If bitcoin goes over $1200 it will enter another bubble.

If bitcoin enters a bubble, so will alts.

Ltc, nmc, ppc, all X50 from todays prices.


I learned about btc in 2011 but waited for that bubble to deflate before buying... just wait for the last bubble to finish deflating and put a little bit of money in and wait and see what happens.


Besides, if you would have bought some coins very cheap you would now be regretting not buying more. Almost everyone regrets not buying bitcoins/more bitcoins when they were cheap, even the people who did make $1million+. There are stories of people making $250k-$500k in the last bubble who have already lost 90%+ of it by never selling at the top or spending it all on drugs/women/whatever. So many things can happen you should just stop regretting it - just do your best starting today. Crypto still has a lot of potential.

I second whoever mentioned p2p lending on the first page as a possibility.

In 2014 I made about 12% on my p2p loan portfolio (pretty much tied the s&p 500). Once people realise that p2p lending is here to stay and will grow fast we could see a speculative bubble form in p2p lending stocks (with lendingclub being the best in my oponion). It could be similar to the 3d printing bubble, led by DDD. Now i am unsure if this will happen in 2015, but if it will happen, i imagine it will be within the next 3 years.

Of course a lot of crypto could go up massively, but I am not risking anything on alts until btc looks like it is about to turn, and even then ill just hold bitcoin.

Oil is a definite possibility, but as everyone else is saying, perhaps too many people are thinking the same way.

If the US stock market were to falter, USD would be one of the best investments you could make, but I am holding my index funds and will probably buy more. I imagine the US stock market will continue up, and would invest there as opposed to anywhere else. (I could be biased since I am in the US)

I do not believe in precious metals very much, look how long it took the gold/silver bubble in the early 1980s to deflate (look at a graph showing the price in inflation adjusted dollars). Personally I am tempted to open a small short position on gold.

Hmm... I'm sure there are other things i was looking at but they can't come to mind right now 

Here are a couple tidbits that may help you:

I notice that many of the largest sell offs end between 7-10 PM US Eastern Time (most likely because some certain % of American traders like to hold cash overnight, especially in a downtrend) I have profited off this trend numerous times, it is very nice when you see it happening  . In price advances, we sometimes get a boost in the morning hours in the United States, and in the nov/dec 2013 bubble, possibly the morning in China as a lot of money flowed in from China.

During Bubble phases, such as march/april 2013 and nov/dec 2013, we experienced "weekend crashes". The massive price rises are caused by many people sending a lot of money to exchanges at once and buying; however since most banks are not open weekends, the inflow of cash is significantly stopped during the weekends, and the price is more susceptible to crashing. Monday morning would mean a lot more cash entering the exchanges and the price would rise rapidly. This "weekend crash" is the most pronounced in times where the price is rising fastest, and I assume it lessens over time as more methods for getting fiat into bitcoins over the weekend emerge.

In terms of price effects of rising difficulty: The difficulty rise once every 2 weeks is expected (as it has gone up every time for well over a year), so I assume this is already priced into the markets beforehand. But it is interesting to look on a longer time frame. Look at the hashrate on a log chart since 2009. You will notice the difficulty spikes during/shortly after the 2011 bubble, then levels out, until the 2013 bubbles which caused the hashrate to spike again. Also notice that litecoins' hashrate flatlined in september, and again in october, and the $ price of litecoin has stopped crashing at roughly the same time. It looks like price bubbles cause a mining equipment arms race, until most of the hashrate is owned by miners who break even or mine at a loss. Then the miners hold a larger % of the mined coins and the price stops falling.


Reasons for price bubbles

Although I have not heard many people mention this, the block reward halving in late 2012 coincides with the beginning of the uptrend that led bitcoin to $32, where it broke a new all time high. Therefore the block reward halving may have had a massive effect on the timing of the 2013 bubbles. (Since most people just assume it was because of Cyprus, this may not be fully priced in for the next halving  )

When the all time high is broken, a media frenzy starts, and thus the bubble is fueled. This means that most people are only interested in bitcoin for its price - everyone watches it when it is skyrocketing. Go look at the google trends chart for the word "bitcoin"; the 3 spikes you see go along with the three bitcoin bubbles.



