I'm still waiting to hear back from BkkCoins on my refund. I could really use the cash, just had to pay a rather large vet bill (just to learn we couldn't do anything to save him ).

Glad to see the ButtHead, I mean, CoinBull followed through on his bet.

Not. Shocking.

LOL There it is! Yeah I was just doing similar calculations. This has revealed their 'price pusher' bot to the world, hahah. That thing has been around for a least a couple weeks now. My theory is more that they hit the panic button when the market went in a direction they and their bot didn't want.

i hear you, this whole thing does indeed reek of he-who-shall-not-be... er.. Matthew.

but, not being involved, im prepared for a good show either way

They might have been mine.

I impulse panic sold at $880! Funniest of all is that I had just 60 minutes earlier paid $931 for for 5 of them, the remaining 17 I paid £835 for.......

.......this is the second time I have cost myself dearly due to babysitting/checking charts at inopportune moments. In my defense, Bitcoin moves far too rapidly and schizophrenically.

A similar profit-making event was buying common domain names in the late 1980s, early 1990s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_oldest_currently_registered_Internet_domain_names

Few people thought of it then.

Fortress is first. And so it begins.

I couldn't be further from the truth about what?

Please enlighten me about what kind of gambling addiction?
 

Great post jballs, but I fear it will fall mostly on deaf ears.  You see most of the bitcoin true believers are 20 somethings who have never traded professionally or for an extended period of time for that matter.  They have never traded during a speculative bubble like the late 90's tech bubble or the 2008 oil bubble.  They think they have everything figured out and that older people have no idea what they are talking and nothing to add to the conversation.

They think bitcoin will take over the world in short order and render the dollar, euro, yen, gold, Fed, ECB, BOJ, investment banks, hedge funds, stock and bond markets completely obsolete and useless.  According to them bitcoin does not follow any of the old rules of trading.  Charts, technical analysis, risk management, profit taking, trading experience are completely worthless.  Bitcoin is a completely new animal.  In short, "this time its different."

Jesse Livermore, one of the greatest speculators of all time, once said, "There is nothing new in speculating.  There can't be because speculation is as old as the hills.  Whatever happens in financial markets today has happened before and will happen again."

For the newbies, a point of clarification.

The architecture of bitcoin is a radical departure from most of the financial world, but not all of it. In absolute terminology, they are a structured derivative. Most likely if they survive (I am betting they will), they will ultimately be absorbed into the financial industry as that product type.

While "swapping paper back and forth" is a useful metaphor, the fact is virtually all derivatives and currencies are already digital. I have not ever in my two decades actively trading transacted any paper for any other paper, aside from a brief foray into the trading floor where there were actually paper tickets, but even those represented something else, not the paper.

In the last year I have bought and sold soybeans, wheat, corn, natural gas, gold, platinum, palladium, crude oil, euros, yen, SA Rand, and option on several of those as well.

I have only been to a soybean field once ever. Didn't like it. Have enjoyed the occasional edamame with my sushi. I couldn't pick out a spring wheat from a winter wheat from a tumbleweed in a line-up, but I am a professional consultant advising wheat farmers and end users for risk management and price protection. I have no natural gas pipeline or storage facility, I have no idea where my gas goes when I sell it or where it was when I bought it. I have never held a yen in my hand, have had a few euros on occasion for spending. It is all digital.

The difference between trading natural gas or soybeans or yen is a matter of making a secure digital transaction over an exchange. Having knowledge of the markets (and yes, if you are a GOOD technical analyst it is immensely helpful, however if you are a bad technician god help you) is important. Having a deep understanding of risk management and refined trading skills is vastly more important.

You are all speculating on bitcoin. I don't care what your premise is, the cardinal rule of trading is the future is unpredictable. Thus you must understand the mental environment of a successful speculator to trade bitcoin, or anything else. Anything that fluctuates in value and has an available counterparty is a vehicle for speculation. In this way bitcoin is no different than any other commodity we trade, save for the much higher potential of high sigma price fluctuation. Which is a good thing. If you're a speculator.

