Does anyone know why the coins listed on coinmarketcap from around row 1130 onwards are shaded?

I am just wondering why my posts were removed?

There was a good intelligent discussion in the thread as well. For reference, this is what I posted:



Where, approximately, are we on this chart?

It appears that we may be somewhere along the segment marked "capitulation". What's other people's thoughts?





Bitcoin is roughly following a not dissimilar price movement:





Not sure what level "despair" would be, if indeed that's where we're heading. Any thoughts?




I have another chart that makes for an interesting comparison.



This is bitcoin during 2013-15 where a fairly similar behaviour occured. It's very similar to 2017-18, so far, and lends support to the reversion to the mean scenario.

In 2013 bitcoin increased by a multiple of 11 and then, over a relatively long drawn out period of over a year, reverted to a multiple of 2 compared to 2013. A similar behaviour for 2017-18 would give rise to a value of around $1,800 by the end of 2018 or beginning of 2019, with some volatilty in the intervening period.

But circumstances are different now to what they were in 2013-15, and they continue to change, so we may see something different emerging.




Other posters were engaged in the debate with interesting comments. The whole thread has been deleted. I'd be interested to know why, if anyone would know.

Back in February I remember a whole bunch of dudes saying buy bitcoin, it's an amazing price of $6000 and you'll never see a chance like this again, it will just go up from here and you will be kicking yourself. Then it did indeed start going up over the coming months, it even reached $11000, nearly double they were saying, you've missed the boat.

But look where we are now. We are at the same February low of $6000. My point is history, and prices, all repeat themselves. Opportunities do come round again. I can say to those people that said to buy in Feb that we are at the same point, and the same opportunity is there again.

(Or is it? I know a whole load of people are saying it's going to fall below $6000 and may even reach $5000. So there will be opportunities. Feb was not a special time).

I've been in the crypto space for a while now and I try and learn as much as I can. I've noticed a huge surge in new coins (ICOs) since a year ago and there's no sign of this abating. For anyone interested in investing time or money in such a venture requires due dilligence and the main part of this is analysing the project, especially looking at the white paper and asking the right questions. However, I notice that the majority of whitepapers, actually all of them, are very technical on the development and blockchain aspects of the project and for most people this is just too technical to understand. Many enthusiasts or investors are not developers; they are just normal people with an interest in the projects but without a development or technical background. How then can they stand a chance of getting a proper understanding of a project?

A while back I stumbled across some information online about a tech company using blockchain in a way that was revolutionising the consumer electronics market. As someone who takes an interest in new and exciting developments in the crypto space I looked into the project. At the time there was a massive marketing hype about this particular coin. It was not an ICO but a coin that had been around for some time but with negligible value (ie. even a sizable holding of coins was worth just a few cents). During the next few weeks the hype grew, although the price didn't move much. I decided the time was right to invest and, given how amazing the project sounded, actually invested a significant sum of money.

A few days later the coin got a listing on an exchange. The price actually shot up. When I looked it was up by around 3,000% from the average price it had been in previous months. My investment was worth about twenty times the amount I invested. I believed I had made a great investment. The price started dropping about four or five days later, but by small amounts at a time. I didn't pay much attention. I knew that the market was overpriced anyway and that prices were due for some downward movement. The price drops were more or less inline with the price of major cryptos anyway.

I decided that my strategy was a long term investment and forced myself to stop looking at the prices of my investment every day. I looked again last Friday. I was horrified. The price was back to almost zero and the value of my investment was about 2% of the amount I invested. The withdrawal fees would be more than the actual investment itself. What on earth was going on I asked myself. I spent the weekend digging around to try and find out. It seems that the whole thing was a scam, and a very clever one at that. The initial price rises on hitting the exchange were manipulated by the team behind the coin. They used the hype that they manufactured to build the interest which in turn produced the hype. It was very cleverly done.

As the team themselves held a significant amount of the coins, from their ICO that they had done much earlier, I think it was a year earlier, they then took advantage of the price, dumped their coins, but did so in a way so as not to raise any suspicions, and made an absolute fortune from this. People who invested during the hype, like myself, essentially created the opportunity for the team to cash in using money invested by people like me. They have now vanished. The coin is no longer trading, is worth zero, and I am left with nothing.

