My question pertained not to spreads but to the precise trigger of the stop-buy, be it the ask price, a buy-ask median, or something more fuzzy. My eyeballs tell me the stops are triggered when the Bitcoinica ask is above my stop-buy, but I do not know for certain whether the ask is the precise trigger.

I sacrificed a few dollars when the Mt. Gox ask prices rose from $2.92 to $2.95. Bitcoinica charts show a wee bit over $2.94 and the Bitcoinica ask is currently a bit over $2.97 and the spread is about $0.8 at this moment:

I negative this.

Now, now boys. I've received many coins in plastic (anti-tarnish?) sleeves in which they remain to this day. They still look great. And besides unless they are for display, tarnish is good, as it protects silver!

This count continues to 'look good' but has been invalidated in so many ways that one would be unwise to bet heavily on it. While the fourth wave (~$3, 6 Dec thru present) looks like a double zig-zag, the drop to $2.9 moments ago invalidates the entire count (again) as it enters the price territory of the first ($2.93, 5 Dec) and second waves.

Alternatively, we could count the entire rally ($2.61 4 Dec) to ($3.05, 6 Dec) as a single wave, though we'd have trouble (it's impossible) counting five subwaves. The sideways correction since would be a legal second wave, though one would have expected a sharp second wave (see the bitcoin yearly chart for perfect examples: (ii, Nov 2010) and (II since June)).

So, again while this little rally 'looks good', it is not Elliott, and likely wishful thinking. The chart at this scale is at best only informative but at worst it's random noise. Whether up or down, the breakout is likely to be 15% or more.

11.1 BTC

Nano? I'd expect a WTF on a macro scale

Bitcoin might be mega-FT

Sanpandatech, I like most of the samples. Interested in exchanging 'mix tapes' if that's still legal in the free world?

The graph of devastating psychological impact is similar to the trajectory of a brick falling from the roof.

Vandroiy, I like your thinking on this. But some people are more open to context switching, devil's advocate, and persuasion in real time (like children and brilliantly creative scientists), while the majority of adults are set in their ways and become more stuck as they age.

As an example of uncertainty not typically seen on greater scales:



DOWN5: ($3.14, 2 Dec) to ($2.61, 4 Dec) counts five clean waves.

DOWN3: ($3.14, 2 Dec) to ($2.61, 4 Dec) counts three wave zig-zag. Some vague impulse ($3.14) to ($2.9, 3 Dec), correction ($2.99), and five invalid waves down (the fourth wave ($2.69-$2.8, 4 Dec) enters the price territory of one and two)

UP3: extended three waves. The first wave ($2.61-$2.9, 4 Dec) is followed by a correction to the previous fourth ($2.72, 4 Dec). First subwave ($2.93, 5 Dec), sideways correction (~$2.88, 6 Dec), third subwave ($3.05, 6 Dec), followed by a multi-day sideways correction ($3 +/- 3%, 6-8+ Dec), and a fifth subwave up, thus finishing the extended third wave.

UP5: five wave rally. Same as UP3, with a fifth impulsive wave breaching well above $3.14.

✔✔	DOWN5 and UP3: Both are part of an abnormal flattened 5-3-5 zig-zag correction. A drop in five waves to ~$2.6 can be expected
✔	DOWN3 and UP3: Both are part of a flat 3-3-3 correction. A drop in three waves to ~$2.6 can be expected (same message as above)
✘	DOWN5 and UP5: These can not both be five waves. One is wrong
✔	DOWN3 and UP5: Confirmation of a major rally since a $2 bottom. After the fifth well over $3.14, we can expect a large second wave correction of a higher scale back into the high $2's (this suggested fourth $2.61-$3.14). An impressive third wave rally would definitively confirm a major reversal since June rally since October

Bigger scales:

Since June, bitcoin has trended down with unambiguous impulsive waves until recently hitting ($2, 19 Oct). 19 October began a perfect zig-zag correction to ($3.8, 29 Oct) and continued down from there. I anticipated five waves, a correction mid November and a continuation of the trend below $2. That never happened and my counts fell apart.



Suppose we never completed the major correction since October? There is no mistaking the late October zig-zag, but that ($3.8, 29 Oct) zig-zag could represent only the first 'a' wave of a 3-3-5 flat (or 3-3-3-3-3 bounded triangle). The 'b' ($2, 19 Nov) is followed by the 'c' wave we experience today (7 Dec). Even a rise back up to $3.8 in five waves would not invalidate the flat. In fact, according to Pretcher, wave 'c' is most often 100-165% the height of 'a' ($3.8-$5). And what follows would be a continuation of the trend, a fall below $2, into the suggested price range of the March iv, about $1.

