Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion

[Tzupy]

6h PSAR flipped to bearish...

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[marcus_of_augustus]

GBTC might start trading on monday, but I would think Gemini/Coin would want to comply with the final BitLicense before they launched.

As I understand, Gemini (the Winkles' exchange) depends only on ordinary bureaucratic licenses (MSB, MTB, whatever).  If  Coinbase can function, they should be able to function too (unless they are based in NY and have to wait for the BitLicense because of that).

The COIN ETF is more complicated: it must be approved by the SEC, which is not just a bureaucratic formality.  There is no way to tell how long the SEC will take to decide, or whather it will get approved at all.  (In fact, I have read somewhere that, the longer the SEC takes to decide, the less likely is that it will be approved.)

whather  

I find it hard to believe that the heavyweight attorney that specializes in this SEC stuff can't make it happen or know the approach to making it a high probability. I'm sure she has had clients that work in key areas of the SEC and/or is on a first name basis w/ politicians that can properly lean on the needed personnel to lock this up. Furthermore, I'm sure major interest across wall street and the hedge fund scene want this type of thing up and running to put portions of their assets into it for an intense growth wing.

I'm sure Kathleen Moriarty has the skills needed, but this is a much bigger game than her getting ETFs approved by SEC through her carreer. The dollar and banking is at stake. At the same time, I think the people with power has realized that they have no good weapons to shut down bitcoin. I think they are just manipulating the price / stalling and trying to time everything in their favor. But I could be wrong (as I usually am when wearing my tinfoil hat.)

The US government can if they want to. All they need to do is arrest key people in the Bitcoin community for distributing an illegal alternative to the legal national currency and make a statement saying that the use of bitcoin is illegal. No lawmakers need to get involved, they have all the precedence they need. If they made it a priority to stop the use of bitcoin internationally they would make it part of their foreign policy and you would see one country after another fall in line. And Norway would be that annoying kid that does it very quickly and then starts pestering the other countries to do it too.

there is no such thing as an "illegal alternative" in the legal money sphere, in fact the FRB is on very shaky constitutional ground running their irredeemable federal reserve debt note scam considering that the only constitutional money is gold and silver coin. Bitcoin is not counterfeiting anything, it is a new form of property, you would need to destroy property law precedents to destroy bitcoin 'legally' as you suggest. Besides game theory almost dictates that the incentives are now aligned for US govt. to try and "work with" bitcoin and profit form the innovation than fight against it ... it's just the banks will be dragging their heels and toes and fingers scratching frantically.

[derpinheimer]

Huobi wants to break down.

Yeah.. I just can't see this happening. If it does manage to break down significantly, I have no idea where the coins are gonna come from on the USD exchanges.

[marcus_of_augustus]

I keep hearing about Bitcoin Investment Trust. Is this any way related to Bitcoin Savings and Trust? Will I be able to get similar services?

lol!

you mean pirateat40s bitcoin savings and trust?

On the face of it the similarities could be quite disconcerting, big pool of coins 'somewhere', pass-through broker agents, bids way above market ... lucky there is no promise of wild ROI and it is 'regulated' by wall st. i guess.

[empowering]

[...]
..........on a separate note do you suppose that "wall street" does not see oil being worth more than its current very low valuation ? that is odd, because wall street thought it was worth almost double this price only last year.. has oil become half as useful, or half as sought after? has it really lost half of its "value" , is there a replacement synthetic on the market to replace the fossil fuel?  or could it be that something else is having an effect on price?
[...]

At the risk of stating the obvious: Oil has lost half of its value because supply & demand. There supply/demand equilibrium is reflected in the current price.
Hope this helps

meh...  it is not "classic" supply and demand issue that has caused the drop in price.. has demand fallen by half? has availability or reserves increased by half? [...]

You don't quite get how supply and demand works. Halving the supply doesn't mean doubling of the price, and vice-versa.
Let me try to explain.

