Are you talking about the inflation before the first halving? Yes, it was higher. But even the halved mining rewards didn't really help us to keep the price at the highly elevated levels that were reached during the hype phase at the end of 2013. Now the hype is gone, but many market participants still try to cling to these high price levels as if they were the new norm and refuse to accept that without the hype they are actually unsustainable. And from my perspective, I don't see a significant influx of new buyers coming in to re-incite the hype.

Sure, good point. But I'd assume that rising prices will bring mining operations back in as the profitability of mining increases again, and inflation will pick up again. So I'm not sure if this will help a sustainable rally to develop.

Hi inca,


It just sounds to me as if the main argument for the bullish case boils down to: "We crashed really hard after going down for months. But we didn't crash even harder. Therefore up it goes". It's just not very convincing for me.


I'll probably step on a lot of toes now, but I consider (most) TA as hokus-pokus. I follow r/bitcoinmarkets closely, and it seems to me that trading contrary to what their indicators and squiggly lines say would have made for much more successfull trading than actually following their predictions.


A chicken and egg problem then? I think without new buyers we are doomed to go lower. Old-timer bitcoiners trading back and forth among themselves does not create a sustainable rally.


I expect the bear market to end with a panic that gets incited when market participants realize we are going down into the 200s, and that we will stay there for a while. I assume we will see real panic selling then, with people jumping over each other to reach the exit before it is (seemingly) too late. Where every move upwards will be seen as a good opportunity to get out, and not as the beginning of a new bubble (the way it is happening right now). It will surely seem naive to most here, but I am actually convinced I will be able to buy back in much cheaper then. It's far from guaranteed, of course.

I am not short, but seriously considering doing so once we go back into the 400s.

Again, all IMHO.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Edit:
Newly mined coins water down the supply side and therefore apply downward pressure onto the price. I find it hard to argue against that? Maybe you are assuming that all newly mined coins go straight to cold storage and stay there? I see no indications for that being the case, though.

Am I the only one here who considers the recent bullish sentiment to be irrational?

The bulls' main argument for a trend reversal seems to be the fact that, after falling ~$400 from this summer's highs, we have seen the first really significant bounce upwards. Honestly, I think that crashing really hard after a months long downtrend isn't exactly the best advertisement for potential new buyers, despite the bounce. And we urgently need those newcomers in order to absorb the constant downward pressure applied by newly mined coins.

The irrational bullishness expressed both here and on reddit indicates to me that the bulls have mostly already gone "all in", hoping to catch the start of a new bubble. And now the price is mainly pushed further up by traders on margin riding the momentum (dollar-swaps on finex touched $24M just today!) and shorts getting stopped out. I don't think this is sustainable without a significant influx of new buyers (and holders) who help to carry the price further upwards.

Meanwhile, the chart on google trends for "bitcoin" is going back down after that last disappointingly small spike which was probably caused by both the recent crash and the release of the "rise and rise" documentary.

The chart for number of transactions may be increasing, but the ones for transaction fees and dollar-value of the transactions are going sideways. I consider especially the transaction fee chart as noteworthy, because it actually costs money to manipulate the chart and because it is not influenced by old coins moving around. My logic is that more transaction fees being paid could indicate more newcomers coming in, who only have non-fee-free coins to move around (besides indicating an increase in "real, non-manipulative" movement of coins, of course).

Volume seems to be decreasing for now, too.

Media hype is also not there, and I don't perceive the interest regarding bitcoin outside of the bitcoin related message boards as especially encouraging.

My personal guess is that bulls aren't going to give up yet and will try to give it another push to higher price levels. But I would be surprised if we actually made it to $450. From there on I expect the rally to fizzle away like the one in summer. We couldn't sustain a bull rally back then, even though there were significantly fewer coins in circulation at that time. We couldn't even sustain prices above $400 after that,. And I don't see how suddenly we could sustain such prices now. Nothing really has fundamentally changed after that crash below $300. So I predict the continuation of the downtrend after the next push upwards.

