This reminds me of that saying about blood on the streets... does anyone remember?

Heh, becoming a bull once again has its own merits. Somehow has a cooler feeling than being a bear. Might have something to do with the general insanity out there; it's very refreshing to have something to be positive about.

Just want to add a little of my chartism, with all the Elliott waviness in here.

Once adapted to the strange time-scales of Bitcoin and some liquidity problems, the past five months indeed turned out similar to the DJIA and NASDAQ bubbles, no? If the price stays stable now or some time soon, and then rises out of that plateau, we have a match almost as perfect as it gets. I'd be proud if the analogy holds. I started using in in June, a stabilisation now would complete the cycle neatly.

The theory is that a horde of people expect trends to continue, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy until stopped by market forces. They first cause a huge rally, then bear trap, then overconfidence battles an overly large supply in down-up spikes trending down, turning into a pure down-trend as people give up on the "infinite rally" theory and follow the down-trend instead. Finally, undervaluation occurs, and again market forces stop the trend with the greatly improved buying power per USD. Day-trading takes over, blocking motion until people agree the trend is over and things turn back to normal, likely reverting the undervaluation in an upward correction.

This isn't even all of the signs and predictions, there's also a first sell-off of sceptic traders before the main spike... and guess what, all of this happened, except for the plateau (or possibly slow decline) and the final correction, which would be the steps to come up next. However, the final upward correction may be the biggest stretch of the analogy. Bitcoin isn't quite the NASDAQ after all. Still, this is the best I got, so it's what I used.

The problem with this prediction method is that it only works in bubbles, between the first sell-off and final plateau. So if it works one more time, it's reached its time-out for quite a while.

You have not been here in June. Things have become SO much better since then! The board is unlikely to reach pre-June quality ever again, it's not a pure nerd community any more and that's okay.

But seriously, your argument is almost a thing of the past now. Back then, it was so very true! Insane maniac speculators EVERYWHERE, search the forum, you won't believe what you can find there, behind that "Why I put all my money and all money I can borrow into Bitcoin".

By now, things have largely calmed down. Don't forget that by fundamentals, a surviving Bitcoin currency would be valued much higher than it currently is, so we can treat some of the risk as already factored into price. It's possible, but not necessary that we get another drop. Even if we do: anyone surviving the >90% super-crash will probably not run from one more dip.

No idea what these exceedingly unfriendly comments are about. ElectricMucus, BitMagic, I don't think the forum's population should act as the "we know more than you so get lost" kind of elitists. It's not nice.


@Topic:

I'm not into micro-trading, but generally, there is an inverse relationship between volume and the price fluctuation size from which micro-trading becomes profitable. Real micro-trading is probably small in Bitcoin, simply because most volume is on Mtgox where, even with high volume, you don't get far below 0.3% fees on the side of the day-trader. This reduces volume and thus profits for micro-trading and arbitrage.

You didn't offer a time-scale for the volatility prediction. Bitcoin is generally volatile, and we might have an ending bust phase after the June bubble right now, so roughly predicting variance is not all that astonishing a feat. Another large-scale movement might happen, dwarfing any of the small fluctuations.

To answer the question in the topic: high short-time volatility*volume increases high-speed trading of bots. Similarly, high daily volatility*volume increases day-trader volume. Both kinds of traders ultimately reduce volatility again, creating a negative-feedback loop.

So, on long time-scales, day- and micro-trader volume is inversely proportional to the average absolute deviation of price minus the fee paid by one side.

BTCurious:

A prediction containing multiple scenarios is not useless, even if it does not affect expectation value. Unless you have unlimited funds, speculation is not only about determining which way to bet, but also about determining how much to risk on each "bet". Say I know variance and skew of the future price's probability distribution: I know something, I could even make a better-than-50% bet where the price goes (if the distribution is skewed), but on average, one cannot make money with it.

I won't comment on "Elliott Wave Theory"; it sounds fishy to me, but I never cared to investigate much since I use other methods for risk analysis. But I wouldn't wonder if it can predict likely scenarios, there is no general reason that would deem this impossible unless the prediction targets expectation value.

It would really help to do a more detailed description of how it works and who is behind it.

I didn't find any personal or company information on this yet. Contact doesn't even tell an address! Chances are the moment I order anything expensive, the coins just vanish on me.

Very interesting though. If it turns out there's a safe way to use this: I got some coins to spend!

Well, no doubt 1 for me. Too bad Casascius raised his price recently, I just wasn't there in time to get more.

Brass is awesome, my favorite material for money. Then I love the holograms, they just catch the eye. And finally, actual data I can look up on the outside, the serial numbers on Euro are crap compared to the public/private key combo. If you replicate these, and someone spends them, the people holding the replicas can notice it themselves, not just someone at the central bank years later!

Also, silver is playing the bubble game and EUR is being maintained by destructive idiots these days, look at the dropping value.

I live in Europe, but hold more money in BTC than in EUR or silver (zero on silver, I wanted put options on it but the trading service screwed up, damn, missed that nice 10 USD drop). Sure, I need some USD for speculation security, but I guess it's obvious what I think of EUR and silver these days.

75 000 BTC is not even 1% of the market currently. 7200 coins is less than 0.1% by now. This is insufficient by far to alter price at current volumes. Forget about the miners. They are fading out of the market as we speak, the most recent downspike was possibly the largest miner sell-off Bitcoin will ever see.