You're on an island with 19 of your friends, and suddenly 10 of you become vampires, who need exactly 1 pint of human blood/day to stay alive. But you're still friends, because vampires or not, you're still bitcoiners.

By strange stroke of luck, it turns out each one of you who is still human can part with a pint of blood/day. Your vampire buddies feed on you, and you have sustainable equilibrium. Being bitcoiners, the humans charge vampires for their blood, as much as possible.

Now imagine what would happen to the price if just one of your human buddies decided to withhold his blood from the market? That's right, a bidding war would ensue for the remaining 9 pints of blood, prices go through the roof, not simply "up by 10%."
Conversely, if one of the vampires died due to sunburn, blood prices would plummet - there's 10 pints available while there's only demand for 9.

If you're still having trouble grasping this, don't hesitate to ask for more help

 (please you do not need to explain supply and demand to me mate)  

ha ha , I wondered if you would pick up on the way I phrased that, of course halving the supply does not double price... I used that very loosely, and yes I could have phrased it better.... but I assumed you would understand what I meant...and I let it slide as that was basically not the point of my post (but you knew that anyway) the point being that it is not a genuine lack of demand, or a genuine increase in actual supply,  that has caused this price decrease, it is a political move by the Saudis.  But you knew that is what I was talking about, and you know what I am saying is correct... so you decide to reply with some sarcy bs and focus on semantics.

Fact is, it is not classic supply and demand, or that wall street that has decided oil is worth half, it is a political move on the part of Saudi.

Hope that helps, if not, tough shit, not playing this game with you.

[JorgeStolfi]

Is that a fact?  Entities that have invested in bitcoin (Fortress, Overstock, DigitalBTC, Tim Draper, The Bitcoin Foundation) seem to have regretted it, and did not want to repeat the experience.  They could have bought shares of BIT from SecondMarket, but they didn't.  They could have bought raw bitcoins (brokers would be happy to assemble large lots for them), but they didn't.  (Risk is not a concern for large investors, they can hire expertise and guard their coins as safely as COIN would do.)

Wall Street obviously does not see bitcoin as being worth more than 220 $/BTC right now...  

Is that a fact?

What are you basing this assumed regret from?  (seemed to have regretted it)

Fortress Investment Group (manages 58 billion $ portfolio): bought 20 M$ in bitcoins in late 2013, reported paper loss of 3.7 M$ on that investment in early 2014, invested some money on Pantera's fund management comany.  I can't find any mention of bitcoin by them after that.

Overstock: They were the first big store to accept bitcoin through BitPay. At first they opted to some percentage of their sales in real bitcoins, but then they stopped doing that, they now get 100% dollars.  At the end of 2014 they held only 340,000 $ worth of bitcoins (~1500 BTC), versus 180 M $ in cash and 10 M $ in precious metals(!). Sales paid in bitcoins dropped after the first months, and amounted to only 3 M $ in 2014 (out of ~ 1.5 billion $ in total sales), all domestic.

DigitalBTC: An australian bitcoin mining and trading company now trying to switch to bitcoin software products.  For the 2nd semester of 2014 they reported 1.2 M$ sales of software, 8.7 M$ revenue from bitcoin trading, 4.6 M$ from mining -- but "Net Loss After Tax of $2.3 million due primarily to non-cash accounting adjustments to the fair value of bitcoin inventory and performance rights and depreciation"

Tim Draper: bought 30'000 BTC at the first USMS auction (~650 $/BTC), 2000 at the second one (~350 $/BTC), did not bid for the third.

The Bitcoin Foundation:  nearly broke, had to let go most of its staff; due in part to them keeping their funds in bitcoin.

Wait a minute... do you deduce their supposed regret from the fact they did not immediately buy all of the rest of the supply of coins available? hmmmmm.... so how come a single entity has not bought up all of the gold in the world? or the oil? ..........on a separate note do you suppose that "wall street" does not see oil being worth more than its current very low valuation ? that is odd, because wall street thought it was worth almost double this price only last year.. has oil become half as useful, or half as sought after? has it really lost half of its "value" , is there a replacement synthetic on the market to replace the fossil fuel?  or could it be that something else is having an effect on price?

