Crap. Now it's playing at double speed.

I thought that too, til I saw this:

https://news.bitcoin.com/secs-first-bitcoin-etf-deadline-is-actually-march-13-not-march-11/

"The last day of the period so computed [March 11] shall be included unless it is a Saturday, Sunday, or Federal legal holiday (as defined in Rule 104), in which event the period runs until the end of the next day that is not a Saturday, Sunday, or Federal legal holiday."

The reason you believe it will be the 11th is the same reason I believe it will be the 13th.

Are you sure Elwar didn't post your price prediction? 

Take or leave all of this...
I'd love to see one of two growth paths:

1. Ability to choose your leverage amount, between say 1x and 10x, when you enter a trade.
2. The existing game remains unchanged, but a second, quarterly competition is added, wherein leverage can either be chosen within the aforementioned range, or at a fixed value to diversify the pack more rapidly for the shorter timeframe.  (Also no/smaller market fee, or no fee for limit orders, also to promote action)

The remainder are technical thoughts:

In thinking about a lowest-impact way to implement leverage...there are two jobs - one easy, one more tricky.
1. Calculate gains/loss at time of trade exit, multiplying effect of leverage.
2. Liquidation check.

1 is easy. Later, an 'interest charge' can be calculated. There's all sorts of things you could simulate, including letting players lend instead of leverage, but that is for later.
2 - I've been thinking on it awhile. You need a way for it to be accurate, but not resource intensive.  For example: If someone goes 10x long at $1000, if the price hits $900, even for one second, you should be liquidated.  It would be grossly inaccurate to only do an hourly check of price, for example.  But you don't want to have to check every price for liquidation, every price check.  Here's what I came up with:

Two single, game-wide values - liquidationLow, liquidationHigh. (These are cleared when exiting leveraged trades)
Every time a player makes a trade of newValue, two additional UPDATEs occur:
a) MAX(liquidationLow, newValue)
b) MIN(liquidationHigh, newValue)

I assume that no centralized job processing currently occurs.
This would need to occur with the same frequency as the price updates.
In the common case, CURRENT_PRICE will be neither below the liquidationLow, or above the liquidationHigh.
When it is, a SELECT can retrieve the players whose liquidationAmount is above/below the price update.
They can be liquidated appropriately, when-and-only-when a liquidation price occurs.

(Once you have a central source determining price, you could always, later, update the clients to just get AJAX updates from source rather than having each ping CoinDesk, but I once again digress :-)  )
Each player can store its liquidation value, and a select can retrieve those players above/below the liquidation value.

TL;DR - Two games - the existing long-term, plus a quarterly with either fixed leverage or the ability to choose. Secondary option, still only one game, but ability to choose leverage per-trade.  Gratuitous technical dreaming ensues.

Love the game, looking forward to continuing to play.

Rose to face the sun
The sun was now behind me
Welcome to the moon

The song has now taken a life of its own, cranked its volume knob to 11, snapped the volume and power plugs off, and super glued itself into the wall.

It you need to calm down from the Rally Song, this should help:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tZ92HPvjzM

I've been thinking about the same thing. Not sure if it's right, but this is what I came to.  I think we've got two key drivers:
1. The percent chance the market believes funds will be made wholly available no later than March 15th. (depressive force)
2. The opportunity cost of not having access to one's coins for this span of time. (depressive force)

This first point is one that isn't a factor...until it is.  As long as there is faith/trust that things will open on time, this factor will be close to zero. If/once is becomes non-zero, it could grow quickly.
We watched this play out on Gox.  While elsewhere coins had a market value of $413, IIRC...we watched the price gap between GoxBux and other coins spread...$20, $30..$50 spread.  As fear gripped the market in the final hours, price plummeted to just above $100 - over a 75% discount of 'real' coins.

To the second, this won't affect the long term HODLers. But those looking for the short term profits, I suspect, will become increasingly pressured to sell 'while the price is still good'. Those most afraid this 1000+ price point is temporary will feel increasing pressure to sell out of fear.

In the end, it always comes down to fear and greed.

If internationally, we saw prices diverging, and going up...then I think greed would take over, and risk-tolerant investors would inject cash into the chinese exchanges in order to buy 'cheap coins', knowing they will be inaccessible for up to a month, and knowing they run a risk of not getting what they put in.  The extent we see this will be visible by buying volume on exchanges, and would counteract both of the above, depressive forces.