So, yes, of course we see a change in ownership. At least I can say that I own significantly more coins now compared to a few weeks ago, and I intend to hold some of them for speculation, as I think BTC is currently undervalued.

IMO, Bitcoins shifted to people with more realistic sentiments than "Bitcoin will rise to 1000 USD by next year" or "Bitcoin will certainly die". This is a good thing, as those kinds of "speculators" don't do a speculator's job, which is correcting and stabilizing price.

Oh wow, 50k BTC a week. That's a whole 150k USD at current price.

Indeed, there are more Bitcoins generated than Minecraft keys sold, at least in average over the last two years. 1.7something is the factor.

Sorry, but do you have any idea about the magnitude global markets work on? Whether the market value is 24M or 50M USD, that's still nothing but nothing! Even with a 90% "Bitcoin will die" probability, current price is rather low.

There you go! All the people on the forum could summon Santa after all. I helped a little -- so unlike me to go in-trend. Rare kind of event IMO, these past days.

Possibly someone generated a lot of "viewers" just to see the reaction in this thread.

I guess the indicator is kind of useless now.

Dude, this is perfectly fine and allowed.

Stop talking as if someone is doing something evil here. It's a small market, any bigger players have to be strategic to get their volume through. As long as someone is not order spamming, he's free to use any order distribution and to change his mind once or twice a day.

This guy just picked an area where his BTC volume goes linear with a price drop. Uuuuh evil manipulator he needs to be stopped -- wat?

If Google now decides to place an infinite bidwall (just exceed existing BTC amount) at 4 USD, that's that. Nobody will complain. If they suddenly remove it and walk away in a press release stating "lol, trolled," same thing. It's a free world and it's strange how people run around complaining what some person does with a few dozen k USD.

This is confusing. The spammer is warning about himself?

Maybe he's switched to troll mode now and is replicating the warning email so people flame about casascius spamming?

Oh, whatever. I just got two of the physical Bitcoins, they're awesome. I'm considering buying a bunch of them, so the fraudster site was really dangerous for me. So I appreciate the warning (even though I never received it per email).



Think about it this way: between an advantage of a fraudster or casascius, there is no doubt what should be put preference. These physical coins are a huge marketing boost for Bitcoin, it would suck if a scammer were to ruin that business.

Thanks for the warning! These days, I could use a browser addon that warns when hosts are in countries like Russia (as this one).

All this scamming has become a massive annoyance. This is one of the cases where we could have another organization funded with Bitcoin, Job: gather donations, select a scammer at random, trace, attack (report to police, DoS, hack, whatever). Post results. Just for the heck of it.

They never got me so far, still, if I ever happen to identify one of these people, they will not have a nice time with me.

I am fully aware that a lock-down against new users was required in June and July, when the forums massively degenerated to a flamewar between madmen, trolls, channers and superpositions of the three. But this was a short event that has largely calmed down now.

Yesterday, I heard the sentence "That forum is locking itself down from serious users, instead encouraging kiddies with too much time on their hands to join." Generally, I agree. Someone who simply wants to comment on a discussion will not want to play strange (and largely useless) games to be able to do so.

This forum is a central point for the Bitcoin community. Warding off newcomers is a serious problem, since it might decide whether they stay with Bitcoin in general or not.

My suggestion would be to try revert to a quick join policy. Maybe get a few more moderators equipped with banhammers, adding temporary IP bans. Quick bans are entirely unproblematic, they only go against people who can't behave.

I think the site lacks a statement concerning share ratio. I didn't use it yet, but there is nothing on the introduction page.

People who want fast torrents do not necessarily want to leech. I suggest that you ascertain that your service holds an average share ratio larger than 1 whenever possible. You can charge extra if people want to actively seed to high ratios, but a paid service should really set a good example.

It would be really unsatisfying to damage the BitTorrent networks even though paying extra for the traffic.

No one is "responsible" for regulating Bitcoin, since any transaction could have happened anywhere on the world. Also, nobody really wants it regulated, apart maybe for taxation reasons. And those haven't proven a very good motivation for political change so far. I don't see a government putting all too much effort into that.

I guess a delay in the ability to buy BTC will mean what the speculators make out of it. If someone really wants to get BTC, he will find a way, and there's no real handle to deny the right to buy them.

BTW, I'm from Europe and this isn't the first time this happens. So far, Gox figured out a way to fix it somehow. If they don't, well, one more reason why fiat money systems are vastly inferior to Bitcoin.

Just now, I was asked "why isn't there someone who offers to remotely download torrents for me? That would be the occasion to use Bitcoins, too!" and I answered, "actually, there is."

So you'll have another user sometime soon. And I think this is an implication that you are nowhere near having addressed even a fraction of a percent of your target market if a frequent BitTorrent and Bitcoin user did not even know the site yet. It probably takes a while to spread the word, keep it up!

"Never", I don't believe you. If someone offers you a kilo of gold per coin, you *will* spend at least a fraction unless you're fairly insane or very rich already.

But yeah, there's a limit to how many coins I would sell anywhere near current prices. If Bitcoin enters a full-success-scenario, unlikely as it sounds, it would turn out a very bad deal to sell everything on the way. That's why I advise people to hold a few coins. I think expectation value of Bitcoin Value is much higher then 3 USD, but since the unlikely cases (full success) drive it up, one should not go all-in for risk reasons.

I think that's what HorseRider means, the fraction one doesn't sell until he sees a full success scenario.