Also main reasons for price falling since last november (idk if this will help):

A large % of mined coins are sold at market

People are scared of holding large amounts of $ on exchanges for any significant amount of time, after seeing so many exchanges fail such as mt gox

To a far lesser extent merchants instantly cashing out (although large purchases of $250k-$1m+ that get instantly dumped  at market will cause a larger effect).

Perhaps manipulation bots on mt gox using fake USD pushing price up in nov/dec, so prices got higher than they would have got in a "normal" bubble, so the downtrend looks bigger.


Also, view my profile, and view my 5th post down, concerning how to time the alt coin markets in the next bitcoin bubble (all run by pure speculation and adrenaline, or human nature) Essentially people profit from the bitcoin bubble, use some of the profits to speculate on alts starting with the ones with the highest market cap, and eventually all of the alts bubble (very generally the lower the market cap the higher the % increase).

Fair point, and I would be the first to agree with you that I am bad at programming.

However, the only reason I am remotely interested in computer programming is because of bitcoin, and for at least a couple years I have been hoping someone would build the very simple app I am trying to build, perhaps as just a small part of a larger wallet app. Some have come close, but none have hit the target exactly, per se, so I decided to try and build a prototype myself and see if anyone liked it. (And if not, who cares? At least I learned a little programming along the way)

I had thought that an easy way to boost adoption would have been to make it very easy for any arbitrary app to set up a way to do bitcoin transactions so that not every programmer had to build their own wallet. Perhaps I am mistaken? Or i am overlooking something very simple/making a dumb mistake?

In any event I would like some constructive feedback. I really do not want to build a wallet, but i need to use a wallet.

Hello everyone! I am relatively new to programming and am trying to teach myself how to build a simple android app. I am building my app using eclipse Kepler, and one of the the last things I need to do is to allow my app to spend bitcoins. The first thing I did was turn my android application project into a maven android application project so I could use more resources. (Am i saying this right? I just needed to be able to import bitcoinj so i downloaded maven and maven 2 eclipse, then added some dependencies)

First, I read that I can integrate my app with an existing wallet, such as coinbases or the schildbach bitcoin-wallet (https://github.com/schildbach/bitcoin-wallet) so I can spend bitcoin out of this wallet by pressing a button in my app, but I cannot figure out how to do this. I tried to follow the sample-android-integration project for the schildbach wallet:

My best guess is to include the following in my pom.xml file, which based on my knowledge should work:

<parent>
   <groupId>de.schildbach.wallet</groupId>
   <artifactId>base</artifactId>
   <version>1</version>
</parent>

<dependency>
         <groupId>de.schildbach.wallet</groupId>
         <artifactId>integration-android</artifactId>
         <version>2.0</version>
</dependency>

When I put the <parent> in my pom.xml file, i get the error "Non-resolvable parent POM". Do I even need this?

When i put the dependency in my pom.xml file I get plenty of errors, such as failed to read artifact descriptor, failed to transfer de.schildbach-wallet:integration... , and 26 missing artifact errors. I am getting "Missing artifact:com.google:bitcoinj:jar:0.11.1" Even though under my project in the maven dependencies section i see bitcoin-0.11.1.jar. Does anyone have any idea what I am doing wrong here?

The way I understand it, if I am "depending" on this artifact, I should be able to use the methods in it as part of my project. How far off from the truth am I? Am i doing anything right?



So, after failing at this for a while, I decided I would try to make my own simple wallet using bitcoinj. I just want to create a wallet I can load with a few $ of bitcoin and be able to send the coins to a specified address.

