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

[fillippone]

Lots of economic havoc. Everything is down; it's like the opposite of the "everything bubble" which has been happening for the last several years. Stocks are down, which is expected, but GLD, Bitcoin, and even TLT (=long-term treasuries) are also down. Where is the money disappearing off to? Are institutional investors really selling everything and then putting the cash "under their mattresses"?

I was especially surprised by long-term treasury yields. People are saying that the high yields are because the US is about to spend trillions of dollars on the coronavirus response, but I always thought (based on past behavior) that the treasury markets didn't really care about US debt. It'd be interesting if yields went way up -- to several percent --, which would turn this recession into a full-blown debt crisis as well. I don't think the Fed would let it happen, though, and I suspect that their intervention would not be enough to cause hyperinflation or any other short-term disaster, either, this time.

The Fed was already propping up the economy, and now they've turned it up to 11. At some point this is going to cause so much mal-investment & disconnection between the real economy and the financial system that everything really just collapses. It could happen this time, though maybe not: the USD being the global reserve currency strengthens it a lot. I've previously predicted that the collapse would come in a few decades. Regardless, the Fed's actions here very much reinforce my skepticism of the fiat economy in general. I'd much rather own a lot of BTC than participate fully in the Fed's/US's crazy game of Monopoly.

I think that the recession is good for BTC medium-term. People are selling now because people are selling everything now. But 2008 was what motivated the creation of Bitcoin, and the same things are happening now. I could see ATHs this year.

Long end treasuries have fallen off together with stocks because of a series of reasons.

The fundamental one is the necessity of FUNDING.

Essentially, the plumbing in the liquidity system managed by the FED is broken.
No matter how much liquidity you inject into one END: liquidity will ever be poor on some end, even if the major player near the FED end up sucking almost all that liquidity.

So, nothing new: equity and yield move in the same direction, not on the healthy way (QE flattens the curve, thus inducing lower yield and favours higher stock valuation because of the reduced discount of future earning), but on the un-healthy way. When liquidity was abundant you ended up buying everything with positive yield, rising everything valuation (even bitcoin, some nocoiners said, or a duct taped banana).

But now liquidity is a scarce resource, so many actor in the market reverted to cash ("CASH IS KING" motto is cool again).
Cash, not even very much cash-like securities like short term US bills.

This was for a variety of reasons: I think I sorted them in an increasing relevance order

• Banks had to sit on increased cash reserves because of people stocking up for coronavirus related panic. Do you think I am exaggerating? Look here
• Asset Managers need to sell bond because of poor equity performances are a call for investors to exit from their investments.
• Pension funds and liability managers came out of years of low yields. They were deeply under capitalised versus the liabilities to be paid out in the future. So they took higher risks bets trough derivatives. Now these bets are turning negatives for them, hence forcing them to post collateral (cash) to counter parties to offset those losses. Getting this cash, of course, involves selling assets.
• Credit: those war-like times (we are at war, after all) require a stress on both civil rights (lockdowns) and economic rights (the possibility to participate in the workforce, wages etc.). Government are called to extreme expenditures (US in primis), with the possibility of greater expenditures and impact in the future (What if there is a NY lockdown?). Corporates have been using cash in the "wrong" way, instead of investing that cash in productive things, they used it to finance buybacks (someone said "airlines"?). AS a consequence of QE -induced low rates (Another distortion in the free market), they are also much more indebted than they were used to be in the past. So markets sold corporate (both equity and bonds) and credit spreads started widening everywhere (with bond selling off), from US  to Europe (guess why Italian bonds were amongst the  worst performer during the last weeks (Lagarde aside): because Italy record DEBT/GDP, who has dramatic effect on economy when the GDP denominator start shrinking.
  

Of course this is making things worse and worse, as everyone is running toward the exit in the system market become more illiquid and correlations brake down causing liquidity not flowing into the system as everyone is scared to be on the wrong side of the trade.

Of course gold didn't benefited by this credit crisis because was sold (in the form of certificates) by the BOJ, who was instead busy buying stocks as per their program.

