Interesting observation, MAbtc. Thanks.

To answer an earlier question: myself, I'm on vacation currently, and, yes, I personally do notice a bit of "analysis fatigue".

That said, I am watching, peripherally, if selling pressure is substantially increasing to the point where the current price level 500s to 600s breaks down , but I don't see that happening so far. In absence of that, I am watching the development through the fibonnacci lense I posted about a few pages ago. From that perspective, we're still on course for leaving the 2013/14 bear market behind.

Really not such a great idea of mmitech to sell his account to a spammer slash imbecile :/

Way to butcher my argument...

Carry on without me then.

I agree with the analysis, r0ach. Mostly. changed my mind. OP has a valid point, wrapped up in a hysterical and sensationalist presentation.

De-decentralization is, in my view, the biggest (technical) challenge BTC faces at its current stage. Needless to say, just ignore the peanut gallery calling you a troll - shooting the messenger is always easier than accepting an unpleasant message.

That said, you seem to see the situation rather binary: either the network is decentralized, or it is not. I believe however that, taking into account human elements, i.e. not just looking at centralization/decentralization as a technical property of the network, we're very far from BTC being completely "centralized".

For one, the largest pools that could in principle collude in an attack have shown absolutely no sign of interest in doing so. In fact, them doing so would almost certainly be economically damaging to them. And other than a hypothetical attack, they don't hold special "voting powers" that grant them a disproportionate influence on decisions.

Second, the large pools are comprised to a large degree of individual miners, so the situation is different from, say, 2 or 3 large individual operators holding the same computing power as the currently largest pools.

Third, you mentioned it yourself, technical solutions (or proposals) exist, p2pool one of them. Right now, the incentive isn't there yet to fully switch to an alternative mining model, but I just don't see it as an urgent failure case either: if any form of abuse of a majority of computing power becomes known, the network's value will be damaged, I'm sure, but at the same time, the incentive to enforce decentralized mining will also be there finally. In the absence of such abuse, there is no urgent reason to switch (which is probably why we're not doing it). I'd prefer miners (and users, and investors) would think a bit more long term and provide more incentives to make the transition to a decentralized mining model (brought that up in a thread of my own), but until we're actually getting there, I fail to see how the current state is so bad that it prevents actual usage of the network for a pretty big portion of, say, online payment processing. It's not as if the alternatives are more secure, or less centralized. In fact, they're substantially worse on both counts - even if BTC security and centralization is not at its optimum.

Hehe, I'm on vacation currently. Just b(e)arely checking in to get a view of the price

I am a hero now. Bow before me, lesser mortals!



*cough* Sorry for that.

As you were...

Complete agreement, on each of your points - long term: huge potential, short term: selling pressure outweighs buying pressure, mid term: not 100% certain what the next reliable "new fiat event" will be.

Or it'll do with a pretty high likelihood what it usually does once volatility goes down as much as it did now, and things get interesting again in a few days, maybe a week.

Oooh, good newbie post. Followed

I didn't say it's a long term stable state, did I? But for now, it seems to be the "small profit takers" that run the show. Until, indeed, the switch is flipped again and we see another "resistant" run-up. Which might take a while.

Before that, I expect a small scale version of the same dynamic, but one that is still sensitive enough to the profit takers' actions. Say, another week or more of the current sideways, maybe even a re-test of lower levels, and then another leg up to 800, 900.

Agreed. I'd call that the "internal" view, and I actually can respect it. To some degree, social movements, successful social movements probably have to selectively ignore reality to a degree in order to gain traction.

But when I want to make an informed trading decision, I need to take an "external" view, one that doesn't take into account the higher goals of the Bitcoin movement, but only considers the objective reality of the market situation (as in: the likelihoods of certain outcomes). This being the speculation subforum, I sometimes would hope for a bit more tolerance of this type of analysis.

Which is where we differ in opinion then.

A "market" is, by most interpretations I'm aware of, based on the premise that (aggregated) individual rationality is the best way to appraise/value stuff. So if the "daytradurz" decide that, right now, it is the time to take small profits, who am I to scold them for it?

I feel there's a certain level of cognitive dissonance rampant on this forum: everyone welcomes the "free market" and "doing exactly what you think is right", but when it applies to BTC price, those who sell early rather than wait for a much higher price level are considered as acting almost anti-social.

Wishful thinking. If anything, I believe part of the reason why the current uptrend drags out like it does is because the market is increasingly professionalized: in the absence of a strong "irrational" trend towards a new ATH (i.e. a new fiat floodgate opening and thousand of new investors/speculators/users entering the market), the rational thing to do is take small profits early rather than hope for larger profits later. Why? Because the same incentive exists for the other market participants, so if you're waiting too long for your profit of n%, I'm going to jump in and take a profit of n-1% and will be happy (and you won't make a profit any more at all).

tl;dr tragedy of the commons effect - right now, the individually rational thing to do is take small-ish profits rather than hope for the "big one".

The screen cap is from the day I posted it, should have mentioned that.

Conclusions: it seems for some user, the bank is still Unicredit, and for some, it is now Raiffeisen.



@hazek

Could you please clarify if you are changing banks (for everyone? for some users?). Changing the banking details (if only for a subset of users) is a big enough deal to announce it, I believe.

Median (and averages in general) are used in TA, but you are right, a lot of trendlines are largely based on extrema. I disagree however with your claim that the latter are too noisy to be useful: you seem to apply the insight from other fields were a noisy, sparsely populated parameter is best avoided. Two arguments why this insight can't just be applied 1:1 to trading: a) price extrema are the result of trades "eating" through the order book first, i.e. they are the conclusion of a longer, motivated process, not a randomly generated "blip", b) the knowledge what the exact maximum/minimum price some human (or his algo) was willing to trade for is not irrelevant or meaningless at all. I understand that from a purely statistical point of view, your argument makes sense, but taking into account that we are trying to model human behavior, not, say, bacterial growth, not everything can be carried over as straightforward, I believe.

re: SAR

I tried using the SAR myself, but find it alternatively too lagging and too "trigger happy" i.e. yielding too many, often unprofitable, signals. There's one positive observation I made however: since it is a momentum indicator with a "built in" price target, it can be useful for exiting a trade on a rebound, i.e. say I sell based on some indicator combination, buy back short term because I determine the "bottom is in", and then exit the trade = sell when price hits the SAR target. Usually relatively low time resolution, between 1h and 12h.



I thought the same at first, but then I came to the conclusion (please correct me if I'm wrong): a USD maximized holding and a BTC maximized holding are equivalent, as long as you just tack on one final 'buy' order to the end (i.e. calculate how many coins the final USD value buys you). Correct?

To see why: imagine you don't take a trade that is suggested by the tested system, and that turns out profitable. Your BTC value will be equal, but your USD to buy coins is higher at the next signal, so being USD optimal is equivalent to being BTC optimal. The only difference is that the final value of the holding is given in USD, so convert it to BTC according to current price.

@l_m_b_t Not entirely sure I understand your point about needing to include position sizing and curve fitting because of calculating BTC holdings. Then again, maybe I misunderstood wary's question.

Didn't even know btcwisdom shows bbw. Or you're simply doing [upper bb] - [lower bb]? If so, I suggest to use tradingview, which (to my knowledge) normalizes width to current price, making it comparable across price levels. Otherwise the statement "the lowest in year" would be even more impressive, but also kind of meaningless since with price increase absolute width also increases.

Same bank as always for me:

Agreed. Lowest daily BBW since ages - below 0.06, last time that happened was September 2013 iirc. It'll resolve soon, I'm sure. Not equally sure though in which direction. :/

*sniff*

Thank you, kind stranger.