Each move within the spread is a single act just as easily toward the ask or bid. As unpredictable as quantum noise within a vacuum. Trends are generally easier to read on each greater scale assuming we could stand far enough away. I have no reason to believe this would not include the expansion of the universe if we sat in God's private theatre booth.

I may have doubts about the data but fewer about the theory. I am skeptical connecting the pre-industrial economy through the Dow Jones Industrial Average and I do not know how to reconcile the Mt. Gox hack and June sell off.

Each bitcoin day has been informative in general and each week quite tradable. I hesitate to label overlapping waves within a single day but can most often discern distinct subwaves of entire waves within a week's duration. Fortunately resolution is enhanced with volatility not strictly with time.


If I shared your doubt I would not be counting Elliott at all. The greater the number of scales in a lattice of confirmation, the greater my confidence in a count. I think you may be asking too much to call the day of the multi-century peak, but the decade? Well, I won't deny stocking up on dried food and bullets. The stock markets are unusually volatile. Just as bitcoin is more difficult to predict at a major bottom, the global markets are difficult to predict at the top.

I don't know if Cypherdoc is correct, but his argumentation certainly opened my eyes. I think it's well worth everyone's read.

Swannell has automated it and produced some nice statistics as well as challenged some of Elliott's original rules and guidelines. (Look back a few pages, I have a link to his 2003 paper). Pretcher has also refined Elliott's work. I think we generally consider Pretcher, Frost definitive.

It is a black art yes. One should be on guard against creating charts based on personal desire to prove an extant position or to create unnecessary doubt. Elliott does provide confirmations and invalidation, which are excellent for pulling out of a losing position with minial loss. In my own short experience, it's been very useful to analyze patterns greater and smaller than the scales I actually intend to trade. This is true with any methodology, but Elliott requires the scaled view and nicely ties multiple scales into the same forecast, which I have not found to be true of other analytic methods.

Yes. This was confirmed by Zhou. I have not yet been Zhoutonged, but it seems to be correct.

Do I read this right? The only thing you don't predict are the tops and the bottoms, but what? you can see the trends after they've begun? Following the good 'ole buy high sell low strategy? If that's work'n for you, keep it up.

The transitions make me smile.

Of course it is supposed to be a technical journal for programmers, but perhaps you are too critical, considering that same paragraph is filled with other loose analogies such as ATM PINs?:

...are transfered between users via exchange of keys
...are transfered between users after the exchange of keys
...are transfered between users after the sender receives the recipient's key
...are transfered between users after the sender receives the hash value of the recipient's key

Thanks Zhou, I understand your hesitation to make a definitive statement. I don't want any guarantees, just to make the connection between triggers and published buy, mean, and sell prices.

Suppose the Mt. Gox price is currently $2.999 bouncing on a huge $3 wall. I would expect the Bitcoinica BUY price to be about $2.95 and SELL price to be maybe $3.05 (the actual spread prices don't matter in this example). Are you saying that my $3.05 STOP-BUY might be triggered when the SELL price is $3.05? I would have expected the STOP-BUY to be triggered when the BUY price is equal to or greater than the STOP-BUY order. ... or if published BUY and SELL prices have nothing to do with it, what triggers a stop order? When you say 'price', can you qualify that (such as the BUY-SELL mean)?

EDIT: Are you saying that Bitcoinica's algorithm anticipates bringing down a wall and will trigger orders before the movement actually happens on either Bitcoinica or Mt. Gox?

But they simply won't. Suppose it was popular and kids accepted untraceable PlayStationCoins selling pictures of their sister - or more nefarious business. Any/every corporate legal team would ensure it's a non-starter.

I do not definitively claim that we have already bottomed out, only that it is a possibility. To be honest, I'm having trouble counting most of November, which is bluring later counts. I've labeled the double drops to $2 (A-B) and the current rally to $3.14 and perhaps higher (C) as an expanded flat 3-3-5, which if correct would imply further drops below $2. I've rambled inconclusively elsewhere, so I won't further clutter up this thread. The discussion starts with S3052's critique of my count and continues exactly a month ago...

Could you explain outputs or provide a link? The wiki Transactions doesn't cut it for me. To me, when I send bitcoins, I collect a bunch of addresses, add up their balance, and using each address, sign the fact that I am redirecting their total balance to a new set of addresses. The 'output' is just the amounts, the destination addresses, the same tiny script 99% of all transactions use, all wrapped in my address signatures. As long as I know my address balances have not changed, what state change could have happened? My understanding of 'output' must be horribly naive.

Is it possible to take a minimal wallet and encrypt it with the recipient's public address and send it to the recipient side channel? In theory, couldn't the recipient use the associated private key to decrypt it? (Are elliptic keys reversible in the same way as RSA?) If this were common, wouldn't bitcoin truly be anonymous, every transaction plausibly deniable?