It's so easy to be fooled by a team whose aim is not to produce a blockchain-related product or service, but rather, create the conditions to create wealth for themselves by conning other people out of their money on the basis of fake promises that they have no intention to realise. I am not going to be able to say which coin this is, although a few people in the community may know or be able to guess, because there may be legal action going on and I don't want to be party to jeopordise it. Having said that, even if there were to be any form of legal recourse we all know it is highly unlikely that it will be successful.

Sometimes, despite all one's due dilligence, even the most careful of investors will get scammed from time to time. I'm not sure if there's anything I would, or could, have done differently, but I am nevertheless putting the whole episode down to a very bad experience that has simply led me to make a substantial loss. I will continue to be involved in the space and will continue to do the fullest amount of due dilligence, but on the understanding that scammers really are getting cleverer!

So many posts recently with questions like "when will bitcoin go back to $20,000?".

It's as if people assume that, if bitcoin was a certain price in USD at some point in the past, that it must go back to that same level again.

But can't see anyone asking "when will bitcoin go back to $1,000?". It's the same logic as the question above. Bitcoin was $1,000 a year ago, so it's exactly the same reasoning.

The question should really be : "when will bitcoin be $x again?", where "x" is the price of bitcoin at some point in the past.

But, just because something has happened in the past does not mean it would, or should, happen again at some point in the future.

The current population of the world is 7,628,581,589 (it keeps changing every second though, but you get the idea!).

Bitcoin in circulation is 17,088,962.

There are 1,600 wallets containing at least 1,000 bitcoin. The total bitcoin of these wallets is about 5,000,000.

(Total bitcoin held on wallet exchanges is about 2,200,000.)

Total bitcoin "lost" (figures vary depending on data sources) is about 4,000,000.

So, 17m bitcoin minus 4m lost equals 13m actual "live" bitcoin. 5m in the hands of 1,600 whales. That leaves 8m in the hands of the rest of the population.

7,628,581,589 - 1,600 = 7,628,579,989 is the rest of the population! 8m between them equals 953 bitcoin each!

That means, with the current circulating supply of bitcoin, and accounting for the "whales" and "lost" bitcoin, there is enough bitcoin available for every person on the planet to own 953 bitcoin. (In fiat money that means there's enough for all of us to own bitcoin valued at 953 x $6,865 = $6,542,345).

Let me repeat that: there's enough bitcoin in the world for everybody to own $6,542,345 worth!

So, what's happened!?

I've read online and on this forum and elsewhere comments from people who talk about the future of bitcoin whilst at the same time drawing their conclusions from the past. For example, some people have commented along the lines of "Bitcoin was $20k at the end of 2017 so it should go back there soon/ it's currently undervalued/ etc." There are others who talk about technical analysis providing signals to buy or sell (or to "go long" or "go short" in trader parlance (more on this later). And then we have the "fundamentalists" who talk about the economy, decentralisation, the value of the blockchain and so on. I wanted to see if any sense can be made from all this and whether we can identify any trends and the drivers behind them.

I started with looking at some statistics from this forum. Here are the stats from 1st January 2016 to 31st December 2017, a full two year period.



We can see an overall steady increase which then starts to increase exponentially during early 2017 and then drops off in the final month of 2017. This pattern applies fairly uniformly for new members, online, new posts and in fact all measures of activity. It will be easier to see if I plot some graphs, which I have done. Here is the first one.



We can see that aroundabout Dec 2016 new posts being created on bitcointalk started to increase month-on-month. By June/ July 2017 there were around 6,000 new posts being created compared to the 3,000 per month in Nov/ Dec 2016. The activity had doubled. And it continued to increase. This particular measure is a good indicator of activity within the existing forum community. If we compare this to new members joining the forum we see something interesting, but not altogether surprising. Here is a graph of new memberships:



We can see straight away that the rise we saw with new posts came much later with an increase in new members. It means that existing forum members were already discussing bitcoin more, rather than the rise in posts being attributed to new members. What this boils down to is that new members were joining the party after the bandwaggon was already some way down the avenue. In fact this increase in memberships only really took off around May 2017 - that's a full six months after the start of the increase in activity of existing members.

To get a better perspective I've taken the trends in bitcoin interest as measured by Google search. Here is a graph for the same two period looked at above:



Notice here that the increase in interest, measured by Google search activity, only occurred around Nov 2017 - that's a further six months down the line still. It means that interest, and by corollary, investment in bitcoin is taking place first within circles of people who are already engaged with bitcoin with the people at large catching on much later.

