hey lucif, did you ever figure out why you were a bear during the biggest bitcoin rally ever, yet? did you make the appropriate adjustments to your methods?

i don't buy it.



looks more like 'final capitulation' to me, and a really bullish one at that. the market bottom is right now, and everyone's terrified on the sidelines. remember "bitcoin never crashes below its previous high?" that support at $120 is stronger than what's on the order book.

again, how can the bubble model account for the minibull to $160? nothing like this happened in June '11.

--arepo

agree, i called the bottom in my thread.

we'll see. everyone is terrified, talking gloom and doom, while the price simply consolidates, so it looks like a market bottom to me.

let me ask you this: who is going to dump now, after a day of quiet consolidation, who didn't dump two days ago? the proportion of weak to strong hands plummeted after the most recent panic sell -- everyone's just on the sidelines. there won't be enough volume to break under $120 on the weekend, and by Monday the buyers are going to be a little less wary.

--arepo

you guys are fools if you think we're going to break $120 any time soon.

i come from a background in science, i know this -- just like your signature -- falsifiability is key

i've started to really stress rigor in my threads, now, too (partly because if i didn't, ichthyo and others get on my back in two seconds flat )

but not to hijack this thread.. sorry Maged, it is an important one.

--arepo

it is true that anything could happen at any time, of course

my main points were that fundamentals are still net bullish, and while i'm having difficulty determining an up/down percentage at this point based on my analysis, a continuation of the still-intact mid-term trend is definitely possible, if not likely.

i'm thinking the negatives you mentioned (exchanges closing, blockchain bloat, etc) are actually less important than people using it for things like purchasing reddit gold, or porn, or beer, or pizza (all of which you can do in a few places, at least), because these guys are not going to care or even know about technical crises and i'm confident that the community and the dev team can maneuver around any such obstacles relatively smoothly.

this is a new age of distributed, small-scale use -- we're moving out of our 'niche community' status.

--arepo

we're actually hovering a bit above that lower trendline right now. my analysis has come to similar conclusions, the lower trendline could remain intact.

--arepo

these are all good points to temper a bullish attitude.


this is a more serious point than it sounds, i admit, but i've been talking about this since February, and i dare say that i was expecting the kind of event that happened on April 10. it wasn't really a bubble, it was growing pains in response to the market cap growing two orders of magnitude in size, quite suddenly.


... which brings me to this point. i was a bear when the rally started, and it was a spectacularly bad call, i'll freely admit. after three or four calls of 'tops' i realized that there was something terribly wrong with my methods. i took a break from posting publicly and turned a critical eye to my assumptions and methods.

i realized a large part was misreading the 'overbought' signals on the oscillators, because they really only work ideally when the influx of money is small comapred to the market cap, which was not the case during the rally. this recent push to $160 also completely defied the 'normal' behavior of these indicators, but this time i accounted for this fact, and anticipated the movement.

but this large influx of money is exactly what i'm talking about -- i'm not sure we're going to see the same kind of 'depression' that occurred last time because i do not think that the market contracted by the same magnitude in percentages as it did in '11.

[this is a bit OT, skip if you want]

as for a personal note, i apologize for seeming so self-assured.. sometimes i get a little too excited about my projections i know that my models are fallible, but the improvements i made during the rally i missed (which included better techniques for quantifying error, and the development of a brand new hypothesis supported by data i had been collecting) should reflect the fact that i was determined to never make so bad of a call again

i don't mean to spam, and i'm certainly not trying to 'sell my report'. i only published the report because of requests from users in the first place. i am really only motivated to continue improving my methods and models, as i did not know much about speculation at all 2 years ago, before i discovered bitcoin, and now (as a BS in physics), I am utterly fascinated by the complexity of finance and economics. also i've been a tutor for many years, and i tend to retain that mind set in everything i do. i love to teach.

and i hope you can agree that i'm learning a little more every day

--arepo

thanks. i don't really understand how that's possible.. do the image tags run some kind of script? <--- not very CS-savvy

what evil magic is this?

didn't think i was able to ignore myself

this should probably be deleted. not quite sure how he gamed the image tags liked that...

auto-ignores me, bitpirate, and smoothie -- i feel honored

who cares what it is, as long as it's being used? ignoring (negligent) inflation, a 20x increase of the volume of demand of bitcoin since $5/btc is the only thing necessary for $100 to be a stable price.

this is why i said it's finding its niches. it's not really being used in one way (it still hasn't figured out what it is), but it's being used in a large variety of small ways, in a manner which creates demand.

not to mention plenty of evidence that its attractiveness as a store of value has inspired some new big players to enter the market.

it's not even that the fundamentals are improving -- the fundamentals are changing. deflation is kicking in.

--arepo

this is ridiculous. this is despair! we're talking about how the coming months will be doom and gloom. don't you understand? the market leads market sentiment, slightly. everyone knows about how bad June '11 was, and now pretty much everyone is expecting a crash. this is the quiet period of consolidation, where most of the money is on the sidelines, and the smart money slowly begins to buy in.

take a look at the all-time price graph, log-scale, again. the pattern we just witnessed looks nothing like the June bubble. it looks more like a small bubble on top of a trend, and then a major correction to the trend.

the June '11 event cannot be compared to this. you can be a bear, but not for this reason.

how can this model account for the recent run-up to $165? nothing like that occurred after the $33 peak, and the proportions are entirely wrong: the run-up was much shorter, and the crash was much longer.

some rough numbers: price collapsed 90% over the course of many months in '11, whereas price collapsed 80% in a few days on April 10.

thoughts?

this is important, and i don't think it's nearly the same. real growth was much smaller, by my estimates*. i'm not sure how one would go about actually calculating this value, but it seems not only larger, but also increasing. don't we expect a somewhat exponential trend line until the price discovery phase is over?

*estimates based on google trends, /r/bitcoin subscriptions, frequency of first-hand (IRL) exposure, estimates of poker seals userbase growth, estimates of "speculation" subforum userbase growth, growth of the market cap, and other data

this is not true... bitcoin is finding its niches in many small places, just planting seeds -- no flowers yet, but soon

i can also tell you from first hand experience that seals with clubs (bitcoin poker) saw a massive influx of new users over the course of the last 6 months.

i think you're underestimating the amount of media coverage we received... bitcoin was all over reddit, tumblr, etc, in a big way. these kinds of things have a gradual effect.

in other words, i think the bitcoin userbase is expanding at an unprecendented rate, even still, though said figure may have taken a hit after the crash.

you're pretty slow, aren't you... 

the price was only above $20 for about two weeks. that was a serious speculative bubble. this was a serious speculative bubble stacked on top of a serious uptrend. the two events don't seem comparable.

it sure looks different this time...

i'm not quite sure it was 'just a bubble' anyway -- there might have a been a 'bubble top' but the market was aching for a regular old correction. and it feels like deflation is kicking in now -- BTC price can't go down without some serious selling if demand is growing. i even doubt we'll see below $100 anytime soon -- too many people think thats a cheap coin

--arepo