Hindsight is 20/20. If only I had bought that purple beanie baby bear in the 90s at $300 and sold at $1200.   If only I had bought more tech stocks with huge P/E ratios and sold before the dot com bust.  If only credit default swaps made sense to me and I realized the scam and cashed in.  If only Enron made sense and I bought and sold before the crash.  The problem is just being able to predict the end is near.  I usually never buy in because I can't understand what the hell is going on and smell the rat.  I have to understand where my money is going and can't just get caught up in the race.


Well as for me I saw the tech companies and people who couldn't afford $500k homes from California moving to Austin, TX in 2002.  I bought real estate and as long as I sell I will be doing really good.  I just hope some rich bankers, wall street gangsters, or the fed. reserve (raising rates) doesn't screw me before I profit.    I'll probably miss out on 100's of thousands of dollars by not sticking around 5 more years but, I plan to sell off next year and move on down the road.  Better safe than sorry works for me.  Greed gets you in a lot of hurt.  The S&P looks like a growing bubble and rising interest rates are my biggest concern at the moment.  The USD are being printed like mad but, they are currently the standard and not my fear.

Well this graph will help illustrate what I mean.  Note how much smaller volume movements drove huge price movement before Apr 12th.  Then after Apr 12th volume is much higher yet the price seems far more stable.

This could be explained by a huge number of speculators in competition however, I think they arrived in early March.  I'm not sure there was a huge surge of new investors mid April.  This is what leads me to believe trading bots are doing a better job at stabilizing the price.

I'm actually quite intrigued at the lack of a panic sell this go around and fast price recovery.  This does not seem like the typical behavior of the herd seen before in these situations.  I'm thinking there are a large number of trading bots being ran to help stabilize the pricing.  Anyone else agree on this?  If so this could seriously help Bitcoin from bubbling or sinking out of control on speculative news.

The above comments about quick trades added and removed at 4k or 1.5k etc. got me to thinking this.  Analyzing the charts it certainly looks more code driven than emotion to me.

There are always x number of buy and x number of sell orders.  If I instantly dump 15k coins they will continue to sell down at whatever the next 15k coins are set to sell off for provided my sell price is low enough to hit 15k buy orders.  It is fairly instant minus a few seconds of lag.

"Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!"

Yep very true.  Tomorrow I shall eat lots of cheese and speculate some massive dumps.

On a serious note he deleted the post before I could reply.  He probably realized the huge sell off was Silk Road coming online and he was about to be witch hunted as the DDOS'er.

All I can read is Redditor takes a dump and videos it. 

Be warned all these buyers propping the price had in buy orders long ago and aren't gobbling up cheap coins.  They were thinking it wouldn't go this low.  I have no idea what will happen in 7-8 hours when the east coast wakes up and sees the price drop.  However, a panic sell is not out of the question.  If you think $130 is a great deal get some coins but, don't be upset if tomorrow people freak out and we see another $55-$70 dip.  I'd spread those buy orders down and not buy all in right this second.  Just my own thought, I could be wrong, don't follow my advice and get mad at me. 

The huge sell volume happened instantly as Silk Road came online.  I have been watching charts and Silk Road minute by minute.  It has nothing to do with that fake Reddit crap.

Fincen is anti-money laundrying and can't make Bitcoins illegal.  Down vote and report that FUD.  It is not true.  Only the Federal Reserve, US Mint or POTUS/Congress could do such a thing.

It was down for several days and a lot of drug dealers have massive amounts of coins.  The fear of not being able to access those coins in their accounts probably has them cashing out.

We aren't talking about 1 guy, we are talking about 1000+ drug dealers all selling at once and drug buyers as well.

Silk Road just came on line and I'm sure it is just some scared folks cashing out fast.  My gut says a lot of Silk road users have faith in the site and this might not be too bad.  I wouldn't be surprised though to see sub 100 tomorrow but with all the exuberant speculators it will probably bounce back.  Even though I don't see fundamentals and believe it is still speculation I'll probably buy more below 100.  I don't see this being the cause of a massive crash below $50.

The facts and figures don't exists for me to analyse serious fundamentals but my gut says there are far more believers than we are about to see panic selling.  When dealing with speculation bubbles you just have to watch daily and try to go with your logic and not get emotional with the herd.