Make no mistake, those of you who believe you have reinvented the wheel and are knocking the old hands in this game, we will watch you ride your emotional rollercoaster, and in the end we will quietly, cautiously, mop up the floor with what is left of you. Trade humble, or go broke. It is a law. Write it down.

later...

 [edit- Thanks all for the props above, always appreciated...)

RP what I don't get is if you truly truly believe your log charts of 12x growth every year then why even trade? You are risking tens of millions of dollars in order to make a few more tens of millions. Isn't there something more worthwhile of your time. Like maybe starting a foundation or something?

this is a little off-topic, but physics is my thing, and i'd love to try to give a layman's interpretation of such a technical thought experiment

the idea is that the classic notion of determinism, that one can use trajectory and velocity and momentum to determine the future state of a given system (similarly to how one judges and executes shots on a pool table), breaks down completely on small enough scales.

in pool each of the balls has a definite location. you can strike one, giving it a definite velocity in a definite direction and with practice pretty handily work backwards through the physics that governs the behavior of the balls and, remarkably consistently, make difficult shots.

if the pool table were the size of an atom, however, and the balls were subatomic particles, the game would be significantly harder. the early pioneers of quantum mechanics (quantum meaning "unit", like the indivisible subatomic particles) realized quickly that the smaller something is, the more strangely it behaved when they tried to "find" it -- that is, determine its location.

it turns out that nothing has a definite location, which is hard to wrap one's head around, but for small things at small scales it's very obvious and a whole new physics needed to be developed. when measuring an electron, for instance, its location seemed to correspond with the amplitude of a wave, with different probabilities of finding the particle in a certain location corresponding to the amplitude of the wave at different points. this, incidentally, is the basis of Schrodinger's Equation, which formalized de Broglie's work.

in the image i linked, the sharp and pointy distribution corresponds to a very massive thing, like a billiard-ball, whose location is much more definite than a very light thing, like an electron (lighter by about 30 orders of magnitude!), about which it isn't an exaggeration to say that it could be anywhere in the universe.

this brings us to the star of Schrodinger's thought experiment, a heavy atom undergoing radioactive decay. one of the insights that quantum mechanics gave us is an explanation of this strange phenomenon. some atoms, for reasons previously unknown, randomly and violently ejected bits of the nucleus from time to time. the strangest thing about this is that is is impossible to know exactly when this event would occur for a single atom, but groups of the same isotope always obey a half-life rule, such that after one half-life (a constant) for a given isotope has passed, exactly half of a given sample of isotope will have decayed.

sounds like quantum weirdness, doesn't it? that's because it is!

what's actually happening is that the particles in the nucleus suddenly find themselves outside of it and are ejected away by the electrostatic force that causes protons to repel each other. weird.

but this leaves us in a quagmire of conceptualization. is it really true that the deterministic world we perceive is really made up of unfathomable masses of fuzzy, random, indistinct processes?

Schrodinger tried to bridge the gap to demonstrate just how weird the implications of this are. if we arrange things so that the radioactive decay of an atom, for which it is literally impossible to know whether or not it has decayed after a certain time t, is tied to a mechanism that will kill a cat (why a cat? ask Schrodinger), then we end up in a situation in which the entire state of the box becomes quantumly uncertain. generally, we model this uncertainty on the subatomic scale as a superposition of every possibility, i.e. a probability curve, but it seems extremely counterintuitive to try to conceptualize the contents of the box as a superposition of live cat and dead cat (and if time t is the isotope's half-life, the chances are exactly 50-50!).

anyway, i hope you appreciated the explanation i tried to give a complete picture of the conceptual underpinnings without going into too much detail. lots of good vocabulary to wiki for future inquiries, too!

--arepo

he seems to be the kim kardashian of economists. he is a provocateur who says things just to get people riled up.