All IMHO, of course.

lol? 29k ask wall @ $300 on stamp?? wtf???

I'm sure I am not going to become popular with my bearish sentiment here on this board full of bulls, especially when we just had that rally upwards. But I'll give it a try:

Up only if a whale decides to push us there, and only if those walls @ $465 and $500 (Bitstamp) belong to the whales so that they can be removed quickly in order to facilitate some quick price action upwards that finally triggers all those short margin calls.

But my guess is we will go down, even if we see another small rally beforehand. Buying action was surprisingly unimpressive after we dropped into the 370s, so it's probably going to be even worse now that we are back in the 440s - despite the paypal news, which is IMHO completely blown out of proportion and will probably fail to bring in a significant number of new buyers. So we'll probably get the same combination of slowly bleeding down together with some unexpected rapid dumps that we have seen in the last couple of weeks. This is still a bear market overall, and unless something fundamentally changes it's probably going to stay that way for the next weeks.

Next stop: 350s, maybe with a short-lived dip into the $320-$330 range. There we (and especially the whales) are going to find out if organic buying pressure will finally pick up, which would mean that the bottom is probably in. Otherwise we are going down even further into the 200s.

All IMHO, of course.

A few minutes before the rally started nearly all the bids on Bitstamp down to 360 were removed within in a second. Also quite a lot of asks were removed, but far less than bids. I switched over to the trading PC and by then everything was back to normal. Did anyone else catch that? I wonder what that was all about, there were literally only a few dozen coins worth of bids down to 360, basically just a long flat green line (on bitcoinity.org). A bug maybe? But would be a weird coincidence because it happened right before that rally.

About the rally itself: I kinda feel that this was orchestrated by a single entity, probably in order to induce a short squeeze. I doubt very much that this was "organic" buying by people who suddenly all decided to buy in unison. Or maybe I'm wrong and it was caused by a bunch of people buying because of the paypal news, but I doubt it...

I followed the rally early on and decided @ about $415 that someone was trying to squeeze those 11000 shorts out. So I went "picking up pennies in front of the steamroller" - I bought into the askwalls, then set up my own askwalls at a slighty higher price. Worked out well, but I would have been in trouble if the price had reversed suddenly. Bids were very thin, so I wouldn't have been able to sell the coins back at the price I bought them at. Was probably not a good idea, even though I made some profit.

Edit: I'm still all in fiat, and comfortably so. Still bearish in the midterm, and think that the paypal news is overvalued (although it's certainly good news, for the long term).

I have bad noose for you, Stamp dipped below 399 just now.

And price just broke 400 again on Stamp and Finex...

Ask side on Stamp seems to be gaining some strength. Bears getting ready for another raid??

I guess we won't see any significant upward movement until new funds arrive at the exchanges on Monday? Probably just sideways movement followed by occasional dumps until then.

Isn't it a bit late for selling coins in order to buy Alibaba stock? Exchanges typically do not let you transfer fiat to 3rd party accounts. So I assume you have to transfer to your bank first, then to a stock broker. IPO was Thursday and retail sale is beginning this Friday, so the funds will probably not arrive on time to get in early?

Le fool d' april!

Oh, another thread about Ripple on the first page of Bitcoin Discussion, and it reads very much like the last one. I will quote myself:

During the Gox crisis all threads about Gox were moved to Service Discussion. That issue had imo far more relevance to Bitcoin and Bitcoiners than the Ripple service does. Obviously the mods are not asleep, otherwise that thread about Dogecoin would not have gotten removed. So why are discussions about Ripple suddenly allowed back in the Bitcoin Discussion subforum?

From this thread:

So why does the Ripple thread stay in Bitcoin Discussion?

I remember when Ripple promoters kept about 4 or 5 Ripple threads on the first page of Bitcoin Discussion at all times, until it became obvious what they were doing. Consequently, all Ripple threads were removed to Service Discussion (I think), and the activity in these threads went to zero rather quickly. I miss those times...

Discuss!

insert "dessert-like coffee" joke here