The 2013 Cryptocurrency Bubble

[Pruden]

Let me say I have confidence in the future of cryptocurrencies.

But what we are seeing these days is mania in its purest form. I consider myself just as dumb as ony other person, and I have engaged in textbook speculative behaviour. With a good chunk of bitcoins, I started to take notice of that other currency, the Litecoin. After several days of reading some judgemental posts on these boards, I decided to "diversify" my bitcoins and bought Litecoins at 0.88LTC/USD. After all, ultimate value is 1/4 that of BTC, right? Ok, let's say 1/40 BTC, that's still a lot more that 1/100. It turned out well, they are now over 5$ three days later. With these awesome results, I noticed that my new exchanges of choice had many other cryptocurrencies on offer for Bitcoins. I bought a bit of almost all of them, this is why or why not:

• NVC: Nope. I heard it's a scam, altough it seems to be favoured by Russians.
• NMC: I heard it actually offers something different with a niche market.
• TRC: It means Terracoin
• PPC: I don't even know how to read it. In my mind, it's poopcoin.

Three days later, they have made me a hefty sum. I don't know if you have read Groucho Marx' account of the 1920's stock market. I have, and if I change in my text "cryptocurrencies" for "stocks" it bears an eerie resemblance.

[VforVictory]

You know it's a bubble when the price of every altcoin goes up 2-5x. X_x

[tiptopgemdotcom]

At a glance I thought this topic was "2013 Cryptocurrency Bible" and my response was "I need a copy of this now!!!"

[Scullyking]

That's the issue with cryptocurrencies, you can have as many has you want, for free, and they all impact each other in a big cluster-fuck of chaos.

[HISTR]

Clearly the run up has been much more on a percentage basis, but I feel that if either of the two "bubbles" is going to pop, it will be Litecoin, and it will happen soon. Of course, we are all in uncharted territory here, so .......

[Cryptoc]

This made me wish i bought a lot of alt coins for all of my savings before the "bubble".
We will have an interesting week ahead of us, gentlemen!

[leverage010]

true, but have you ever been as far as decided to go want to go look more like?

on a more serious note, i think this can take over the world, so im hopping on the bandwagon hoping to get something out of it.

[silzero]

Everywhere I see people saying Bitcoin will keep 'raising and raising'. Those two words applied to housing prices got the U.S. into just a little mess starting in 2007-2008.
Pure hysterical raise is actually bad for Bitcoin in the long run. If does indeed turn out to be a crash, the bar, in terms of public image and value, will be much higher to be accepted as a real alternative to traditional currencies. Not that Bitcoin or the users are worried about public image. You may be looking at another 5-6 years before Bitcoin sees another uptick.

As much as I want to Bitcoin to raise, can anyone offer some insightful notes on why Bitcoin's price is going up?

Thanks,
SZ

[chowdan]

It will be curious to see what happens in the near future.

The valuation of a BTC to USD is currently $141 per BTC. Just two days ago, this valuation was at $92 per BTC. If this bubble bursts, I will be quite interested to see how far it falls.

I'd suspect to see a valuation of drop close to $20-$40 per BTC at the high end of things.

[BlackBison]

As much as I want to Bitcoin to raise, can anyone offer some insightful notes on why Bitcoin's price is going up?

Thanks,
SZ

I've spent 5+ hours per day researching this for two years and I eat, breathe and sleep crypto-currencies. Do your own homework or expect poor results like all lazy investors.

EDIT: read through my last 50 posts would be a good start 

[jrlichtman]

There's three separate things going on.

1) The "natural" built-in deflationary economics of BTC (and possibly some of the other related virtual currencies) will tend - all things being equal - to drive its value up over time. The economics of such isn't really proven in practice, despite anything people will tell you.

2) BTC as fear index. Gold isn't "working" right now in terms of its value going up. There's a lot of fear in Europe (and possibly in developing markets, although I don't really know) of the traditional banking system, in light of recent happenings in Cyprus. In theory (again, we don't really know in practice) it is hard for governments to control / tax virtual currencies.

3) Greed. This is where the bubble stuff comes in. It is interesting to watch the open trades list on exchanges to see where the support levels are. BTC has a lot lower volume than, say, a big futures market, so there's inefficiencies built in, but you can still see where people are reluctant to pay more, or sell for less.

[Pruden]

As much as I want to Bitcoin to raise, can anyone offer some insightful notes on why Bitcoin's price is going up?

Thanks,
SZ

It's obvious: Lots of people have no place to put their money into that is both safe and yields more interest than the rate of inflation (which is 50% higher than the official one, at least in Spain).

In practical terms: Banks in Spain are crashing (I'm Spanish), "one of a kind" Cyprus retains (and probably steals) most of people's money...

About its use as a currency: My friend has just started an online retail business. No sooner had he done that than he started hating PayPal.

Of all the reasons, the last one is the one that gives me more confidence on cryptocoins. The others are just speculative (trust in future value, not in future use).

[thepiratetrader]

Everywhere I see people saying Bitcoin will keep 'raising and raising'. Those two words applied to housing prices got the U.S. into just a little mess starting in 2007-2008.
Pure hysterical raise is actually bad for Bitcoin in the long run. If does indeed turn out to be a crash, the bar, in terms of public image and value, will be much higher to be accepted as a real alternative to traditional currencies. Not that Bitcoin or the users are worried about public image. You may be looking at another 5-6 years before Bitcoin sees another uptick.

