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

[ChartBuddy]

Coin
Explanation

[satori0123456]

What worries me the most is that for 95% of all the bitcoin startups, VCs are just throwing huge sums of $$$ at them, but they are all basically creating "solutions looking for problems" instead of solving real needs.  Gee, where have I seen and lived through that before?  Oh yes, the DotComBomb of 2000.  Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.

Indeed. But there were a few trillion dollars to be made before it all went tits up and then things really got rolling after the wreckage had been cleared. I hope it doesn't pan out that way but it's kind of a natural cycle.

Believe it or not, one of the companies that I'm most worried about is Coinbase. 

For example, go look at their employee roster page at the bottom.
https://www.coinbase.com/about

In in the past 2 years, I have literally watched that page grow from about 5 employees to what you see now on that page.  And they just keep adding more employees.  At the rate they are going, unless something drastically changes I don't think that they are going to have a business model that will support all of that headcount and still make a profit.

So many sexy girls working at coinbase. I want to work for them.

They have some job offers on their website

[madmat]

What worries me the most is that for 95% of all the bitcoin startups, VCs are just throwing huge sums of $$$ at them, but they are all basically creating "solutions looking for problems" instead of solving real needs.  Gee, where have I seen and lived through that before?  Oh yes, the DotComBomb of 2000.  Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.

Indeed. But there were a few trillion dollars to be made before it all went tits up and then things really got rolling after the wreckage had been cleared. I hope it doesn't pan out that way but it's kind of a natural cycle.

Believe it or not, one of the companies that I'm most worried about is Coinbase. 

For example, go look at their employee roster page at the bottom.
https://www.coinbase.com/about

In in the past 2 years, I have literally watched that page grow from about 5 employees to what you see now on that page.  And they just keep adding more employees.  At the rate they are going, unless something drastically changes I don't think that they are going to have a business model that will support all of that headcount and still make a profit.

So many sexy girls working at coinbase. I want to work for them.

They have some job offers on their website

I saw them, but San Francisco is a bit far from home.

They are recruiting a security engineer. I hope they already have some

[oda.krell]

What worries me the most is that for 95% of all the bitcoin startups, VCs are just throwing huge sums of $$$ at them, but they are all basically creating "solutions looking for problems" instead of solving real needs.  Gee, where have I seen and lived through that before?  Oh yes, the DotComBomb of 2000.  Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.

Indeed. But there were a few trillion dollars to be made before it all went tits up and then things really got rolling after the wreckage had been cleared. I hope it doesn't pan out that way but it's kind of a natural cycle.

Believe it or not, one of the companies that I'm most worried about is Coinbase.  

For example, go look at their employee roster page at the bottom.
https://www.coinbase.com/about

In in the past 2 years, I have literally watched that page grow from about 5 employees to what you see now on that page.  And they just keep adding more employees.  At the rate they are going, unless something drastically changes I don't think that they are going to have a business model that will support all of that headcount and still make a profit.

Not wrong, but not the full picture either:

a) true, it might quite well go down in flames, and that early VC capital will be lost like tears in the rain;

b) then again, it's a (controlled) gamble on their side, similar to early dotcom seed/investments: if it pays off, it'll pay off rather royally, if not, it's a (comparably) minor hit to their total holdings. Which brings me to:

c) on a different scale, through a different aspect of the market, that's similar to the "bet" we're making here as well: most who hold some long-term BTC position do so because of the chance (by his/her best judgement) that there's a big unrealized economical potential for the Blockchain (emphasis on the Blockchain), which (again, by his/her best judgement) in turn would likely lead to a major appreciation of market value per token.

The flip side of this bet just as the one by VC: it might not work out that way - alternative blockchains might take the lead, public and business interest might stay comparably small (i.e. "solutions looking for problems" turns out to be true and stay true), etc.

Some people here conveniently ignore the latter point, only going on about the limitless potential. Others pretend there is no potential, only risk, and eventually: doom. Personally, I think it's simply too early to draw either conclusion, 6 years since launch, and ~2 years since VC started pouring in for real.