Regarding Bitcoin, once again showed that honey badger doesn't give a fuck.
I hoped the Digital Gold rhetoric were true, but instead low correlation with other asset classes showed it is.. a rhetoric only, without any data to support Bitcoin is used as a store of value.
Still the vast majority of players in the BTC markets see it as an highly speculative asset, hence the selling, also fuelled by some technical fact probably caused by the halving driving up the difficulty.
Here my toughs about  this story.

Belgium corona lockdown is great, just went for one of my nicest ever 50km cycle rides. Traffic lights become irrelevant after 9pm it's liberating! Ironically, not many less people out on the streets this evening compared to previous evenings, much notably less cars... lots of people also having a walk for "exercise". Don't know what it's like in other cities... but not much has changed here apart from more restaurants are shut now. Night shops still open though, so enough people going out "shopping" it seems  

Take care mate when riding in lockdowns.
(touch wood now)
In case of an accident they would take you to an hospital, the exact place where you DO NOT want to be during a pandemia.
Additionally, during a lockdown firstly nobody can assist you on the road, secondly the rescue team might be busy doing other stuff, so you might be lacking the proper support in a timely manner.

[1714464640]

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[1714464640]

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[rolling]

Anybody has an explanation of btc flatlining?
It's weird, but i take it in lieu of declining.

just a guess but it came in my mind today:

cash is king in these times and therefore a lot of speculation on the price of BTC is missing. what we see at the moment is maybe nearly the real value of BTC without the whole amount of speculation which is responsible for all the noise in other times. look how stable BTC can be without speculation. impressive!

No way this is even close to the real value of btc!

The price is stable because we have market makers involved in the system. They make their money by keeping the price stable. We had a massive dump the other day and then the market makers stepped in and are keeping the price stable at it's current level. If we have a massive pump, the market makers will stabilize the price at whatever it ends up at.

The price only moves up or down when the action is too much for the market makers to control.

[Biodom]

Anybody has an explanation of btc flatlining?
It's weird, but i take it in lieu of declining.

just a guess but it came in my mind today:

cash is king in these times and therefore a lot of speculation on the price of BTC is missing. what we see at the moment is maybe nearly the real value of BTC without the whole amount of speculation which is responsible for all the noise in other times. look how stable BTC can be without speculation. impressive!

No way this is even close to the real value of btc!

The price is stable because we have market makers involved in the system. They make their money by keeping the price stable. We had a massive dump the other day and then the market makers stepped in and are keeping the price stable at it's current level. If we have a massive pump, the market makers will stabilize the price at whatever it ends up at.

The price only moves up or down when the action is too much for the market makers to control.

That's a really strange explanation.
If market makers were buying (from sellers) on the way down, THEN they have to entice a pump (during which they can sell the inventory and stay neutral), otherwise they would be loaded with btc that they (market makers) don't need on a permanent basis.

[JimboToronto]

Me hands Jimbo the bottle of Victory Gin—and yes, I just took a swig straight out of it—and I think that if you share drinks with strangers, you should generally be more worried about herpes simplex than about coronavirus.  No, I don’t want the bottle back.  Keep it, with my compliments.  You said that you are old and wise, which means that you were once young and foolish—and that means you are at high risk of having been a 60s hippie—and that would mean a high risk that you carry oral herpes.  No offense.  Keep the bottle; it’s almost empty, anyway

Yep. Guilty of the 60's hippie part. I was a beatnik before that. Maynard G. Krebs was my hero when I was a schoolboy. Got the scars on my liver to prove it.

I never said I was old and wise though. You just assumed that part.  Now I'm middle-aged (in my 70s) and I can still be foolish. Never got herpes but I did need tetracyclin and Quellada on the odd occasion (another great boomer invention... the sexual revolution). Those were the days... after the invention of the birth control pill and before the discovery of AIDS.

Thanks for the gin. Hope you don't mind me splashing a little Dolin's and dropping an olive in it. As for sharing bottles, think of it as un-thickened alcohol-based hand sanitizer.

Here: have some Farmacias Paris "Alcohol Puro 500 ml 03500111" in a recycled Agua Purificada bottle with a laser-printed label. Kills all the nasties... viruses, bacteria, even intestinal parasites. Yum.

