I'm not saying there is necessarily causation, but there seems to be correlation. Any thoughts on this?



Forget OKCoin. Forget Huobi. This is the show to watch.

I liked the name "bitcoin". It was nice and simple and described exactly what the service is in one word: a digital token. Even many of the following altcoins and services had sensible names such as "litecoin", "feathercoin", "ripple" etc. But now in this latest wave of crypto, all of the services seem to have all of these highly mystical, weird, and/or commanding names. I think the inventors were either narcissistic or used too many drugs:


"ethereum": Are you a f*king sorcerer? Is there ethereum VM the astral plane? Are "ether"s chi or mana points? What's with the logo: is this dungeons and dragons? Also: "GHOST"? "Casper"?

"The DAO": Is a Chinese god telling me that contracts within DAO are the new will of the universe and investing in DAO tokens is my true path?

"Inter Planetary File System": What are we sending files to f*king Saturn now? As far as I know, all of the files are still here firmly on Earth. Would a decentralized crypto system even work very well at such large distances unless perhaps wormholes were involved?

"Akasha": Does this new social network have all of the records of the entire universe from all of the past, present, and future? Can I speak to my deceased relatives? Actually, the Akashic Records is supposed to be like a library and I think the term would actually much better be applied to the IPFS. It's not really a social network.

"Enigma" (from MIT): The crypto machine the Germans used in World War II, which was broken? Is this implementation really going to be that significant? Also, why would you want to call it that?

It's SOFTWARE.

You all are a bunch of egomaniacs.

It actually looks much more like 2012, which is also much more bullish. You could be doing such a better job at this. Is it because your chart doesn't go back that far?

Guys the trading isn't going so well anymore. I'm quitting again, probably permanently this time. I can't predict crap anymore, I can't tell what the hell is going on with these Chinese exchanges which I thought should have been irrelevant by now, the fees are too high, the liquidity is too low, I can't use stops properly, and I can't even trust the exchanges. Also I can't even post in this forum without eliciting negative responses everyone when I'm only trying to contribute.

Also just like when I traded bitcoin years ago it's giving me terrible anxiety, sleep deprivation, health effects, and reducing my job performance. So I'm cutting my losses early this time.

I'm dividing my remaining coins up 30% fiat and 70% btc and withdrawing again, because I spent all the fiat from last time so I'm too heavily weighted in bitcoin. This way, I can have peace of mind in order to do another full btc information blackout.

See you guys again when I check the price again in 6 months or a year or so. In the meantime if you want to see me, you can find me at a 2/5 or 5/10 holdem table where at least I can have fun while I'm gambling.

I've heard this all over the forum, and it just doesn't seem to be true, according to the chart of DJIA vs Bitcoin. In fact, it might be the opposite.

1. Depending on how it plays out,  it's not guaranteed that the price will rise. It might collapse instead.

2. Bitcoin is a high tech payment network with hundreds of use cases.  Restricting it to this one use case of capital flight is pretty narrow minded and an insult to bitcoin. A real bull would want bitcoin to succeed in its own merits.

3. The price would be much higher if bitcoin went mainstream in a thriving economy with government approval, rather than a negative environment with no spending and only storage. Things would be growing,  and money would circulate hundreds of times faster.

4. In the case of hyperinflation, the prices of goods is rising in tandem with the bitcoin rise and your actual wealth in terms of what goods you can buy isn't rising as much,  if there is even a supply at all.  Meanwhile your neighbors are suffering and starving.  Heck,  you might just starve too.

5. You want to live in a negative and harsh world,  where everyone is unhappy and there isn't even anything fun to spend your coins on... If you can even find places to spend them because they're probably illegal. Nobodies quality of life is going up,  not even yours.  For any advantage due to your bitcoin wealth,  there is an equal and opposite disadvantage.

6. If people get wind of your wealth,  they will hate you and your life is in danger. 

7. You literally want billions of people to suffer just so you can make a profit.  You're just like the capitalist pigs and the government and are against all the values that bitcoin stands for.  You are despicable.

Go hope for something more productive because you might just get what you wish for.

1. Mtgox and its huge volume, and api.

2. Regularly seeing 5K-30K coin walls pop up in the course of normal trading (it wasn't 'bearwhale' or 'bullwhale', just normal).

3. The lack of dark orders.

4. Clark Moody (for some reason, it just released more dopamine than the other charting sites hands down).

5. Animations from the admin on Bitcoinity to celebrate or joke about key price levels.

6. Rippling effects after each price movement that would give you ample chances to get in or simply profit off the ripples.