The question is, where do price movements kick in? Here is a graph showing bitcoin's price (in USD) for 1st Jan 2016 to 31st Dec 2017:



It bears an uncanny resemblance to the level of interest as measured by Google search. If we look at these two graphs, above, we can see a clear similarity. The more people become "interested" in bitcoin, the more the price rises and by proportionally the same relative amount. Number of searches for "bitcoin" goes up by 100% on Google then so does the price of bitcoin.

Of course, anyone might argue that all this is just pure coincidence. So we need to show whether or not it is. To do so we need to see whether there is any direct correlation between volatility of bitcoin compared to other assets. The closest comparisons would be other commodities but we should also include stocks, ideally something like the S&P 500 to get a good enough barometer of comparison. Here is a graph plotting the volatility over one year rolling periods since 2011:



It's clear to see that the three do not move in tandem. One final test, just to be sure, is to calculate actual correlations between bitcoin and a large enough sample of other assets. Here is a graph showing just this, correlation with 1,400 ETFs which cover pretty much the investment universe:



Around 99% of correlation occurs within -0.1 and +0.1 which is quite categoric in that bitcoin is uncorrelated with anything else outside of the crypto space. If you're now wondering whether bitcoin is correlated with other cryptos here is a table showing the correlation over the past three months:



It can be seen that bitcoin is indeed highly correlated to other cryptos ( the last four items in the table represent a comparison with other assets as follows: ^SPX = S&P 500 Index, ^VIX = CBOE Volatility Index, ^GLD = SPDR Gold Shares, ^TNX = CBOE 10-year treasury-note yield.)

To sum up, interest in bitcoin, which in turn affects its price, is the key driver. The increase in 2017 was extremely significant as it saw bitcoin's biggest rise since its inception in absolute terms. This was fed by a media frenzy which brought the existence of bitcoin to the awareness of people around the world who had never even heard of bitcoin. For fear of missing out many jumped in, driving the price up. This links in pretty much exactly with the Google search data above. It's worthy to note that the drop in Google searches for "bitcoin" since the third week of December 2017 have coincided with a corresponding and proportional drop in the price of bitcoin.

 

Visa network crashes and sparks card payment chaos.

Millions left unable to pay in shops, petrol stations and railway stations across UK and Europe.

Would this ever happen with bitcoin?

It might be useful to remember that it pays to get the bigger picture and look at any investment as a longer term action. This is of course unless you are a trader, in which case you will only be concerned with short term speculative work. But for those who see bitcoin, and indeed any crypto, as an investment, then long term plays an important part.

To illustrate the magnitudes of difference I will take two simple comparisons - the month end of 31st May and the year end, also to 31st May.

So, looking at the prices of bicoin for the two timeframes, we have:

Price at 1st June 2017  $2274
Price at 1st May 2018  $9268
Price at 31st May 2018  $7565

So the month of May 2018 gave rise to a loss of 18% but over the year from 1st June 2017 to 31st May 2018 a holder of bitcoin will have seen a rise of 232%.

My guess is that this is generally repeated. What this means is that there will be proportionally a lot more rolling year periods showing a gain than comparatively one month rolling periods.

Ok so some people are waiting for an opportunity to buy; they wait until they see what they think is a good enough dip; then they buy some crypto/ bitcoin; price starts to go up and they start being in profit; then the price starts going down, and down a bit more and eventually gets back to the price they bought at. Then, and here is the thing, the price goes below the price they bought at. Then it goes done some more. And then maybe some more. Then, those people sell their bitcoin/ crypto. Then they come on here and start spreading FUD. Then the price goes up. Then it goes up some more. Then it goes above the price they originally bought at! Then it goes up some more. Then they come back on here spreading more FUD because they personally lost out. But other people are making money from the same bitcoin/ crypto - they just did NOT have the patience and understanding to see it through. Nobody's fault but their's. Yet they think spreading FUD because they made the wrong decision is somehow bitcoin's fault. Sound familiar? Go figure.

DISCLAIMER: I am not saying you should buy or sell bitcoin or any other crypto. I don't know if prices will go up or down. Past performance is not a guide to future performance. If you need to speak to a professional adviser then they may give you some assistance. I am not a professional adviser. I don't know anything.

[FAQ]

Ok, so there's like loads of new posts everyday asking the same stuff, and I'm like don't people read before posting ? So I am putting together this FAQ to answer all those types of questions in one bash so that people can stop posting the same questions over and over. Do you DIG?