[nullius]

[— excruciatingly tortuous attempt to justify a bad analogy, made worse by an attempt to explain to me stuff that I know 100x better than he does —]

There:

So there was Hitler, born in Austria, infected almost the whole of Europe.
Today there is Tyrol, infecting half of Europe with SARS-CoV-2.

You win the prize for the stupidest rhetoric of the day.  And today, the competition is extraordinary!

Here:

I see, you still didn't get behind the connection of the comparison. As i said before, it's complicated.

almost comically stereotypical national-guilt nonsense

For privacy reasons, I will not disclose my own nationality (or even my timezone),  But with sincere apologies to my German friends (who are NOT LIKE THIS), I think that I just met the real Jürgen.

Jürgen the german OutOfMemory in london
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EAuaNnsXy4

(With thanks to my English friends.  I don’t watch TV.)

I just reread OutOfMemory’s posts in Jürgen’s voice.  Much better that way. :-)

There:

I feel ashamed.

EDIT: And angry.

Oh, I get it, anonymous screen name who implicitly claims to be of German or Austrian background:  “‘Due to our history’, we need to somehow make sure to blame the coronavirus on Germans.”

That comparison with Hitler is hard to understand for people that have no german or austrian background.

Here:

I see, you still didn't get behind the connection of the comparison. As i said before, it's complicated.

[...]

...you're trying to project onto me

I hope my limited, non-native english did not create more room for misunderstanding than i already created by said comparison.

No problem.  Do you understand what I mean by saying in English, “due to our history”?  If you do, then you should have known that I understood you completely, straight from my first reply to you.

N.b. that regardless of what languages I do or don’t speak, I have friends all over the world, including in Germany and Austria.  Although they are highly intelligent, many of them have English skills far worse than yours.  I am accustomed to that.

Adolf was a promising austrian artist (painter) when he was young. He applied at the university of arts in vienna, but his portfolio didn't include enough drawings of heads, as the  auditor wrote in his notes. This was the start of young hitler turning from a bohemian artist into a frustrated working class member, who got caught by antisemitic speech and decided to engange in politics.

Now, for the sake of the comparison i drew, are you willing to accept that many cases of Covid19 in Europe AND the misery that hitler brought to Europe BOTH were caused by a single bad decision of an austrian principal, in both cases.

Since you are such an expert on this bit of history, quelle surprise that you forgot the part where he was directed to apply to architecture school.  Also, no, I am NOT willing to accept what you said:  Your whole historiography of WWII causes is bollocks.

I do realize that “WWII happened because Hitler didn’t get into art school” is indeed a quite popular version of TV-level history; and coming from you, with the surreal twist of pinning it on “a single bad decision of an Austrian principal”, it does work perfectly in Jürgen’s voice.

I feel ashamed.

EDIT: And angry.

Now, back on topic please

Indeed.  I have made my point.  I suggest that you try to think it over, instead of presuming to treat me to a lecture about all of this.  Though Youtube has more Jurgen videos, if you are inclined to continue this discussion.

[Febo]

These are stats of the people who were actually diagnosed though which obviously involves going to hospital & getting tested. The people who are suffering & need to rush to hospital are the weak/already ill/elderly.

There will be thousands & thousands who have mild symptoms who don’t seek any testing or treatment & recover totally 100%. These people will not be included in those stats.

The stats above make it look much worse than the reality is.

Well, the point it that those with mild symptoms or totally asymptomatic could still be contagious and spread the disease, eventually making things even worse in the future.
In Italy there are for sure a LOT of asymptomatic cases, and we are debating to test basically everyone or not.
In the meantime elderly people are dying at an unnatural rate in certain regions.

https://twitter.com/QuickTake/status/1239045482665525259?s=20

Why worse? Asymptomatic cases will for sure not need hospital. Main problem that we have is that there is/will not be enough hospital beds/medical stuff/medical equipment for all. If 70% of population is immediately taken out, then we are operating with much smaller numbers. For me this is a very good news.

[Last of the V8s]

[Raja_MBZ]

Double bottom

It'll progress like that but in a slow manner... Y'all ready for it?