I don't understand your point.  Yes, Wall Street does not see oil as being worth more than 60 $/barrel right now.  So?

"Something else" in relation to what?  How do you propose to measure the value of oil or bitcoin, except by watching how much people are wlling to bid and ask for it?

[ChartBuddy]

Coin
Explanation

[shmadz]

Coin
Explanation

All that bid depth go from coinbase to finex, or what?

[coinableS]

Coin
Explanation

All that bid depth go from coinbase to finex, or what?

Looks like it, coinbase knew it couldn't fool anyone with it's fake volume

[Wary]

You don't quite get how supply and demand works. Halving the supply doesn't mean doubling of the price, and vice-versa.
Let me try to explain.

You're on an island with 19 of your friends, and suddenly 10 of you become vampires, who need exactly 1 pint of human blood/day to stay alive. But you're still friends, because vampires or not, you're still bitcoiners.

By strange stroke of luck, it turns out each one of you who is still human can part with a pint of blood/day. Your vampire buddies feed on you, and you have sustainable equilibrium. Being bitcoiners, the humans charge vampires for their blood, as much as possible.

Now imagine what would happen to the price if just one of your human buddies decided to withhold his blood from the market? That's right, a bidding war would ensue for the remaining 9 pints of blood, prices go through the roof, not simply "up by 10%."
Conversely, if one of the vampires died due to sunburn, blood prices would plummet - there's 10 pints available while there's only demand for 9.

This is all meant to illustrate, in way too many words, that a slight change in supply or demand can cause a huge change in price.
If you're still having trouble grasping this, don't hesitate to ask for more help

Do you have estimates for the price elasticity of bitcoin?

P.S. I like your idea that half of bitcoiners are blood-sucking vampires. That explains a lot  

[empowering]

Is that a fact?  Entities that have invested in bitcoin (Fortress, Overstock, DigitalBTC, Tim Draper, The Bitcoin Foundation) seem to have regretted it, and did not want to repeat the experience.  They could have bought shares of BIT from SecondMarket, but they didn't.  They could have bought raw bitcoins (brokers would be happy to assemble large lots for them), but they didn't.  (Risk is not a concern for large investors, they can hire expertise and guard their coins as safely as COIN would do.)

Wall Street obviously does not see bitcoin as being worth more than 220 $/BTC right now...  

Is that a fact?

What are you basing this assumed regret from?  (seemed to have regretted it)

Fortress Investment Group (manages 58 billion $ portfolio): bought 20 M$ in bitcoins in late 2013, reported paper loss of 3.7 M$ on that investment in early 2014, invested some money on Pantera's fund management comany.  I can't find any mention of bitcoin by them after that.

Overstock: They were the first big store to accept bitcoin through BitPay. At first they opted to some percentage of their sales in real bitcoins, but then they stopped doing that, they now get 100% dollars.  At the end of 2014 they held only 340,000 $ worth of bitcoins (~1500 BTC), versus 180 M $ in cash and 10 M $ in precious metals(!). Sales paid in bitcoins dropped after the first months, and amounted to only 3 M $ in 2014 (out of ~ 1.5 billion $ in total sales), all domestic.

DigitalBTC: An australian bitcoin mining and trading company now trying to switch to bitcoin software products.  For the 2nd semester of 2014 they reported 1.2 M$ sales of software, 8.7 M$ revenue from bitcoin trading, 4.6 M$ from mining -- but "Net Loss After Tax of $2.3 million due primarily to non-cash accounting adjustments to the fair value of bitcoin inventory and performance rights and depreciation"

Tim Draper: bought 30'000 BTC at the first USMS auction (~650 $/BTC), 2000 at the second one (~350 $/BTC), did not bid for the third.