I have been able to create addresses and a wallet, but I need to save the wallet. However when I run the method wallet.saveToFile(File f) I get the following errors:

log4j:WARN No appenders could be found for logger (com.google.bitcoin.core.Wallet).
log4j:WARN Please initialize the log4j system properly.
log4j:WARN See http://logging.apache.org/log4j/1.2/faq.html#noconfig for more info.
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoSuchMethodError: org.bitcoinj.wallet.Protos$Key$Builder.setPrivateKey(Lcom/google/protobuf/ByteString;)Lorg/bitcoinj/wallet/Protos$Key$Builder;
   at com.google.bitcoin.store.WalletProtobufSerializer.walletToProto(WalletProtobufSerializer.java:131)
   at com.google.bitcoin.store.WalletProtobufSerializer.writeWallet(WalletProtobufSerializer.java:94)
   at com.google.bitcoin.core.Wallet.saveToFileStream(Wallet.java:468)
   at com.google.bitcoin.core.Wallet.saveToFile(Wallet.java:303)
   at com.google.bitcoin.core.Wallet.saveToFile(Wallet.java:342)
   at Main.main(Main.java:55)

Under maven dependencies I have log4j-1.2.16.jar and slf4j-log4j12-1.6.4.jar. Besides setting up slf4j as a dependency, what else do i need to do to "iniatilize the log4j system properly".

And my final question, will this be a recurring theme? Will different objects/methods I use from bitcoinj require me to set up ever more dependencies and jars?


If anyone has any suggestions, can answer any questions, or can point me to some material i should read, I would be very grateful!!!!

I am just giving the OP what he wanted, but it will all come down to bitcoin hitting a new all time high.

Okay, here is your best chance at what you want:

Step 1: slowly buy bitcoin as you have been
Step 2: wait for bitcoin to hit new all time high, which will start another bubble from media hype (the only reason is media hype, not cyprus/china/w.e)
Step 3: wait 1-2 weeks
Step 4: split some btc among 100 alts, lets say the ones ranked 20-120 by market cap, and put the rest on litecoin (litecoin should be 0.005-0.007 ltc/btc)
Step 5: when litecoin spikes, ALL the alts below market cap rank 20 will be primed to go AT LEAST X10, so get ready!!
Step 6: as the alts you own from step 4 go X10, sell and reinvest in the ones that have not / buy ones further down the rankings.

total profit: 2.5X from btc hitting ath, X10 from alts = X25, up to X50 if you can time the transition from btc to alts perfectly (ltc and nmc usually first, watch doge and darkcoin aswell this time though) and catch the major alts that go much more than X10. But you have time to think hard about this after btc hits ath and before ltc spikes.

GOOD LUCK, but this all depends on bitcoin hitting a new all time high  


Track record using this strategy primarily only with ltc and btc (would have been a lot higher in november if i followed my own advice and bought alts, but idk how much i trust certain exchanges)

April 2013 bubble: X50
November 2013 bubble: X13

Okay thank you very much 

edited first post, looks like some sites are displaying the wrong address

So i was looking at the top 500 richest bitcoin addresses to see how they changed in the last couple months, and I came across something I do not understand.

The address ranked #153 (was 160) is 1M4vL7mvrKcG2mHas11snsbpktXtqNYJiD

go here and scroll down to 153: http://bitcoinrichlist.com/top100?page=2

It supposedly has 6,309.08 bitcoins in it and has had 725 inputs, but when i search the address on blockchain.info, or click the address from the richlist page, I only see 2 inputs for 0.00001 btc each, and a final balance of 0.00002.

Does anyone know what could be up? I would love to know who is wrong and why.