[fillippone]

Why worse? Asymptomatic cases will for sure not need hospital. Main problem that we have is that there is/will not be enough hospital beds/medical stuff/medical equipment for all. If 70% of population is immediately taken out, then we are operating with much smaller numbers. For me this is a very good news.

The problem is asyntomatic is that they don’t know they are spreading the virus around. Hence they are actually infecting people a lot more than syntomatic people that eventually quarantine themselves reducing contagion risks.
This is why lockdowns are important even early on the infection cycle.

[OutOfMemory]

...
 ...  
 ...

Dude, you were right, you're somewhat biased towards me.
The link to my profile page...
I was trying to suck out a dried fruit, obviously.

EDIT: Forgot about the trolling, sorry nullius (half of the introduction is sufficient for a good description of your posting style in our tittle discussion)

[nullius]

Yep. Guilty of the 60's hippie part. I was a beatnik before that. Maynard G. Krebs was my hero when I was a schoolboy. Got the scars on my liver to prove it.

I never said I was old and wise though. You just assumed that part.  Now I'm middle-aged (in my 70s) and I can still be foolish.

Well, I presume that having finally hit middle age, you finally learned to respect the opinions of people who were called “conservative” when you were a know-it-all youngster.  Now, if only the youngsters would listen to you...  I am sufficiently old-fashioned to blame modernity itself.  The modern mentality.  Now, get off my lawn.

It is the powerful who know how to honour, it is their art, their domain for invention.  The profound reverence for age and for tradition—all law rests on this double reverence,—the belief and prejudice in favour of ancestors and unfavourable to newcomers, is typical in the morality of the powerful; and if, reversely, men of “modern ideas” believe almost instinctively in “progress” and the “future,” and are more and more lacking in respect for old age, the ignoble origin of these “ideas” has complacently betrayed itself thereby.

Never got herpes but I did need tetracyclin and Quellada on the odd occasion (another great boomer invention... the sexual revolution). Those were the days... after the invention of the birth control pill and before the discovery of AIDS.

Before the discovery of coronavirus, too, it seems.  Well, don’t worry:  The hedonists nowadays can get their jollies on Pornhub, just as they have their “Friends” on Facebook:  Without human contact.

I suppose that such a means of itch-scratching will probably not make many babies; but as you observe, that outcome is specifically avoided, anyway.

Thanks for the gin. Hope you don't mind me splashing a little Dolin's and dropping an olive in it. As for sharing bottles, think of it as un-thickened alcohol-based hand sanitizer.

Here: have some Farmacias Paris "Alcohol Puro 500 ml 03500111" in a recycled Agua Purificada bottle with a laser-printed label. Kills all the nasties... viruses, bacteria, even intestinal parasites. Yum.

Ah, a man of refined tastes:  An olive in your pharma rubbing-liquor and a splash of... whazzat, I gott it backwerds?  Dammn I’m drunk.  That winston chap did warn it’s like a dose of nitric acid, that Victory Gin.  Welcome to the future...  happening now, much better than Orwell ever imagined, and I sez BETTER because I love Big Brother.

* nullius sheds tears of love for Big Brother (right before the bullet)

[JimboToronto]

Thought I'd mention that I'm using Bitcoin for what it was intended... not as a get-rich-moderately-quickly investment vehicle (although it has actually done quite well as that) nor a retail purchase currency (coffees?) but rather as a fast, reliable, cheap and secure way to send money around the world.

Since we decided it would be more prudent to wait out the Covid-19 emergency and panic by staying in our remote jungle village instead of dealing with high-risk airports and cities, I had to figure out a way to take care of financial obligations at home while not having a bank account.

There is also the fact that they may be closing the only highway into our village to keep tourists from bringing Covid-19 in. We  might be truly isolated, a whole community quarantined. We have no landline or cell phone service but usually have internet access. Postal service is almost non-existent taking months for delivery.

Bitcoin to the rescue. A friend lent me 3 bitcoins. Sent him an address with a QR code and he sent me 2.5btc. The other 0.5 he's going to sell (ouch!) and use to pay my rent and bills and put the rest on my credit card. I prefer for them to owe me money and not the other way around.
Hopefully by next month I'll only have to sell a lot less than half a coin to pay my expenses.