[gentlemand]

Believe it or not, one of the companies that I'm most worried about is Coinbase. 

For example, go look at their employee roster page at the bottom.
https://www.coinbase.com/about

In in the past 2 years, I have literally watched that page grow from about 5 employees to what you see now on that page.  And they just keep adding more employees.  At the rate they are going, unless something drastically changes I don't think that they are going to have a business model that will support all of that headcount and still make a profit.

That's a lot of mouths to feed. It's a natural reaction to assume companies that suck in millions of dollars in funding from fancy people and have lots of bells and whistles actually know what they're doing.

The dotcom thing proved that they often, er, don't. Hopefully lessons have been learnt.

[BrewCrewFan]

What worries me the most is that for 95% of all the bitcoin startups, VCs are just throwing huge sums of $$$ at them, but they are all basically creating "solutions looking for problems" instead of solving real needs.  Gee, where have I seen and lived through that before?  Oh yes, the DotComBomb of 2000.  Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.

Indeed. But there were a few trillion dollars to be made before it all went tits up and then things really got rolling after the wreckage had been cleared. I hope it doesn't pan out that way but it's kind of a natural cycle.

Believe it or not, one of the companies that I'm most worried about is Coinbase. 

For example, go look at their employee roster page at the bottom.
https://www.coinbase.com/about

In in the past 2 years, I have literally watched that page grow from about 5 employees to what you see now on that page.  And they just keep adding more employees.  At the rate they are going, unless something drastically changes I don't think that they are going to have a business model that will support all of that headcount and still make a profit.

So many sexy girls working at coinbase. I want to work for them.

Yeah I noticed that ... yummy.

[Wandererfromthenorth]

triangle on the 30m will close today or tomorrow, look for a breakout/breakdown of that and buy/dump accordingly.

[TakeTheSkyRoad]

So many sexy girls working at coinbase. I want to work for them.

Yeah I noticed that ... yummy.

Also apparently a beard with a man attached.



Plus who submits a ball pool pic for the company profile ?



Edit : Maybe he did it to annoy this guy

[Torque]

Believe it or not, one of the companies that I'm most worried about is Coinbase.  

For example, go look at their employee roster page at the bottom.
https://www.coinbase.com/about

In in the past 2 years, I have literally watched that page grow from about 5 employees to what you see now on that page.  And they just keep adding more employees.  At the rate they are going, unless something drastically changes I don't think that they are going to have a business model that will support all of that headcount and still make a profit.

That's a lot of mouths to feed. It's a natural reaction to assume companies that suck in millions of dollars in funding from fancy people and have lots of bells and whistles actually know what they're doing.

The dotcom thing proved that they often, er, don't. Hopefully lessons have been learnt.

History has proven to repeat itself.  Most of the employees there are so young to not have even remembered the dot-com boom/bust, and naively thinking that "this time is different."  No it isn't.

I worked as an IT Consultant and developer during the Dot-com years. It was insane, I had more work than I could handle.  All of my clients were basically startups being funded by VCs.

One startup client in particular, they had 15 employees (and growing), and had a burn rate of about 10-12$M per year of VC funding for the first two years.  After the first 2 years, they had maybe sold their software product (that cost about $100K in licensing) about 8 times.  In the third year, the VCs said "Listen, you need to sell your product at least 40 times in the next 12 months, or we cut your next round of funding to a third."  That was 5X more than they had sold it for all of the first 24 months!!  I knew that was the death knell signal, as the company was no way equipped or capable of that many sales in that short of time.  The software had a long sales cycle (about 12-18 months on average), so I knew there was just no way.

Sure enough, I finished up my work for them that third year, and they ran out of funding and closed the doors about 4 months after that.  The writing was on the wall.

[ChartBuddy]

Coin
Explanation

[JorgeStolfi]

Believe it or not, one of the companies that I'm most worried about is Coinbase. 