7. The ability to make a trade on btce immediately after seeing it on gox and 'cheat'.

8. Taking advantage of trading bots that had gone haywire.

9. Being able to take advantage of technical glitches on exchanges to make easy trades.

10. In general, being able to trade without knowing any kind of TA.

11. Arbitrage and inter-exchange fiat channels.

12. Massive crazy alt coin pumps on btce led by fontas.

13. Altcoin IPOs on btce.

14. The gox litecoin ipo.

15. Huge altcoin arbitrade opportunities on the emerging high volume altcoin exchanges.

16. The lack of huge fake confusing CNY volume.

17. My trading competition being high on drugs from silk road.

18. The weird glitchy liquidity link between bitfinex and bitstamp.

19. Gpu mining and having weeks to profitably mine a new altcoin.

20. Being ahead of the awareness curve. My grandfather wasn't telling me about bitcoin yet.

21. The lack of reporters using big jazzy wall street terminology. The focus on the application and organic user economy rather than 'getting the big money in and the next big name company in'.

Everywhere I look I keep hearing people complaining about the price and blaming the auction and the auction only, and thinking that everything hinges on what price the coins are sold at. It is silly.

Right before the descent in early June, there were not one but THREE significant news events - it wasn't just the auction. There was also an article released in China by central bankers of how they were going to keep track of and close down accounts that were being used for recharge codes.  After that there was GHash.io reaching 51%. There are even aspects of the auction itself which are more significant than the coins themselves being sold. I'll explain each of these:

1. China: There was news about further crackdowns on deposit methods to Chinese exchanges including recharge codes. Now, I don't care how many times people try to dismiss China or call it 'FUD' - China is very significant. China is the world's most populated country with 20% of the worlds population, is one of the world's largest economies, and most importantly it contains the world's largest shadow currency trading market where high rollers throw around trillions of dollars on a regular basis to gamble on shadow currencies (mostly BANs - notes from banks). It is also happens to contain half of Bitcoin's exchanges which appears to do 5-10 times as much volume as the other half. There are some questions about the legitimacy of the volume but a safe guess is that the legitimate volume should be at least as much as the 'west', which is still highly significant. You can't just take something involving at least half of Bitcoin's trading economy and dismiss it. Any news about China is going to be very important for Bitcoin (in the short term at least) whether you like it or not. At the very least, it is much more significant than the auction.

2. GHash: The pool reached 51% for the first time and nothing was done about it for a while until a big player finally voluntarily pulled some power out of it.  This raised questions about the viability of Bitcoin and the nature of the community and caused some major players to become bearish. Some whales decided they were going to sell half of their holdings. The amount of bitcoins being dumped over this probably trumps the 30K bitcoins being sold at the auction. In addition, future investors have become somewhat dissuaded and there will be some degree less new investment in the future. All in all, it is a much more significant event than the auction.

3. The Auction. Even within the auction itself there are more significant things to consider than the 30k coins themselves being sold and their effect on the market.  Anything involving the government doing something adverse leaves a bearish taste in investors. "Why is the government selling? Has the government become bearish on Bitcoin?"
- "What does the government know that we don't? Have they found some exploit in the protocol? Have they run some study and found that there is no way technically or economically that bitcoin could possibly work?"
- "Has the NSA broken EC already but it is top secret?"
- "Does the government plan on banning Bitcoin?"
- "Are they going to dump their other 500,000 coins?
I'm not saying any of those are true but it might be what is running through certain people's heads which would account for a reduction in new investment which is more significant than the coins themselves being sold.

I understand many of you may object to some, or many, or all of these points, and that is fine... Maybe none of these things are really that significant in the long run. However, that is not my point. They don't have to be that important - just more important than the auction. My entire point is that there are many things that have occured lately that are much more important than the impact of 30K coins hitting that market and at what price these 30K coins are going to be bought. This is an inisificant matter and something like that wouldn't have caused a downward slide this severe and this long. 30K coins are... a mere 0.22% of coins - it is nothing. Get over it. Please stop talking about those coins.

I think I know,  but I'm tired of hearing this catchy phrase. IT sounds like spam or a cheap sales pitch. Could please define a little more about what 'move in' means?

Is an exchange going to open?
Is bitcoin going to open on comex?
Are a bunch of guys with suits and ties going to dump their stocks and decide they need to bring bucketloads of cash over to bitcoin so they can join the speculation and holding circle?

Exactly what kinds of things will occur and companies and players will be involved.

What is this 'high risk" order cancellation BS? If there is a problem with your account information then they should notify that of you beforehand in your account and block you from trading, before you are led to believe that you can trade or that you have placed a trade!

I made a great buy last week at $560, and now I find out it is cancelled! What's worse is many of the coins were for someone else, and I've already given him the coins from my stash. So basically I'm in the hole for the price difference, as if I sold my own coins at $560!

I heard Coinbase does this intentionally and maliciously for their own insider trading to profit off of customers. We need to do something about this? What can we do?