Meanwhile I'm sipping a cold Tecate and thawing out some imported beef while my lovely Mexican cutie is making taquitos out of the leftover chicken. We have lots of TP and there doesn't seem to be any shortage of anything yet. It's as if Covid-19 didn't even exist here.

Life is good. Thank you Bitcoin.

[xhomerx10]

 Yay! V8's alive!   

[nullius]

...
 ...  
 ...

Dude, you were right, you're somewhat biased towards me.
The link to my profile page...
I was trying to suck out a dried fruit, obviously.

If the shoe fits, wear it.

You are the one who somehow managed to imply that the coronavirus outbreak was the fault of Austrians and/or Germans, by a nonsensical direct analogy to completely irrelevant historical events.  I object to that.  Don’t you wax self-righteous toward me, now—especially not when my initial response showed insight into German and Austrian post-WWII cultural issues, instead of simply invoking Godwin’s Law and calling you a troll.

[rolling]

Anybody has an explanation of btc flatlining?
It's weird, but i take it in lieu of declining.

just a guess but it came in my mind today:

cash is king in these times and therefore a lot of speculation on the price of BTC is missing. what we see at the moment is maybe nearly the real value of BTC without the whole amount of speculation which is responsible for all the noise in other times. look how stable BTC can be without speculation. impressive!

No way this is even close to the real value of btc!

The price is stable because we have market makers involved in the system. They make their money by keeping the price stable. We had a massive dump the other day and then the market makers stepped in and are keeping the price stable at it's current level. If we have a massive pump, the market makers will stabilize the price at whatever it ends up at.

The price only moves up or down when the action is too much for the market makers to control.

That's a really strange explanation.
If market makers were buying (from sellers) on the way down, THEN they have to entice a pump (during which they can sell the inventory and stay neutral), otherwise they would be loaded with btc that they (market makers) don't need on a permanent basis.

They don't buy on the way down or the way up when there is a big move. They get out when there is too much price movement. They are mostly present when the action dies down. Look up market making bot.

I'm sure the pros at the big firms have more complex strategies than you can get with a crypto bot but it's the same concept.

[eddie13]

...
 ...  
 ...

Dude, you were right, you're somewhat biased towards me.
The link to my profile page...
I was trying to suck out a dried fruit, obviously.

If the shoe fits, wear it.

You are the one who somehow managed to imply that the coronavirus outbreak was the fault of Austrians and/or Germans, by a nonsensical direct analogy to completely irrelevant historical events.  I object to that.  Don’t you wax self-righteous toward me, now—especially not when my initial response showed insight into German and Austrian post-WWII cultural issues, instead of simply invoking Godwin’s Law and calling you a troll.

That's it..
I'm calling china and tellin them that it's actually germany/austria's fault..
Also to rename it the hitler virus..

I hear some places are having trouble cremating the amount of dead bodies.. I will also suggest them to contact germany for their expertise on this subject..

They also must pay reparations to china for this.. Actually, every country now owes china reparations just because..
Can be payed in the form of consensual annexation by china..

[HI-TEC99]

Why worse? Asymptomatic cases will for sure not need hospital. Main problem that we have is that there is/will not be enough hospital beds/medical stuff/medical equipment for all. If 70% of population is immediately taken out, then we are operating with much smaller numbers. For me this is a very good news.

The problem is asyntomatic is that they don’t know they are spreading the virus around. Hence they are actually infecting people a lot more than syntomatic people that eventually quarantine themselves reducing contagion risks.
This is why lockdowns are important even early on the infection cycle.

They successfully used mass testing to stop the virus in a small Italian town. Quarantining the asymptomatic was what totally stopped it.


https://www.nhregister.com/coronavirus/article/Italian-town-experiment-coronavirus-testing-Vo-15141033.php

the small Italian town of Vò has not reported any new cases of COVID-19 since last Friday and the spread of the illness has been completely stopped there.

Vò, a town of 3,300 just outside Venice, was part of an experiment that involved aggressive testing and quarantine measures. Every single resident was tested for coronavirus in late February when Northern Italy was first rocked by the outbreak, and three percent of inhabitants were found to be carrying the virus.