As much as I want to Bitcoin to raise, can anyone offer some insightful notes on why Bitcoin's price is going up?

Thanks,
SZ

This is my worry as well... The prices seem extremely unstable. I have read about guys who are "hoarding" 10,000s of bitcoins and don't plan to sell until the price reaches $1,000 or $10,000. They claim they don't want to cash out because they want to show that they truly believe in Bitcoins. But I call bullshit. If they truly believed in Bitcoin, they wouldn't care whether they cashed out at $10, $100, or $1,000. This insane rise in the price has every sign of a bubble. Yes, including people calling it a bubble. Just because people can identify it as a bubble doesn't mean it's not a bubble. It also doesn't mean that they will profit from shorting the market either. When the bubble pops is anyone's guess. It could go to $300, or yes even to $1,000, or $10,000. The quicker we go there though, the harder the crash will be. And at this point, Bitcoin can't sustain another crash. People will lose faith in it and the general populace will not adopt it ever if we see another crash like we did in 06.2011. Those who have tons of coins, if they truly believed in the future of a free market, would not attempt to be the bankers of the futures with 10,000 of thousands of bitcoins worth $10,000 each. That's not vision, that's greed. They should seek to keep a stable market. They should spend their bitcoins for goods and services to spread them out. If someone has tens of thousands of coins, they should try to be a market maker and bring stability to the market, not just see how high the price can rise.

[thepiratetrader]

It will be curious to see what happens in the near future.

The valuation of a BTC to USD is currently $141 per BTC. Just two days ago, this valuation was at $92 per BTC. If this bubble bursts, I will be quite interested to see how far it falls.

I'd suspect to see a valuation of drop close to $20-$40 per BTC at the high end of things.

If the "bubble" bursts, it won't have a valuation of $20-$40. It will be worth $0. It will scare the general public away from crypto currencies, and we would have lost. Those merchants who are getting involved now will decide never to try bitcoins again after sustaining potentially irreversible losses. The more volatile the price action, not only does it appear to be more bubbly, but it makes it increasingly difficult for merchants to use it and it becomes more tied to the USD.

What Bitcoins need if we are going to succeed in being the currency of the future is not greedy hoarders--who claim they want what's best for bitcoin but really just want to profit when it gets to $10,00/BTC--we need stability. And if that means that you don't get to hold 10,000 coins into the future of bitcoin, it's for the good of the coin. Bitcoin will never see $10,000/BTC if it is just hoarded and not used.

[whiskers75]

Put it in https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=166056.0

[RodeoX]

I'm skeptical of the rush to alt coins. I think if people really understood the differences they would understand why bitcoin is stronger than most/all the alt coins. It is like people buying silver now that gold is high. They are going to get burned because gold is more scarce than silver. Much more silver is waiting to be mined and when it is, the price is going down fast. Some of the alt coins are like this.

[silzero]

Very sensible input! Thank you.

I think agree that brick and mortar businesses have a good incentive to accept Bitcoin so they don't get spanked around by MasterCard/Visa/Paypal. I might be missing something here: However for online transactions,  without a trusted entity, Bitcoins are always suspect and always buyer beware.

Is it the objective of Bitcoin to be a force in online commerce? If so, it needs to reach a level where "one click" buy is common - i.e. the consumer does not think twice about if the seller is going to run with the money without recourse. In face to face transactions, is where the infrastructure is already there for Bitcoin. You takes the goods in one hand and say bye to your coins from the other.

In my humble opinion, the future of Bitcoin lies in more use of Bitcoin as a currency preferably without tie into USD/EUR. What I mean is, each time you buy something in Bitcoins, you do not convert it to USD to get a sense of value for the item. This probably is not going to happen anytime soon, if ever.

One other thing I'm still wondering about from recent Medium article: What do people consider Bitcoin as: Is it a commodity or a currency or both? Currently, it looks like Bitcoin is treated like a commodity due to hoarding and such.

[SusiBiker]

I'm not really fussed what the price of Bitcoins is. Yes, it might be a good idea to trade them now, or not, but after all the rises and falls in values I still have my coins - unless the collapse altogether.
Cryptocurrency is reasonably new and the values have yet to stabilise one way or another. Trying to predict the market would only cause me much anxiety, especially if I was to mess up the sale.
How many bitcoins do I have?
Er, less than ten    

[oser41eric]

This is not bubble. Bitcoin is highly undervalued now. After 10% of mankind will be using Bitcoin and the price stabilizes for 1year+ we will know the true value of Bitcoin and the Bitcoin commerce will flourish.

I expect stable price around 500 000 USD / Bitcoin in about 5-10 years.

[svenp]

It certainly looks like a bubble and one that has very very little time left to go, it may have just popped. 

I've seen this kind of parabolic rise before many times, BTC in Jun '11, silver Apr '11, are some examples.  BTC is INCREASING in value as it increases in usage.  Demand to use it determines its value.  And that is unarguably increasing.  So, the bubble pops, price settles down at a plateau greater than the previous plateau.  Rinse, repeat. 

It's not going to the moon and it's not going to be the end of the world.