So here we goes!

The BITCOIN FAQS

Q. What is bitcoin?
A. It is a cryptocurrency.

Q. What is a cryptocurrency?
A. It is a digital form of currency based on mathematical cryptography.

Q. What is cryptography?
A. It is a trustless system of using a network of computers to verify transactions by solving complex mathematical puzzles.

Q. What is bitcoin?
A. Have you not been paying attention?

Q. Help! I bought bitcoin last month/ last week/ three days ago/ yesterday/ an hour ago/ two minutes ago/ just now* and it's gone down loads. Help! What do I do?
A. You need to be patient. Prices move up and down, all the time, so you have to buy when you think the time is right and wait a bit.
* = delete as appropriate

Q. Will bitcoin go up?
A. It goes up and down all the time. Long term nobody can be sure exactly what will happen.

Q. Will bitcoin go down?
A. It goes up and down all the time. Long term nobody can be sure exactly what will happen.

Q. Will bitcoin make me very, very, very rich?
A. Possibly, after a very, very, very long time.

Q. What is a lambo?
A. It is a very expensive car made just for people who get rich with bitcoin.

Q. Does 1 bitcoin = 1 bitcoin?
A. Yes it does.

Q. Will the governments ban bitcoin?
A. They cannot. It's impossible. That was the whole point that Satoshi Nakamoto invented bitcoin.

Q. Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?
A. Nobody knows.

Q. What do you mean?
A. I mean, nobody knows. He, she, it, they are/ is an enigma.

Q. What's an enigma?
A. Look it up in a dictionary.

Q. Is now a good time to buy bitcoin?
A. Nobody can answer that for you. You should do your own research and decide if and when it is right for you.



Q. I am going to sell my car, my house, my wife/ husband/ kids* and put all the money in bitcoin. Is this a good idea?
A. No.
* = delete as appropriate

Q. Why not?
A. Have you not been paying attention again? The value of bitcoin can go up, but it can also go down, over different timeframes, and you may not get all your money back. So you may not get your house or you wife/ husband/ girlfriend/ boyfriend* back.
* = delete as appropriate

Q. I didn't want him/ her* anyway.
A. I see, well in that case ...
* = delete as appropriate

Q. Should I start new topics in the forum asking any of the above questions all over again?
A. No.

  

I have been reading the posts on this forum and so many people are saying they lost a lot of money and bitcoin is no good. Many people are saying that bitcoin and other cryptos have been a bad investment.

But if we look at the facts and the performance and compare to other investments that some people make we can see that this is not the case.

People are making the mistake of focussing on price changes on a day to day basis but investment is not about day to day price movements. It is about patience and reward.

If we look at the changes in one year we can see that bitcoin has performed many times better than all other investments. For one year bitcoin has gone up a massive amount. It was $900 this time last year! Now it is $7000. That has given bitcoin investors an incredible 700% return in just one year. The stockmarket average return for the same one year has given only 2% return. Fiat money has fallen. The dollar has gone down by 15%. Savings accounts have given a return of about 1%.

When you look at the returns and losses of all these investments, the best was stockmarkets that gave average 2%. So bitcoin has given 700% yet people are complaining that it has been a bad investment, even though it is 350 times better than the next best investment. What other investment has given you 700% profit in one year?

Remember, don't be fooled by day to day price changes. Look at the one year and the longer term facts. When you look at these you can see that if you invested in bitcoin you have made many more profits than everything else put together hundreds of times over.

For over a month the price of bitcoin has fluctuated between approximately $6k and $11.5k, with an average of around $8.5k, which is where the price also finds itself now. This tells me that there are many players in the market, buyers and sellers, and overall nobody is sure where and when the price is heading towards longer term.

If you look at some of the comments on here, social media and the news in general, there is a lot of support for bitcoin, and cryptocurrencies in general, and the supporters are urging a buy stance on digital currencies. They believe that the price will keep going up overall in the long term. They cite reasons such as improved efficiency of the blockchain, including the lightning network that will bring quicker transacations at a lower cost, which will drive the price up.

Then, on the reverse, there are the commentators who are suggesting that things will end badly, that the price of bitcoin can only head downwards, possibly towards zero, and are urging everyone to exit the crypto ecosystem for once and for all. Reasons they give include that digital currencies have not taken off as currencies, there is limited utility or that the price increases are based on speculation without fundamental intrinsic value.