Andrea Crisanti, an infections expert at Imperial College London, was involved with the experiment and told news outlets that half of the carriers exhibited no symptoms.

Anyone who tested positive was placed under quarantine, as were individuals that came into recent contact with the infected. The town's residents were then tested again 10 days later, and just .3 percent of the population was found to be carrying the virus. However, at least six infected individuals were asymptomatic and would not have been tested in most other countries.

[OutOfMemory]

You are the one who somehow managed to imply...

I see...

That's it..
I'm calling china and tellin them that it's actually germany/austria's fault..
Also to rename it the hitler virus..

I hear some places are having trouble cremating the amount of dead bodies.. I will also suggest them to contact germany for their expertise on this subject..

They also must pay reparations to china for this.. Actually, every country now owes china reparations just because..
Can be payed in the form of consensual annexation by china..

 

EDIT: Thanks eddie, i'll take this laugh with me to hodlsleep (c).
Good night at $5.375

[nullius]

This is beautiful; I don’t want to detract by dissecting it, so I will keep my reply short:

Thought I'd mention that I'm using Bitcoin for what it was intended... not as a get-rich-moderately-quickly investment vehicle (although it has actually done quite well as that) nor a retail purchase currency (coffees?) but rather as a fast, reliable, cheap and secure way to send money around the world.

Since we decided it would be more prudent to wait out the Covid-19 emergency and panic by staying in our remote jungle village instead of dealing with high-risk airports and cities, I had to figure out a way to take care of financial obligations at home while not having a bank account.

There is also the fact that they may be closing the only highway into our village to keep tourists from bringing Covid-19 in. We  might be truly isolated, a whole community quarantined. We have no landline or cell phone service but usually have internet access. Postal service is almost non-existent taking months for delivery.

Bitcoin to the rescue. A friend lent me 3 bitcoins. Sent him an address with a QR code and he sent me 2.5btc. The other 0.5 he's going to sell (ouch!) and use to pay my rent and bills and put the rest on my credit card. I prefer for them to owe me money and not the other way around.
Hopefully by next month I'll only have to sell a lot less than half a coin to pay my expenses.

Meanwhile I'm sipping a cold Tecate and thawing out some imported beef while my lovely Mexican cutie is making taquitos out of the leftover chicken. We have lots of TP and there doesn't seem to be any shortage of anything yet. It's as if Covid-19 didn't even exist here.

Life is good. Thank you Bitcoin.

The Real Flippening would be when the actual Bitcoin economy picks up, and takes over substantial real-life functions from the economy based on government-issued toilet paper.

When a stash of Bitcoin helps you to survive a real, dire emergency, it is a happy moment because Bitcoin helped you, and a sad moment because too many ways of “spending” it are either directly or indirectly dumping it for fiat.

When you can spend Bitcoin to another Bitcoiner, who will in turn spend it to yet another Bitcoiner—that is the golden moment of Bitcoin maximalism!

I know that everybody here understands this on such a level that I seem to have stated only the obvious.  But the concept needs a name, and a concise model of thinking.  I propose The Real Flippening:  Bitcoin flippening over fiat bit by bit.  Hardforking the government-controlled economy without consensus official mandate.  The generalized concept of a fork attack need not only work against Bitcoin.

It is another reason for each individual Bitcoiner to push for adoption.

 Yay! V8's alive!  

And in good humour, it seems. :-)

[Toxic2040]

I can't get this image of little corona's spitting out of a mangle...all screaming BRRRRRRRRRRRR! whilst #feelsguy looks on with horror...  Sometimes the mind is a funny thing.   

Why worse? Asymptomatic cases will for sure not need hospital. Main problem that we have is that there is/will not be enough hospital beds/medical stuff/medical equipment for all. If 70% of population is immediately taken out, then we are operating with much smaller numbers. For me this is a very good news.

The problem is asyntomatic is that they don’t know they are spreading the virus around. Hence they are actually infecting people a lot more than syntomatic people that eventually quarantine themselves reducing contagion risks.
This is why lockdowns are important even early on the infection cycle.

A fairly easy to digest nugget about covid-19 and epidemics imho. Please share.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgBla7RepXU

Bonus material for philomaths.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kas0tIxDvrg

#washyourhands