The Bitcoin Foundation:  nearly broke, had to let go most of its staff; due in part to them keeping their funds in bitcoin.

Wait a minute... do you deduce their supposed regret from the fact they did not immediately buy all of the rest of the supply of coins available? hmmmmm.... so how come a single entity has not bought up all of the gold in the world? or the oil? ..........on a separate note do you suppose that "wall street" does not see oil being worth more than its current very low valuation ? that is odd, because wall street thought it was worth almost double this price only last year.. has oil become half as useful, or half as sought after? has it really lost half of its "value" , is there a replacement synthetic on the market to replace the fossil fuel?  or could it be that something else is having an effect on price?

I don't understand your point.  Yes, Wall Street does not see oil as being worth more than 60 $/barrel right now.  So?

"Something else" in relation to what?  How do you propose to measure the value of oil or bitcoin, except by watching how much people are wlling to bid and ask for it?

Just because you are a gold dealer/investor,  it does not mean you buy ALL of the available gold.... not a hard concept to get your head around, and it is no different with BTC, if you have bought tens of millions worth,and that is what you decide to buy,  not buying more does not mean anything concrete at all.  Literally nothing, you assume it is regret but you could easily be wrong, it could be a multitude of reasons, you just like the regret theory.

The "something else" in the case of oil, is that the Saudis have flooded the market with cheap supply, on purpose, and so there is an increase in supply, but it is not an "organic" increase in supply, or the result of a new set of reserves, it is because the Saudis are flooding the market for political reasons, and wall street is just along for the ride, they are not the ones setting the price of oil, they are not controlling the supply, they are merely doing what they do.....  the fact that oil is almost half the price of its ath, is nothing to do with oil being less in demand, and it is nothing to do with it being less useful, it is nothing to do with the fact that oil is suddenly not as useful and it has nothing to do with the properties of oil and what it can (or cannot) do, or what its true "value" is,  in reality, the true "value" of oil is not worth half of what it was last year, and it is not "half as useful".... the reason for the change in price is the result of political manoeuvrings and manipulation on the part of the Saudis. Hence there are "other" considerations in play other than "what wall street thinks it is worth"


The idea that you define how much something is worth by how much people bid and ask for it, is not entirely correct, as the Saudi example shows, and is evident in other forms of business, there are situations where the price does not reflect the true value of an item, easy example, say Walmart decides that they want to run a promotion to get new business, they sell a product that the rest of the market says is worth £10, but walmart sell it for £5, for a period of time, maybe to get more customers, or maybe to hammer a nail into a competitor,  or what about a company that discounts item A, and sells at a loss, but they do so,  so they can sell more of item B at a considerable markup.

There are many possible reasons, why something may sell for a price that is not what one would decide is the true value of the item.

The market does play a role in deciding price, as does supply and demand, but then so does various forms of manipulation by market participants ,for many tactical reasons.

Prices can be suppressed, and/or prices can be inflated depending on circumstances, and objectives.


(ps, also random walk)

 

[ChartBuddy]

Coin
Explanation

[brg444]

GBTC might start trading on monday, but I would think Gemini/Coin would want to comply with the final BitLicense before they launched.

As I understand, Gemini (the Winkles' exchange) depends only on ordinary bureaucratic licenses (MSB, MTB, whatever).  If  Coinbase can function, they should be able to function too (unless they are based in NY and have to wait for the BitLicense because of that).

The COIN ETF is more complicated: it must be approved by the SEC, which is not just a bureaucratic formality.  There is no way to tell how long the SEC will take to decide, or whather it will get approved at all.  (In fact, I have read somewhere that, the longer the SEC takes to decide, the less likely is that it will be approved.)

See this is the crux of what I'm sure is a tense debate behind the scenes between the industry and regulators.

By all appearances Coinbase is fully compliant w/ all known existing regulations in most states they operate.

AML/KYC/MSB/MTB you name it.

Now statists and "lawmakers" being what they are they can't help but having to try and "regulate" anything new under the sun.