I keep hearing that brain wallets are not viable solutions and that we have to use hardware/software wallets with a bitcoin client to have a secure wallet, because of the lack of entropy in wallets generated by brainwallet passwords. Rubbish! There is a really simple way to fix this problem and make your brain wallet 100 times more secure.

Code:

Private key = SHA256(salt+passphrase)

Just generate a giant random alphanumber (at least 256 bits to provide maximum entropy) and store it somewhere. You can call this your 'entropy key', your 'salt', your 'seed', or whatever. Then use it in addition to a memorized password when generating a brainwallet.  For example could store a salt somewhere "a3fE3f92kOe2p4d0" (it would actualy be much longer than this), memorize a password "correcthorsebatterystaple",  and then your password would be "a3fE3f92kOe2p4d0correcthorsebatterystaple".  So now instead of your private key being SHA256(passphrase), it is SHA256(salt+passphrase), or you could make it something more complicated than that - it's up to you.

This completely solves the entropy problem of a brainwallet by adding the maximum amount of entropy possible to your password right off the bat. It's kind of like two-factor authentication.  It is also solves the physical security issue of a paper wallet where if the wallet is stolen, it is compromised. If an attacker steals your seed, no big deal - they still don't have the password component. An attacker would have to first know that what they were looking at was a brainwallet seed and then they'd have a to run a bruteforce cracking operation just on your brainwallet seed specifically. Of course this is not impossible but it is kind of far fetched and much less easy/likely than the attacks involved in a plain brainwallet, a plain paperwallet, or even hardware/software wallets.

Now some people might complain that this isn't a true brainwallet solution, because there is some information you need to store somewhere outside of your brain. That is true. However, it is the closest you can get and is a much easier solution than running a dedicated hardware or software bitcoin client. Also, to mitigate this issue, you could take measures to make it very easy for yourself to access your seed and make sure that it is always available to you. You can store it in one, many, or all of many places. For example, you could
-Store it on a pc
-Store it on a thumbrive
-Write it down or print it on paper
-Keep it in a bank vault
-Store it hidden away somewhere on some websites you can log into
-Embed it inside the code of an image you post on facebook
-Store it in a file on your web server, possibly behind password protection/htaccess
-Store it in a database
-Email it yourself
-If you are really brave, store it on the blockchain - then you know even in a worst case apocalytic scenario, as long as bitcoin still exists you will have access to your seed.

You can be really lax with security on your seed because as I said earlier, you also need the memorized password to add to it. If you are concerned with security, you can also encrypt your seed using some encryption algorithm and another password that you use to decrypt the seed before using it. You can also use multiple seeds and store them in different places, and then use them all together with your password to generate your wallet.

Secure solution

Code:

Private key = SHA256(seed1+password1+seed2+password2+seed3)

I hope this helps.  Once I got serious about moving into cold storage and was ready to send, it only took me a few hours to think of and perfect this solution. I'm surprised more people aren't doing it.

This is not a prediction

I'm not trying to be a bear here. In fact I'm currently long and hope that this doesn't happen. However, I couldn't help but share a fractal idea I had in my mind of how, if a downtrend were to resume, it could look like a fractal of the previous downtrend. The theory is as follows:

Notice how, in the Feb-May bear market, there were two sub-crashes, one was the 'gox-crash' from Feb-Mar, and the other was the 'China crash' from late Mar-Apr. Each sub-crash had their own resistance line which branched out from the main resistance line, which had a much lesser slope than the sub-resistance-lines. Each sub-crash then recovered in a weak way which eventually led into the next subcrash.  Finally in May, the whole bear market supposedly ends, but it ends in a weak way.

Now what if, this whole Feb-May bear market, is actually a 'sub-crash' of yet a larger bear market. Feb-May is subcrash one and then in July-October will be subcrash two.  July-October will have its own resistance line similar to the resistance in Feb-May, and both resistance lines will branch off of yet a larger parent resistance line with a lesser slope which spans the entire actual bear market of one year. Finally sometime in 2015 the bear market actually ends as the parent resistance line is broken.

There are two support lines in my chart: one is a line connected to a point starting in late 2012 and another is a line connected all the way back to the 2011 crash bounce/recovery. The Feb-May subcrash finds support against the first support line, which was not about to die without a fight. However, its weak trading action where the line is constantly being tested and there is low volume eventually gives way to it breaking and initiating the July-October subcrash as the weekly ichimoku cloud is breached. The entire bear market eventually finds its support on the original 2011 trendline.





Elliot waves???


Again I'm not saying or hoping that this will happen and it's just an idea for the math brains to think about.

I'm wondering why most people are calling for a bubble in July? Historically, bitcoin consolidations are symmetrical, and the recovery takes just as long as the preceding decline. This pattern occurs despite the never-ending incredible exponential increase of fundamentals each time. In this case the preceding decline lasted 5 months (december-april), so the average (probability) length of the recovery should be 5 months (may - september) and a breakout should occur in september or october. So I am wondering why people are calling for a breakout in the start of July? That is only a 2 month recovery, and would look extremely assymetrical on the chart with one side being 250% of the length of the other side.