For example, go look at their employee roster page at the bottom.
https://www.coinbase.com/about

In in the past 2 years, I have literally watched that page grow from about 5 employees to what you see now on that page.  And they just keep adding more employees.  At the rate they are going, unless something drastically changes I don't think that they are going to have a business model that will support all of that headcount and still make a profit.

My guess is that they and Circle will be shifting the bulk of their business to the USD-to-USD payment market (i. e. PayPal's turf), which is orders of magniture bigger than BTC-to-USD (BitPay's model) and USD-to-BTC.  For that market, their staff does not seem exaggerated at all.

Circle also seeems to be eyeing the USD-to-CNY and/or CNY-to-USD remittance markets.  I imagine that bitcoin will be an internal instrument that will be used if and when it advantageous to them.

[ssmc2]

Meanwhile, bid walls building on Finex...

[Fatman3001]

What worries me the most is that for 95% of all the bitcoin startups, VCs are just throwing huge sums of $$$ at them, but they are all basically creating "solutions looking for problems" instead of solving real needs.  Gee, where have I seen and lived through that before?  Oh yes, the DotComBomb of 2000.  Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.

Indeed. But there were a few trillion dollars to be made before it all went tits up and then things really got rolling after the wreckage had been cleared. I hope it doesn't pan out that way but it's kind of a natural cycle.

Believe it or not, one of the companies that I'm most worried about is Coinbase.  

For example, go look at their employee roster page at the bottom.
https://www.coinbase.com/about

In in the past 2 years, I have literally watched that page grow from about 5 employees to what you see now on that page.  And they just keep adding more employees.  At the rate they are going, unless something drastically changes I don't think that they are going to have a business model that will support all of that headcount and still make a profit.

Not wrong, but not the full picture either:

a) true, it might quite well go down in flames, and that early VC capital will be lost like tears in the rain;

b) then again, it's a (controlled) gamble on their side, similar to early dotcom seed/investments: if it pays off, it'll pay off rather royally, if not, it's a (comparably) minor hit to their total holdings. Which brings me to:

c) on a different scale, through a different aspect of the market, that's similar to the "bet" we're making here as well: most who hold some long-term BTC position do so because of the chance (by his/her best judgement) that there's a big unrealized economical potential for the Blockchain (emphasis on the Blockchain), which (again, by his/her best judgement) in turn would likely lead to a major appreciation of market value per token.

The flip side of this bet just as the one by VC: it might not work out that way - alternative blockchains might take the lead, public and business interest might stay comparably small (i.e. "solutions looking for problems" turns out to be true and stay true), etc.

Some people here conveniently ignore the latter point, only going on about the limitless potential. Others pretend there is no potential, only risk, and eventually: doom. Personally, I think it's simply too early to draw either conclusion, 6 years since launch, and ~2 years since VC started pouring in for real.

But why won't the same people more consistently invest directly in BTC? It wouldn't take much for all those VC investors to prop up the currency/token such that their more indirect investments stands a much better chance of succeeding.

[satori0123456]

BTCUSD moved up after $ got hit by US sales data

[madmat]

BTCUSD moved up after $ got hit by US sales data

[minerpumpkin]

Yeah, Finex seems to lead today's rally! Good to see that happen for a change!

[Fatman3001]

Yeah, Finex seems to lead today's rally! Good to see that happen for a change!

What rally? I can't see it. Am I going loony?

[inca]

What worries me the most is that for 95% of all the bitcoin startups, VCs are just throwing huge sums of $$$ at them, but they are all basically creating "solutions looking for problems" instead of solving real needs.  Gee, where have I seen and lived through that before?  Oh yes, the DotComBomb of 2000.  Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.

Indeed. But there were a few trillion dollars to be made before it all went tits up and then things really got rolling after the wreckage had been cleared. I hope it doesn't pan out that way but it's kind of a natural cycle.

Believe it or not, one of the companies that I'm most worried about is Coinbase.  

For example, go look at their employee roster page at the bottom.
https://www.coinbase.com/about

In in the past 2 years, I have literally watched that page grow from about 5 employees to what you see now on that page.  And they just keep adding more employees.  At the rate they are going, unless something drastically changes I don't think that they are going to have a business model that will support all of that headcount and still make a profit.