In which case gov puppets like Lawsky assume they have authority to impose largely useless, wholly unnecessary and realistically impracticable regulations, the BitLicenses, under the false pretense of "consumer protection".

The Winklevoss being they corporate shills they are they will sing the praise of such "initiatives". They will go as far as to claim other exchanges operating without being "licensed" could be considered "unregulated".

Companies like Coinbase are satisfied enough with their legal status they feel comfortable operating under current state & federal laws.

It will be interesting to find out what becomes of the BitLicenses after reading the industry's stance on the last revised version.

They are evidently not having it.

[derpinheimer]

Coin
Explanation

All that bid depth go from coinbase to finex, or what?

Looks like it, coinbase knew it couldn't fool anyone with it's fake volume

These charts are relative AFAIK; so if BFX had a 20k bidwall pop up, bitstamp and coinbase would appear as almost totally flat. When coinbase had that 5k bidwall, it did the same thing to BFX/Bitstamp, to a lesser degree. Now that it's gone, BFX appears to have a mountain of bids.

[empowering]

Coin
Explanation

All that bid depth go from coinbase to finex, or what?

Looks like it, coinbase knew it couldn't fool anyone with it's fake volume

These charts are relative AFAIK; so if BFX had a 20k bidwall pop up, bitstamp and coinbase would appear as almost totally flat. When coinbase had that 5k bidwall, it did the same thing to BFX/Bitstamp, to a lesser degree. Now that it's gone, BFX appears to have a mountain of bids.

Really?

I always thought that the amount of coins was just measured on an individual chart basis, and corresponds to the figures on the y axis of the chart ?

[Wary]

... [discussion with troll] ...

> @Wary: Leave all that brainy bullshit to the mainstream so-called scientists. All the economic theory we bitcoiners need to know is "the cake is a lie!" & "buy and hold!"

If it's how you perceive my position, you are mistaken. I respect economic theory (at least, microeconomics. No my respect for Keynes et all).

Now, about elasticity of bitcoin price. In general case, you are right. But bitcoin is a special good. Because it is money.

Within your model, the demand for blood is almost fixed, because it is determined by vampires' biochemistry. He needs a pint, no less, no more. That's why price will swing wildly depending on supply.

How about bitcoins? How much of bitcoins do we need? If John is on drugs and buying them for bitcoins, how many bitcoins does he need? If his daily shot costs 100$, he needs 100/price-of-bitcoin.  If Peter invests his salary in bitcoin, how much bitcoins does he need? If he can save $1000/month, he would need $1000/price-of-bitcoin.

What would happen if price of bitcoins doubles? John's and Peter's demand on bitcoin will halves. Because they need not bitcoins themselves, but bitcoin's purchasing power. Which is equal to bitcoin price. On language of economics it means that elastitity of bitcoin price is equal to 1.

So when supply is halved, the price doubles.

In your model it would look like vampire's need for blood changes in inverse proportion to blood's price. When price doubles, need for blood halves: half-pint instead of pint.

P.S. Be careful while quoting trolls. It's common here to put on ignore trolls along with those who quotes them.

[derpinheimer]

Coin
Explanation

All that bid depth go from coinbase to finex, or what?

Looks like it, coinbase knew it couldn't fool anyone with it's fake volume

These charts are relative AFAIK; so if BFX had a 20k bidwall pop up, bitstamp and coinbase would appear as almost totally flat. When coinbase had that 5k bidwall, it did the same thing to BFX/Bitstamp, to a lesser degree. Now that it's gone, BFX appears to have a mountain of bids.

Really?

I always thought that the amount of coins was just measured on an individual chart basis, and corresponds to the figures on the y axis of the chart ?

I don't think it was always this way, but you can see they line up by just opening all 3 and checking the y axis scale.

[ChartBuddy]

Coin
Explanation

[BayAreaCoins]

4/20 coming up... will Bitcoin get high?

[Cconvert2G36]

I'll leave the rest to your imagination.