing - they bring liquidity, making it easier to sell (and buy) without the price changing dramatically.

The halving takes place every 210,000 blocks - roughly every 4 years (blocks should be found, on average, once every 10 minutes. In practice the average is roughly 9 minutes between blocks). The next halving will occur when the 420,000th block is found - we don't know exactly when that'll be, but we can estimate pretty accurately. There are a couple of websites providing estimates: BitcoinClock and BitcoinBlockHalf - the estimates vary (and BitcoinBlockHalf seems to bounce around a lot), but they both tend to point to the first half of this coming July.

I'm calling shenanigans. You've obviously a whale who's bet big on a high thread count and are now blatantly - blatantly - trying to manipulate the number of new threads.

You're assuming - as, to be fair, a number of other posters in this thread appear to be doing - that "the 'priced in' crowd" believe that price can't move up, that the 2016 halving is the only game in town. I believe that a known event, mere months away, is largely priced in. I don't believe that subsequent block reward reductions are fully priced in, and I don't believe that as-yet unknown future changes in usage or innovation are priced in (nor could be).

Thanks for your advice, though. I won't be selling when my position has doubled (much of my position was accumulated through 2010-11, so doubling seems a little irrelevant anyway), and I won't be waiting a mere 12 months before selling: I'm not a to-da-moon bull, but I do intend to hold for the long-term.

I think there's some crazy-ass aggregator (possibly preev.com) that includes LocalBitcoins, and consequently skews the reported price. I follow the prices of individual exchanges - it's far safer than relying on this forum, and the difference in prices between exchanges is useful information in its own right.

Interesting, thanks!

With SegWit due this month I've been wondering whether it would coincide with my expected move. Do you think it could be the catalyst to a break out from your horizontal channel? (I'm not taking a position on whether SegWit is good or bad, mostly because I think the market's view will be much more interesting and relevant than mine, but I am getting increasingly bored by the lack of volatility).

Thanks! I see the repeating as being within an ever-diminishing range - $200-500 in October-November, $320-470 in December-January, $360-450 in February-March. I view this as (a) a sign that a breakout from this is imminent (good news for traders desperate for volatility), and (b) that support and resistance levels are sloping, not flat.

Why $450? Has there been a lot of buying around $450? Apart from that possibility, I'm not seeing anything about $450 that suggests there'll be resistance - the only significance I can see is that the last peak reached $450 - but that was in the context of lower peaks, higher troughs.

I expect resistance around $500, however, due to the November high.

Stable. Volatility is at near record lows. Price has been flat-lining for some time, even yesterday's drop was only 2-3%.

Whether it remains stable is something else, and I don't share goxed's view - I think it'll break out within the next few weeks. But for now it's stable by any reasonable definition.

In that case I guess the network effect would be zero. But it seems like quite an implausible scenario. Is there anything to suggest that the demographics of new users has changed so dramatically?

The graph shows inflation against time - I'm not sure where you're seeing future price?

More specifically, the graph is based on block reward reductions. We don't know exactly when these will occur (they occur every 410000 blocks, and each block should take approximately 10 minutes on average) but we know that they will occur. We know, for example, that the block reward will be reduced to 12.5 BTC per block (from 25 BTC per block) in the next few months. We don't know exactly when, because it depends on how fast blocks are found, but we know to within a few weeks.

Miners "leave their jobs" all the time and it's not very bad news for Bitcoin.

This is a graph of difficulty (and network power). Every time the red line goes down, instead of up, it's because difficulty has fallen. Difficulty falls in response to the computational power of the network falling - which happens because (some) miners stop mining. When difficulty falls it makes mining more profitable - prompting new miners to start mining.

The current miners purchased their mining equipment in full and certain knowledge that the block reward reduction - the halving - was going to happen. The halving is not going to come as any surprise to them. They will have taken it into account when determining whether or not to purchase their latest mining gear. When the block reward reduction occurs, most miners are not suddenly going to find themselves looking at an unexpected and difficult situation. They're going to be facing something they've been expecting, that they took into account when calculating ROI on their mining gear.

I don't think anyone is seriously arguing that the halving will result in prices falling. Some people - including me - have been arguing that (a) since the halving is known prices already largely reflect it, and (b) some of the more "enthusiastic" traders may well be disappointed by the actual price when the halving occurs. For some reason this is seen as being bearish, as if all the other reasons to be bullish somehow ceased to matter.

https://www.reddit.com/r/shapeshiftio/comments/4dx6k4/shapeshift_update_april_7_security_breach/

(via http://www.coindesk.com/shapeshift/)

You're both talking in absolutes - markets don't "become efficient", they become more efficient. Perfectly efficient markets are hypothetical only.

Right now the USD and CNY exchanges are all at $416, but assuming there was a substantial difference between, say, the USD exchanges and the CNY exchanges (as there has been in very recent history) then arbitrage would efficiently address that. The price difference would reduce until it reached the cost of arbitrage.

I've been following the "triangle" formed along the top of the highs and the bottom of the lows since the last peak (November), watching Bollinger Bands expand and contract, and following volatility. The triangle doesn't leave price much room to move, Bollinger Band width has been low and flat-lining for longer than previous lows, and volatility is near its historic low.

My guess is that price is going to move sharply very soon, within two weeks.

Now that I've said that, expect price to flat-line for much longer!

Disclaimer: long-term holder, I'm not betting on the price movement I've described above. If Coinut hadn't messed up its sig campaign so badly I'd consider buying straddles, though.

There isn't a drop.

Here's what's happened since talks_cheep posted "mission accomplished".