I'm not sure Silk Road fixed anything since DPR didn't mention it.  Perhaps this Silk Road DDOS was just a big push for a panic sell for more buy in.  At least we can hope.

The site is back up now, no telling how long.  I think over 50% have faith in DPR and will not try to mass sell.  At least I hope for the sake of bitcoin.  No telling how long this uptime will last once the jackasses return.  Let's hope they did some good engineering and things will remain up a while.

But it did for several years whether or not it makes sense.  The exponential growth I contend is based on the possibility of ATMs being installed without issues of currency exchange and regulation.  The big start of the growth was widely reported people in Cyprus, Spain, Greece, Italy, and Argentina looking for a place to put money.  I'm sure the gold burst pushed more in.  All this equals a speculation bubble or in the words of Alan Greenspan irrational exhuberance.  The point isn't that we will continue to see linear growth forever.  The point is there has yet to be tangible evidence to me to see a value over $30 so far.  If people move money elsewhere or panic sell I fail to see why $30 would be unreasonable.  Although with the new speculators my value still remains at $30-$50 until I see something real happen.  If someone has something tangible, I'm always here reading and absorbing it all in.

I'm not a bear saying it is going down soon to $30.  Hell gold at $1800 I predicted would get to $1200.  Look at how long that has taken.  I'm thinking long term and realistically.  Not trying to be some bearish Fud spreader here.

Before anyone screams at me I'm just making a point (I am not making a prediction).  I don't believe these graphs have much to do with the irrational exuberance behind the price.  This is simply to make a point about linear growth versus exponential.  Let's say that Bitcoin adoption continues at a linear pace as it has done for several years and the exponential is speculation.  Now here is a 6 month linear graph.  6 months, I didn't have to go back 3 years.  

This Steve Miller song popped in my head on reading the title. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFGZufk4HFs

What you are missing is that the mirrors are what we call the front ends.  That allow the interface to do transactions on the database or backend.  If the front ends are being DDOS'd this causes latency to the backend database (think of two people purchasing the same product 5 minutes apart on two different front ends) and the transactions get all out of whack.  It makes semi-real time trading almost impossible.  The only solution I could see would be to make all trading heavily delayed to mitigate the latency.

I don't architect trading sites based on BTC so I'm not sure if delayed trading could work.

Ashley, don't be silly, I've been telling you forever the price is solely based on speculation and not usage or adoption.  Right now my best guess is it is being used as a temporary cash store in hopes of good news later on.  There is nothing surprising here at all.

Also Silk Road has had on and off issues for a long while so it will take more than 3 days to lose confidence.  If MtFUX didn't bring BTC down to double digits that shows the irrational exuberance is still at an all time high.  I've predicted a slowly downward trend for a long time although a panic sell based on possible news scenarios wouldn't shock me.  Once Silk Road comes back who knows another irrational bubble as I first was thinking.  I figured it would be up by today though.

EDIT - Also those with BTC in silk road can't panic sell currently their Bitcoins are gone unless the site comes back.

I don't want to spread FUD (just trying to use logic) but the longer Silk Road is down the more I worry a big cash out when funds do become available.

Irrational exuberance!!!


I haven't really been bearish or bullish mostly on BTC except during certain prices. At $8 I was a super bull and buying it up and over $200 I was bearish and sold.  Thus I haven't had any hate thrown at me.  I try to keep my posts rational and ask serious questions adding all information to my personal valuation.

Anyway when the price is going up I tend to lurk because anything that can be slightly taken as negative will be assaulted with name calling like idiot, moron, retard.  This is what people do when they don't have logical valid arguments to justify their position.  I'm not sure exactly what BTC is worth right now because it is pure speculation and greed.  There are many great things that could bring this speculation to real value and push it to $1000.  We will see.

Anyway irrational exuberance is why most of those with critical thinking skills and legitimate concerns tend to shut up around here.  No one wants to be holding the red cape when the bulls come attacking!  Many people here are just not very civil in their debate.

For a good laugh - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrational_exuberance
Better info - http://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/irrationalexuberance.asp

It isn't "launching on the 2nd".  There will be a demo (for a select group of people) of a machine you put bills in and it transfers them to a bitcoin account.  There is still no word on how they will deal with government regulation or when there will be one available to the public.

EDIT - Acutally someone else already presented a working machine in February anyway - http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57570925-38/need-bitcoins-this-atm-takes-dollars-and-funds-your-account/