EDIT: Now when i search the richlist, this address comes up as rank #153, 6,518.6 bitcoins, 728 inputs, but still I only see the 2 0.00001 inputs. (this was only 5 minutes later, and I also found 2 addresses with a last transaction out date of sometime in the last 2 days where blockchain.info shows no transactions whatsoever; the address has never been used)


EDIT 2: searching google for this address brought me to this, which I assume is showing all inputs/outputs.

http://bkchain.org/btc/address/1M4vL7mvrKcG2mHas11snsbpktXtqNYJiD


Well it looks like the address 3MkwFfGNQDve7vz1z6gUDVxkuQpcSV3Mz8  shows all the proper transactions on blockchain.info, so maybe it was just the wrong address being listed on the richlist and this other site in EDIT 2

Because they think it is stupid buying something that they can get for "free" by mining. I imagine that they learn fairly quickly though  

I am sorry if it is unclear but here is an example:

person 1 owns 1000 bitcoins purchased at $20 each
person 2 owns 500 bitcoins purchased at $1000 each
person 3 owns 500 bitcoins purchased at $750 each

Statistic A:      1/3 of the people in this scenario have profited
Statistic B:      1/2 of the bitcoins are held by the people who have profited

I am looking at Statistic B. I don't know if it is a useful statistic, but it may be interesting to think about.

That seems to be the simple answer, but surely some people cashed out when prices were higher, so some of the coins mined before 2013 are now owned by people who have lost money on bitcoin. And also, I am sure a lot of the coins mined in 2014 are going to people who have profited from bitcoin as well.

I would just like to know what everyone on bitcointalk thinks about this. Thanks for responding  

Profit can come from mining, investing, trading, etc. As long as someones net worth has increased as a result of bitcoin, the bitcoins they own are counted.


EXAMPLE:

person 1 owns 1000 bitcoins purchased at $20 each
person 2 owns 500 bitcoins purchased at $1000 each
person 3 owns 500 bitcoins purchased at $750 each

Statistic A:      1/3 of the people in this scenario have profited
Statistic B:      1/2 of the bitcoins are held by the people who have profited

I am looking at Statistic B. I don't know if it is a useful statistic, but it may be interesting to think about.

When will bitcoin bottom and when should you buy? 2 clues:

Here is the first clue:
When you look at the bitcoin charts and the little voice in the back of your head is screaming: "The time to buy is NOW, please oh please just click the damn BUY BUTTON NOW!", and everyone not involved with bitcoin is saying: "Bitcoin failed, it was a ponzi scheme, you should give up, it will never recover because people are not stupid, I cannot believe you fell for that"

And here is the second:
When you can sense the quiet before the storm - when all the poeple who are involved with bitcoin are thinking the above and are waiting for someone else (the smart money) to make the first move. Typically when there are no more good excuses as to why the prices are falling, buy support looks strong, prices have been stable for a while (although low).


Hopefully we are getting a tad bit closer every day 

I am with you guys hoping some of these large mining companies fold, especially the ones who immediately sell for $.

I want them out of the game so in a few years we can read stories such as "We bought $10 million of mining equipment, mined $12 million worth of bitcoins and thought we did good but quit when difficulty went too high, but if we had just held the coins they would be worth $X00 million"

will be fun to watch, some of the larger ones should go bankrupt at some point. just sit back with some popcorn and watch the hashrate explode 

Remember, in the grand scheme of things we are still early in the game where bitcoins are "easy" to get, with an inflation rate near 10%, and large amounts of confiscated and hacked bitcoins are floating around.

i guess what i am saying is do not watch the prices every day and start thinking on a longer term scale.

Coinfan, you are wrong. If you have been holding from like $600, $700, or higher, why would you even bother selling at $100? Sure some people would, but the vast majority would not even bother.


Kind of like if you had purchased 10 litecoins at $48 and then logged in to see them a couple months ago at $3.50. There really is no point in selling - your $480 has turned into $35, it can't really get much worse.

Also I will offer $100 for all circulating bitcoins right now assuming someone can amass them all if they hit $0.

naked short selling it down close to zero would be the worst mistake someone could make, but would make all of us very rich on the short squeeze 

Me? I would gain control of 99% of the hashrate and then stop mining the instant the block reward halves lol

have fun waiting for the difficulty to adjust in that scenario

How exactly does apple pay reduce transaction fees  

Getting people more accustomed to mobile payments in general is great, because whatever "they" can do, bitcoin can do with lower fees.