[poll] Estimate how many took noticeable losses

[chriswen]

I bought coins at 76 (awhile back) and If I sold my litecoins before it crashed i would have been a lot wealthier in cryptocurrency.

[Wuji]

As PT Barnum said there is a sucker born every minute.  I'm sure there are plenty of "idiots" out there to help fund our retirements.  Also a lot of smugness today from those who thought we would never go under $200 and were headed straight to $1000 (short term memory much?).  The market has calmed down today (and is higher than I expected) but, that doesn't have anything to do with what happens next week.  Just like with speculation on stocks you always see speculators running them up and down until they finally get bored and find another thing to go broke on.  I believe there will be many more ups and downs and I may just start looking more at option on Bitfinex than buying coins for anything other than using them.  Right now it seems a lot easier to predict when it is insanely valued based on very short term gains and volatility than to predict a bottom.

I might just give LTC a try after a week or so if the price stays stable on BTC.  With all the new speculators interested another run up and bubble burst is feeling more likely all the time.

[Photonfrog]

I see a rather surprizing number of votes for the 100k - 0.5M range.

What kind of a calculation would reasonably lead to this huge number?

[Photonfrog]

With over 60 votes we got some numbers to plug in.

The poll seems to guesstimate that we have about 20k people who would consider themselves damaged from the bubble bursting. This is a higly unreliable number but its safe to say its likely correct within an order of magnitude. The truth lies between 2000 and 200000. We should probably nudge it up to 50k for good measure.

We can figure out the total volume of trade by integrating the volume bars for the last 4 days. Counting only mtgox and usd we get about $200M in volume. The total volume is probably about twice that.

It's unlikely that all of this volume would be considered losses either, we can estimate half to be.

This has us with about 50k people sharing the cost which in total appears to be about $100M. Then there is some sort of standard distribution across these 50k people which should leave the majority of them taking insignificant losses and a few carrying the weight.

All in all, this is TINY gimpass bubble compared to anything previously called a bubble. Its more akin to a poorly managed construction project.

[hgmichna]

If this poll manages to aggregate a decent guesstimate for the number of hurt individuals we might get an idea about how long it will take to replace all of them with new people.

Your question is aiming at an irrelevancy.

Is it really irrelevant?

I'll have to defend its relevancy somehow as we are currently looking at speculating about the consequences of a burst bubble.

Consider the case that there was only one single individual who bought all of the "profitless" bitcoins and then this person failed to sell any of them at a profit. This hypothesis has a single loser and everyone else is a "winner". If this hypothesis was to be true (in our fantasy world) then the emotional consequences of a burst bubble should be close enough to zero to matter at all. In this case the system has in practice been sponsored towards greater success in the future.

In the opposit case we have a quite more significant emotional impact. Imagine the case that only one rich person had possession of all bitcoins except for those that were bought at more than 70 usd. Then this rich person is the only individual who manages to sell any coin at a profit during the bubble burst. In this case we have quite a significant emotional impact from the bubble and it will be quite a challenge to recover some semblance of faith in the bitcoin system as a whole. It would be really hard to consider bitcoin a viable technological innovation in the future.

Reality will be found somewhere between these extremes. It should however be leaning towards one or the other extremes and the impact should adjust with the position along this imaginary axis.

Let me put it this way: I want the negative emotional impact maximized, because I want the idiots who destabilize and damage the bitcoin market to disappear.

The destabilizers are those who buy high and sell low, i.e. exactly those who lose their money.

[Comodore]

It is over 9000!!!!!

[Akka]

There are only 12(?) Million Coins in existence most of them are not even available on the exchanges.

If you now only count serious investors (bought at least 1000$ worth of coins) it can't be very many.

[hgmichna]

[…] If you now only count serious investors (bought at least 1000$ worth of coins) it can't be very many.

Serious investors only rarely lose much of their money. They are experienced, conversant with typical market movements like speculative price bubbles, they have a good idea how much a bitcoin should be worth, they know the Kelly Criterion by heart, etc.

There are lots of serious idiots though who should lose their money as quickly as possible and go somewhere else instead of damaging the reputation of bitcoin.

[Photonfrog]

If this poll manages to aggregate a decent guesstimate for the number of hurt individuals we might get an idea about how long it will take to replace all of them with new people.

Your question is aiming at an irrelevancy.

Is it really irrelevant?

I'll have to defend its relevancy somehow as we are currently looking at speculating about the consequences of a burst bubble.

Consider the case that there was only one single individual who bought all of the "profitless" bitcoins and then this person failed to sell any of them at a profit. This hypothesis has a single loser and everyone else is a "winner". If this hypothesis was to be true (in our fantasy world) then the emotional consequences of a burst bubble should be close enough to zero to matter at all. In this case the system has in practice been sponsored towards greater success in the future.

In the opposit case we have a quite more significant emotional impact. Imagine the case that only one rich person had possession of all bitcoins except for those that were bought at more than 70 usd. Then this rich person is the only individual who manages to sell any coin at a profit during the bubble burst. In this case we have quite a significant emotional impact from the bubble and it will be quite a challenge to recover some semblance of faith in the bitcoin system as a whole. It would be really hard to consider bitcoin a viable technological innovation in the future.

Reality will be found somewhere between these extremes. It should however be leaning towards one or the other extremes and the impact should adjust with the position along this imaginary axis.

Let me put it this way: I want the negative emotional impact maximized, because I want the idiots who destabilize and damage the bitcoin market to disappear.

The destabilizers are those who buy high and sell low, i.e. exactly those who lose their money.

The only way to achieve this goal is to forever suppress the market value of the coins. Greedy people with no better purpose than looking for easy money will always try to get in if there is a profitable trend going. This popped bubble provided a painful experience for a microscopic portion of all the greedy people on the internet. Next time the value starts climbing a new crowd will take their place.

We can also look at this argument as one which concludes that the greedy people are needed, otherwise the bitcoin system will stay just where it is and fail to be adopted wider. It looks quite much like someone is trying to suppress the value of the coins right now... Eventually this will run out of steam and the greedy crowd will come running in.