Not wrong, but not the full picture either:

a) true, it might quite well go down in flames, and that early VC capital will be lost like tears in the rain;

b) then again, it's a (controlled) gamble on their side, similar to early dotcom seed/investments: if it pays off, it'll pay off rather royally, if not, it's a (comparably) minor hit to their total holdings. Which brings me to:

c) on a different scale, through a different aspect of the market, that's similar to the "bet" we're making here as well: most who hold some long-term BTC position do so because of the chance (by his/her best judgement) that there's a big unrealized economical potential for the Blockchain (emphasis on the Blockchain), which (again, by his/her best judgement) in turn would likely lead to a major appreciation of market value per token.

The flip side of this bet just as the one by VC: it might not work out that way - alternative blockchains might take the lead, public and business interest might stay comparably small (i.e. "solutions looking for problems" turns out to be true and stay true), etc.

Some people here conveniently ignore the latter point, only going on about the limitless potential. Others pretend there is no potential, only risk, and eventually: doom. Personally, I think it's simply too early to draw either conclusion, 6 years since launch, and ~2 years since VC started pouring in for real.

Nice balanced post as always. Plus marks for the blade runner reference..

[oda.krell]

Not wrong, but not the full picture either:

a) true, it might quite well go down in flames, and that early VC capital will be lost like tears in the rain;

b) then again, it's a (controlled) gamble on their side, similar to early dotcom seed/investments: if it pays off, it'll pay off rather royally, if not, it's a (comparably) minor hit to their total holdings. Which brings me to:

c) on a different scale, through a different aspect of the market, that's similar to the "bet" we're making here as well: most who hold some long-term BTC position do so because of the chance (by his/her best judgement) that there's a big unrealized economical potential for the Blockchain (emphasis on the Blockchain), which (again, by his/her best judgement) in turn would likely lead to a major appreciation of market value per token.

The flip side of this bet just as the one by VC: it might not work out that way - alternative blockchains might take the lead, public and business interest might stay comparably small (i.e. "solutions looking for problems" turns out to be true and stay true), etc.

Some people here conveniently ignore the latter point, only going on about the limitless potential. Others pretend there is no potential, only risk, and eventually: doom. Personally, I think it's simply too early to draw either conclusion, 6 years since launch, and ~2 years since VC started pouring in for real.

But why won't the same people more consistently invest directly in BTC? It wouldn't take much for all those VC investors to prop up the currency/token such that their more indirect investments stands a much better chance of succeeding.

I would guess: because it's VC, not quasi-Forex gambling money. Also, because the market is rather illiquid. Paper profits are extremely far from actually realizable profits at current levels. Finally, they probably do hold some stake in the native tokens. So it's really asking "why won't they prop up price?". Only, why would they?

There is no function the Blockchain would suddenly & magically be able to perform just because total valuation is twice of what  it is now, at least not without public interest growing equally as well. Probably the only thing price affects right now is speculative interest, but I see it as largely unrelated to fundamental growth of the Bitcoin economy, as long as per coin price is high enough to make the network "secure enough" - which it is, despite the sometimes desperate seeming attempts of Sirer, Stolfi et al. to prove otherwise.

Why continue building your position if you're not also working on building the economy that eventually, hopefully, leads to an increase of valuation of position? From that point of view, it makes sense to me that any accumulation that might occur from the VC side would be rather marginal compared to current inflation... Let's say $50M of VC capital are flanked by the same amount of "accumulation effort". At ~$300 per coin, that would have soaked up around 50 days of block reward. So even if it would be on the program (which I doubt, they might be perfectly happy with their position built at vastly lower prices), it wouldn't single-handedly turn the tables on the greater market situation.

[billyjoeallen]

Has anyone stopped to consider that the dollar index is down for two months in a row? What this means is that bitcoin is already in a clear bull market (significantly above the 200 day moving average) in almost every fiat currency other than the USD and currencies that are pegged to the dollar.

Just in case you are wondering why there has been no correction for weeks.