The last two bitcoin breakouts have occured on a full moon. Both times I looked up in the sky at the moon and decided to throw in the towel as a bear and buy (or place a stop order).  Could the full moon have something to do with bitcoin breakouts? Are we to expect now a consolidation until another breakout on the next full moon?

Everywhere I hear a psychic give a prediction on bitcoin, it seems to be unanimously bearish and apocalyptic.

"52 Bitcoin OK just think the crash of 1929, and the South Sea Bubble. Multiply those two events by ten then you'll be close to what is going to happen to this ponzi scheme."
-Christian Dion "the seer"

"Prediction #14: The alternative digital currency, Bitcoin, will crash due to a well placed virus that affects the algorithm. . …"
-LaMont Hamilton

I had a personal reading myself with a renowned psychic in march/april and was told:
-someone would steal all my money
-exchanges would start stealing customer money (I described what happened with gox and was told other exchanges were going to start doing the same thing)
-whatever happened in December was going to happen again, and cause a crash
-There would be a recovery into the 500s.
-There would be a little bit of action this year, but nothing extravagant. No huge rallies. Probably just 500s.
-Afterwards, prices would steadily decline again into an even further crash
-Something would happen in Japan
-The costs of using Bitcoin would rise (due to regulation)
-I was not going to continue to exponentially increase my money into millions and I was more likely to lose it all instead.

So what's up with these psychics. Why are they so bearish?

Disclaimer: I am currently long since my stop was blown out at $460 and I moved all of my coins into cold storage. I don't plan on changing this at the moment.

Sorry about the grammar in the title - it was due to space constraints.

Lately I have been creating secure cold storage cold storage wallets using offline key generation and either paper or brain to store the key. It is kind of a scary process because deep down I think there's a chance I might generate an invalid key or mess up somehow and then later I won't be able to retrieve the bitcoins I send to the address. So I go through the tedious process of testing the new address by going through all of the secure/offline methods to send a small amount of coins to and from the address, and verify that it works, before I start sending tons of coins there. Well, as this process is tedious and seems to add an unnecessary layer of risk, I was wondering if it is even necessary.

Is it at all possible to create an invalid private key? Of all 256-bit hex numbers, is each and every one a valid key? Also, is it possible for the algorithm that converts the private key into the public key to mess up somehow? If I wrote down any random 256 bit number, and use (offline) brainwallet to derive the public key, is that sufficient enough and can I start sending my coins to it right away without having to 'test' it first?

We know that New York is taking a very proactive role to support BTC. But what about the federal government, and what about the central bankers? They may have a different stance than New York and may be keeping it a secret while they quietly devise their plans. The federal government and the central bankers, the same people that seem to be hated in this forum, ultimately have the ability to starve btc price by removing it from the banking system and public legality if they so choose. Any decision made by FinCEN etc. will trump a decision made by New York / WallStreet. What do you think is going to happen, and do you have any evidence?

I would like some type of alert on my phone every time China bans and unbans bitcoin, an exchange bank account is closed, reopened, some new deposit method is added, etc.

I cannot believe I am still hearing people vigorously advocating taking a long position right now and that this is the bottom because their perception of 'previous cycles'.

A blind man could read this chart and tell you that it's not a good time to buy. It's more like... time to gtfo, take a 3 month vacation, and maybe put an alert in with a charting service to alert you when the 1W emas or 1W MACD has crossed back up. Weekly emas have only ever crossed down once in the history of bitcoin, in 2011. All you have to do is open your eyes and see.

All you have to do is stop being deluded with your thoughts of how bitcoin is the holy grail and so great that it is impervious to downtrends and long drawn out bear markets. Even the strongest stocks in the stock market with the best growth fundamentals have these types of bear markets when the economy gets bad and there is trouble overseas. Stop being deluded with logically flawed thoughts and chart readings and log lines of how you're entitled to a 'cycle' with a rally every 9 months. You think you can pick the bottom based on "sentiment" on forums and a time position within a "cycle". This is all based only on infantile pattern recognition and bad math, and people seeing only what they want to see on charts but failing to recognize divergences. One such obvious divergence is the RSI divergence on the weekly chart which indicates that the uptrend with 9 month cycles is over.

Also, stop thinking that "wall street" is suddenly going to "move in" to save a bunch of lucky tech kids and turn them into billionaires. It's like you have some sense of entitlement. "I bought 50,000 bitcoins before bitcoin was cool. Now I am entitled to be a billionaire. It's time for my scheduled 9 month rally. I want it now. Where is my train?" It's not coming... Just open your eyes and look at the weekly chart. The chart tells all. Trade the chart, not the news and what traders are talking about on forums.