There is merit to both sides of the argument and I think anyone clued up enough will keep an open mind. To take a staunch position on one side of the fence means your eyes will be closed to opportunites to enter or exit as the case may be.

So I've been following bitcoin for a while and looking at various charts and other data. For most of that time I couldn't see any way that bitcoin had any correlation with any other assets other than the vast majority of other cryptocurrencies.

In the past few days however, I have noticed patterns with the dollar. Take today as an example. The dollar has weakened against a basket of other fiat currencies but here's the interesting thing - bitcoin has appreciated in price by almost the same percentage as the percentage loss of the dollar against other major currencies. This is happening more and more. Dollar goes down; bitcoin goes up. And vice versa.

This could provide some advantage in timing trades of bitcoin. Monitoring economic data where we expect the dollar to weaken could provide an additional reason to buy bitcoin. The underlying market suggests that people are transferring from dollar to bitcoin when the expectation is that the dollar is losing strength. This further sugggests that bitcoin is now being seen as a store of wealth, which was not the case a year ago. This might also go some way to explain why the price of bitcoin is more than 1000% compared to twelve months ago.

The theories need more testing but initial comparisons are certainly interesting and provide some real clues into what's happening with the markets in general and where bitcoin is going.

A few notes from a newbie (me). This is my first new topic post.

When I first started finding out about Bitcoin I learnt that it was designed as a currency - a method of exchange with which to transact for goods and services - in a decentralised, trustless form thereby bypassing corruption and manipulation of trust-based systems such as governments and central banks and so on. A financial system for the masses by the masses if you will.

Having spent quite some time reading the comments made by many people on this forum it's become apparent that many people are not using bitcoin in this way. Instead, people here seem to be building up a stack of bitcoin, maybe as an investment in the hope of the value increasing and thereby netting them a profit. If this is what people are doing then it's not what bitcoin was invented for. If we are just hoarding bitcoin, and not using it to transact for goods and services, then it is unlikely it will ever enter the mainstream.

The other issue with this approach is that, by hoarding bitcoin in this way, it will remain in the hands of the few not the many. Even now, with 16m out of 21m bitcoin in existence (that's just over three quarters of all bitcoin that can ever exist) probably only a tiny fraction of the world's population actually own any bitcoin. A stab in the dark I'd guess that's less than 0.000000001% of the world's population (one "satoshi" of all people in the world!). This is another hurdle in bitcoin being adopted by the masses.

The eventuality makes bitcoin more a store of wealth as opposed to the currency it was supposed to be. This means virtually all bitcoin remains in the hands of the very few, and those few become wealthier than the rest of the population who will mostly never be able to get their hands on bitcoin as it remains as a store of wealth and becomes increasingly more expensive due to the impending cap on quantity available.

There is another scenario. And this is already playing out now. People use bitcoin as a commodity to trade, buying and selling in shorter and shorter timeframes to make profits more quickly (as long as they guess the direction of the market correctly). This goes some way in explaining the price of bitcoin over the past few months. This has the effect of making bitcoin follow some well established market movements and, if those that hold bitcoin or invest for the longer term (as opposed to trading for short term gains or transact as a currency), decide they want to claim their profits or cut their losses accordingly, depending on when and at what price they bought, then we will see bitcoin falling further. Under this scenario we could see bitcoin falling to levels not seen since a year ago or even earlier.

There will always be spikes and dips. We are seeing them regularly and, despite many people on here seemingly complaining, they are a sign of a healthy market (unless you are a conspiracist or even a realist with insider knowledge and believe there is widespread price manipulation).

I don't know what the long term price movements of bitcoin will be, and won't even pretend to know, like so many do, but I feel confident enough to predict that the price will be nowhere near where it is at the moment in the twelve months ahead and beyond. We could end up exceeding the previous all time high or we could head towards zero. I'll just add that it's impossible to get to absolute zero simply because some people will have "lost" their bitcoin and a few may never sell, ever, and in this situation where some bitcoin will always be outstanding, the price cannot be zero. But it doesn't mean it can't get close. Then again it could double, triple or more. I'm not placing any bets. The playing field is level (unless you are that conspiracist) and it's open.

The bitcoin games have begun. How they pan out, and how they end we'll just have to wait and see. But the true face of bitcoin has changed. And it might just change again.