...however, with the ETF decision looming, I don't think we'll see such price divergence, but rather sideways action until the decision.

 There remains 17 funded, version one, 100 BTC bars.
There are a larger number of version two bars.

 This offering is not funded, it represents a different, limited offering Mike did. I am pretty sure the mintage is much higher than four, that is just how many we know about.

 I shifted focus a few years back to acquiring the most limited mintage pieces. My long-term view is that if the collectible community fails, it won't matter what the specific investments are. If the collectible community takes off, we will have more collectors, and the goal of completing sets will apply the most pressure to those pieces with the most limited mintage.

 To that end, something like this is a neat buy,   But only as a longer term speculative investment with potentially a complete loss, and also potentially a multiple-fold gain.

Downturns tend to be more protracted than we think they'll be - I'd go with your first call, personally :-)

Tell someone 5 years ago their young children will never need to learn to drive a car, most say you're crazy.
Make the same statement today, most will agree.

Today if we claim we will be able to mine an asteroid 100 years from now, and increase the supply of gold on Earth multiple-fold, most say you're crazy.

...Even without considering alchemical solutions, we are nearing the tipping point where the feasibility of asteroid mining will be demonstrated. I believe it is already an eventuality, and merely a question of timing. I think within 5 years, we will have a similar tipping point for the technology required for asteroid mining.

The difference here is that precious metals have no way of transforming their way out of this problem.
Bitcoin's equivalent problem - quadratic computing - does have a solution, through evolution.

Today, the value was expressed in log 12.5.

Thank you.  My major concern had been that the nature of the investment had changed, in that they would no longer be maintaining the ratio. On closer reading, that doesn't seem to be the case.

An attempted distillation:
-The price/share ratio is intended to remain the same.
-The mechanism for issuing new shares was reliant solely on Genesis Global Trading, and is now being opened to anyone qualifying as an Authorized Participant.
-Authorized Participants are not rewarded for selling NYSE shares, but are rewarded by selling coins into the Trust.

Increasing buying options while rewarding those offering the coins both seem net positive.

If I got anything wrong, please correct - the formal language is tricky (for me) to parse accurately.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/grayscale-investments-llc-ceases-private-140000550.html

I'm unclear on the meaning of this.
Are they suggesting that GBTC will use a different mechanism for purchasing shares going forward, or that they will no longer be maintaining the 10:1 ratio and instead letting the investment center around the number of coins currently held by the trust?

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/grayscale-investments-llc-ceases-private-140000550.html

I'm not sure I'm clear on the meaning of this.
Are they suggesting that GBTC will use a different mechanism for purchasing shares going forward, or that they will no longer be maintaining the 10:1 ratio and instead letting the investment center around the number of coins currently held by the trust?

Possibly a well-timed, internal move to pay down debt with profits.

Perfect timing for a much-needed correction! I expect this range to hold on the downside until breakout.  I'm unsure what kind of ratio of time-in-handle exists, relative to time-in-cup. 

I just realized there's a new, interesting dynamic in play.

With China losing their leverage, Bitfinex has regained a large attractor.

All other things being equal, I take their chances of reclaiming the role of price leader as net positive.  I wonder how the competing interests of reduced-faith in Bitfinex from the recent hack will fare against the increased greed/strength of leverage.  (Incidentally, I think it'd be a really smart move for them to publicly pay down some of their remaining debt.)

Smarter traders than me keep track of things like available money for loans, short vs long interest, borrowing rates.  Whatever those (leading?) indicators mean, I'd bet they become increasingly valuable.

Keep in mind that this pattern will hold so long as our bottom rests anywhere between $789.78 (Finex) and the previous bottom, at $504, changing only the slope.  The cup-and-handle scenario does not violate this scenario, and is extremely bullish.

I'd still love to see fear trigger a bit more of an overreaction to the downside. Rather than cause technical damage, I see short-term down as the fastest path to rally resumption.  

A Chinese New Year's formal announcement by the PBOC, assuaging go-forward fears...that's my dream scenario. I figure if we get some sort of sudden, positive external event like that, we are more likely to resume the rally in the short term. Conversely, if we simply exhaust, the (stronger) consolidative base would rise more slowly over the coming months.

Having broken on low volume, with no real follow through, this is looking increasingly likely. The case would strengthen greatly if we get a rally which stops on the yet-to-be-defined, resistance line parallel to support.  This is one of those rare scenarios where my short term expected position is bearish, but for exactly those reasons the medium term outlook is bullish.