A significant sell off was overdue.  I'm not too worried about market participants pulling out right now.  Still, the bitcoins I sold at $7.10 to $7.20 make me happy.  Ready to buy when the time is right.

Is this advocacy for pissing your money away at a casino?  Sure, it's exciting, but looking at all the sad saps pumping their pensions into poker machines all day I would hardly describe any of them as having the time of their lives.

Part of having a 'life' is leaving assets to your children so that they can live a better life than you did.  Yes, you can't take it with you.  My father will leave his house to me, which will greatly aid in paying off my mortgage.  I hope to leave my house to my children, rather than donate it slowly to a casino.

It takes a lot of courage to post on an open forum that you've just sold... and then watch the price rise another 20% within a day.

Watching the price rocket over $7, I can't help but feel we're beginning to see the giddy greed of May/June 2011 reappear again.  Not a popular opinion, I know.  People don't like to hear negative opinions.  I'm long bitcoins but ready on the sell trigger.

There's an ascending triangle... in my pants... as I'm watching the price rise.  Interesting times.

We both know what I mean.  Have a look at the bubble popping in June 2011 for reference.

After a large and rapid increase in price it would be natural, almost expected to see quite a few people take profits off the table and dump the price to somewhere in the low to mid $5 range.

For those traders who anticipate higher prices in the very near future, I would ask why that is so?  What's happened to bitcoin in the last week to make it rise so far and so quickly?  Apart from change in sentiment, was any new product or service announced?  Did the fundamentals change?

Does that apply to people who sold between $15 and $25 per bitcoin, and have recently bought back in for <$5? 

The time to sell up is when price growth becomes exponential.  Irrational exuberance takes over, if you will.  I'm hoping this latest rally becomes a slow boil rather than a repeat of March -> June 2011.

Nothing wrong with pussying out.  If you never sell then you never really have a profit.  The real world in which we live still revolves around government issued currencies.  Need to take profits at some stage.

I just signed up for a mortgage (no, not in the USA  ).  Does that mean my bank manager is going to hell, based on the Koran?  That's one heck of an occupational safety hazard.

Remaining anonymous is also very handy for if or when the fund manager decides to disappear with everyone's bitcoins, or the market is blamed for the fund's collapse.  This is the reason why funds and managers tend to be registered and regulated. 

In June 2011 people were confidently predicting $100 by Christmas 2011.

I have both buys and sells programmed in, but not entered on MtGox.  No need to give my hand away and provide free information to the market which it does not deserve.  Any analysis based on existing asks and bids is missing a huge amount of data and also assumes people won't adjust their trades if the market swings one way or another.

If I had a bitcoin for every time someone posted 'only $X to go until we hit price $Y', I could retire on bitcoins alone 

The only countries to use the mixed date format, (MM/DD/YYYY), are: United States, Belize, Micronesia, Palau, and the Philippines.  Every other nation uses either big or little endian dates, not mixed endian which quite frankly make no logical sense.  In my programming projects I'm forced to use DD/MMM/YYYY format dates so there is absolutely no ambiguity (is 6/2/2012 a day in June or February?  Depends on whether an American is reading it or not), but that makes life difficult for people who do not understand English.

Coincidently, the only countries left in the world still using Fahrenheit as the official measure of temperature are: United States, Cayman Islands, and Belize.

Maybe the USA will convert, one day...

Someone sold in a hurry.  I guess if they planned a pump and dump they had to exit while the exiting was good.  Well executed.

I can't help but feel that services like Bitcoinica are a step backwards for bitcoin and will lead to more instability and wild swings in price.  I'm not having a go at Bitcoinica in particular, but more about the introduction of '1%' tricks like short selling and high levels of leveraging.  Maybe someone can introduce CFDs too and the real fun will begin.

We're moving further away from a market based on demand and supply, real world uses for bitcoins and actual commerce, and heading towards who can be the best trader and extract profits before the feces hits the fan.  We're not learning the lessons of 2007-2011+.

The more people buy bitcoins the higher the price goes, causing more people to be interested and buy even more.  It's how the bubble was built, and it works in the exact opposite way when people see the price heading down.

It's heading up now, so more people are buying.  It'll reach a certain point again (anyone's guess) and repeat.  We'll see all sorts of reasons and justifications given, 'this time it's different' rationalisations and quite well formed arguments, but the bubble and busts go back to basic human psychology and greed at their core.  Enjoy the rally while it lasts.  It looks rather juicy and there are easy profits to be made.

Many people think I'm a bitcoin bear, but I'm not.  I'm actually long bitcoins 

LOL 

Seems I need to go to more parties.  Heading off to bed in a few minutes.  Feel free to let the rally continue 

Well, I just came back from a NYE party (same time zone as MtGox) and was really suprised to see the spike to $4.99.

Now, for the person who called it.... Was it blind luck?  Intuition?  Chart reading voodoo?  Or insider info about someone who wanted to buy bitcoins in a hurry?  I'm sure this forum would love to know.

So, what is the logic behind suddenly forcing the price up from $4.25 to $4.99 in an instant?  I can't think of one, except forced buying through Bitcoinica or someone playing the thin market (New Year's Eve and all).  I can't think of a real reason why someone would want a whole lot of bitcoins suddenly for a real world use.

I'm long bitcoins, with the realistic expectation that bubbles rarely reinflate.  If they do rise once again, they generally don't rise to anywhere near previous levels.  Barring some extraordinary use for bitcoins where no other method suffices, we're not going above $10 again.  It's not what super bulls want to hear, that's for sure.