It really is such a ridiculous idea that everything one dislikes must be the making of conspiratory evil forces that I'm troubled to understand how they can ignore the cognitive dissonance.

If you see a deflationary collapse like 2008 coming where, you know, everything collapses vs. fiat currency ... Why not? Is the point of speculation to preserve and increase purchasing power or is it some sort of feel good mentality?

Why did it go up in the first place?

The advantage of an ETF is that it is accessible not only to high-net worth individuals, at your regular broker. I think it'll help a lot, but it will depend a lot on the circumstances of when it is launched because the sentiment/price environment will dictate demand.

It's just wishful thinking as always, we already have plenty of non-exchange traded funds. People suck up the "200M within a year" figure as if the fund manager had any say in how demand will look like, or actually was a credible and non-biased authority. We already have a great barometer of this demand, and it's this thread. Try explaining that to those who need it to be true though.

edit: Oops, I only now noticed you were talking about ETFs, and not non-exchange traded funds. Still, lots of wishful thinking I've observed with regard to this GABI fund.

How ironic.

So SecondMarket hasn't bought shit for over 3 months now.

I noticed as well. Really admirable how the price is still holding in the high 500s in the face of this ask pressure. By the way, the 2% divergence between Western and Chinese exchanges is being resolved by the Western ones following. Seems that China still has more influence than I thought? Is Jorge right after all?

I think Bitcoin is a risk asset and losely correlated with the broader economy, same as gold. (credit goes to waveaddict btw). That is, I believe if the stock market goes into the toilet, Bitcoin would have a much harder time than it has so far. It's probably something that you put money in when you have an excess, and pull money out when you lack it.

Why, not at all. I much prefer it to low value content like pictures of whatever. I don't want to stifle anything. I'm just voicing my thoughts that maybe things are much more complicated with news than commonly thought. Maybe there is logic in what is happening.

Interesting divergence between Huobi and everyone else right now. About 2% deviation.

In my view, that's because because of sentiment and technical analysis. Unless we're in a parabolic chasing new alltime highs (which is most of the time), positive news usually have little effect, simply because we're usually neutral or bearish then.

Here's one way to think of sentiment: When the pool of bullish people has been exhausted and noone has money left to buy, then we have a whole bunch of cheerleaders screaming moon train while building up insane expectations that inevitably, in most cases become disappointed simply by the price not moving for too long, or even moving counter their expectation. This creates disappointment, and now you can imagine what happens progressively as people start realizing their profits as the cognitive dissonance becomes too much to bear. Eventually, irrationality to the upside is followed by irrationality to the downside because so much disillusionment has been bred. To move up now, we need a good deal of this irrationality to the downside, or we need new bulls with new money because right now, we're trading pretty much the same USD back and forth.

tl;dr When shit isn't going parabolic, noone really cares too much. That's just how we humans are with regard to super volatile risk assets like Bitcoin.

Not large for the overall market? Yes, I agree. Although arguably you could take it as a sentiment indicator for the broader market, but it is hard to say how representative it is. Large for the exchange market, perhaps a little. Large for the Bitfinex market? Definitely.

There's no question that this has anything to do with any exchange other than Bitfinex and perhaps BTC-E, really. Why would it, when the last margin induced flash crash on Bitfinex didn't?

Sure we do. Just check out https://www.bitfinex.com/pages/stats or http://www.bfxdata.com.

Right now it's near 30 million USD vs. 5.3k BTC.

What good news? Why do you people (not you in particular) all think you are so clever that even if "fresh" news played a large role, even assuming that there are no insider front runners, who are you to say what is important and what is not, or even whether a piece is overwhelmingly good or bad? How do you tell if something has been priced in, and how long does that take? Do you have a framework to put everything in relation? News is even more subjective than technical analysis, and as far as I can tell it's one of the worst ways to trade.

Maybe because the overall condition has persisted for a long time? It's just that few spoke about it before. A few weeks or months isn't much compared when this has been going on since either March 2014 or even winter 2013, depending on how you view it.

I'm not sure it's particularly probable per se that a flash crash has to happen. It's conceivable to deleverage in a more orderly fashion, or that this pattern holds out long enough and the saviour rally actually comes. Also, the longs on Bitfinex is just one particular aspect of that exchange, and Bitfinex is one particular aspect of the overall market (a flash crash on Bitfinex is unlikely to significantly affect Bitstamp), and the exchanges are just one aspect of the overall market too.

But, with the current amount of longs versus shorts, IF a deep spike downwards happens, it's going to be hard to not have a liquidation cascade.

Of course miners are not the source of large sells. The idea is that they're providing regular and increasing selling pressure on the market, and thereby unlock selling power by people finally realizing profits.

"Most mining", perhaps, but certainly less relative hashing power is in the hands of people similar to you than before, which is the point. That trend is still ongoing.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=713973.msg8071083#msg8071083

One of the few actual fundamentals with Bitcoin, yet noone really gives a shit.

He was ever effective?