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

[JayJuanGee]

everyone wondering why its dropping... isn't anyone surprised its still double what it was before the rally just a few months ago?
jeez u bulls are greedy; price will only go up when people have some reason to use it as a store of value (hiding money from the chinese govt, QE, bank runs etc)
not as some novelty currency with a nascent infrastructure.

also huobi just went down. ddos?

I doubt that a majority of the sentiments from the bulls in this thread are a product of greed, but rather a product of surprise and confusion in figuring that the BTC price should be higher by now... and yes< believe many of the bulls here have a pretty high expectation that BTC is going well over $1000 this year, and that is NOT based on greed but instead based on BTC fundamentals being relatively strong.  Maybe some of the more "greedy" bulls, if you want to call us that, are more anxious for higher numbers - such as 3k or 5k or 10k by the end of the year or soon thereafter. 

Surely, the odds become smaller based on expectations of a higher amount.  I'm o.k. with anything above my average BTC investment price in the next couple of years; however, it would be even nicer if BTC prices go to the higher numbers, and any of them are reachable in the next 2 years, including higher amounts... 20K would NOT be out of the question in 2 years, but it may NOT be necessary in order for a BTC bull to feel comfortable with his/her rate of return.

[JayJuanGee]

what are your time lines for these various death of bitcoin predictions?  Is bitcoin just going to suffer a slow death, or will its death be sudden, at some point?

I don't know.

On one hand, there are many people who invested millions in ancillary business (exchanges, funds, payment processors, mining hardware, ATMS...) and many owners of large hoards who may be willing to spend some million USDs in marketing and creating factoids just to keep Bitcoin alive for years.  There are also many faithful who will probably stick to it no matter what.

I read that Warren Buffett thinks that Bitcoin will be around for 10 years still.  Maybe. 

On the other hand, there are many more BTC off market than on-market.  If their owners decide to dump, the price may fall so much that many of those ancillary businesses would fail, and miners may abandon BTC for greener coins.  Or the US government may decide that it does not like bitcoin (BTC specifically, or all private cryptocoins, or any cryptocoins).  Or the bitcoin scene may become so polluted with scams and crimes that the public will be turned off at the very name. Or whatever...

The most painful under your hypothetical scenario would be if the BTC price were to just slowly keep going down while sucking more and more of us bulls into buying.. and then all of our lives' savings would be in bitcoin, when it goes belly up? 

So you are here in this thread to try to save as many of us as you can, while there is is still hope to save some of us? 

I feel a moral and professional obligation to warn the general public about the risks of investing in bitcoin, and about the false or exaggerated claims that many bitcoin "salesmen" of all sorts are still making.    I would feel that my time has not been wasted if I can prevent at least one person from being scammed this way.

I am not concerned with adult and mentally capable people who still choose to invest in Bitcoin,  knowing perfectly well what they are doing (as probably is the case of most people in this thread).   They must know that there is no objective way to assign probabilities of "success" (by any definition) or expected future prices to Bitcoin, so that they are gambling in a game with undefined odds.  What advice or help could I give to those people?  What outcome could I wish for them? 

I was surprised to see on this forum (not this thread) people openly asking for "good Ponzi schemes" to invest in.  Well, as long as all investors are aware that something is a Ponzi, I suppose that it can be considered a kind of gambling, so it is their problem, their money, and their fun.  What is not OK is people who know it is a Ponzi trying to lure new investors without telling them that.

Actually, I appreciate your response here. It makes more sense than some of the other ones that I read.

Regarding Buffet, yep, he is pretty bearish on bitcoin... but you never know with him, he may begin to invest on the side... though these things may NOT really matter too much for a guy like Buffet who has already made a lot of dough and doesnt necessarily need to deviate from what he knows in order to continue to make a killing.

[JayJuanGee]

There are scumbags everywhere, and probably the ratios are NOT any worse in the bitcoin scene as compared with banking or other industries. 

It seems that I have not been clear enough on this point....

There are scumbags everywhere, in the banks and governments too.  What is different about making the Satoshi Blockchain into the basis of a crypto-currency economy is that a few thousand people, including many scumbags, will start out OWNING all the money in the world --- as oposed to just having the oligopolistic privilege of storing, handling, managing, and transmitting it.

I have seen some of your other posts on this particular topic, and your thesis in this regard seems ill-founded.  There may be some truth that some less than savory characters may have been first adopters of bitcoin, and potentially these less than savory characters would profit the most if they are able to HODL their BTC while the price continues to rise.   However, in another sense this seems like a fantasy world problem that you are characterizing into bitcoin b/c in NO time in the near future is bitcoin going to be the sole currency or the sole holder of value.. and these kinds of developments, if they were to occur, would take 5-10 years minimum... b/c we are going to have various other currencies and assets that will hold and transmit value. 

 And, surely early adopters would become newly rich by this whole BTC scheme, yet there still seems to be opportunities for status quo rich ( or the old traditional) rich to buy into bicoin at various price points - especially once they recognize bitcoin as a decent hedge investment.  These transitions will take a while as well, and surely we cannot be very certain, at this point, how these kinds of transfer of wealth are going to play out.

I have not looked hard into Auroracoin, but from what has been said here it seems to be an improvement over BTC in this regard: It will distribute some of the money evenly to all Icelanders, instead of only to miners.  Of course, if some private individuals will still retain a large fraction of all the AURs, it will still have the same problem of Bitcoin or any altcoin: those people will end up grabbing a large slice of the Icelanders' total wealth, totally out of proportion to their contribution to the society.

From my understanding, I believe that Auroracoin has more centralization problems than BTC.

[RAJSALLIN]

Usually drop by here a few times per month since nov last year. I think sentiment has never been as bad as now. During the crash in December and now the last crash sentiment was more "oh no it's going down but that's alright since now I can buy cheap coins". Now I'm seeing more and more of the "bitcoin is broken for ever" sentiment. Take it for what it is but I find it interesting.

[JayJuanGee]

I'm kind of on the fence about buying any right now. Should I? At current price, it'd take me 2 months to buy 1 BTC.

Just buy .15 BTC per week.  Or measure the quantity in Fiat how much you buy each week.    Say $75 per week or something like that. 

Then when the BTC price is high, you buy less and when the price is low you buy more. 

There are various ways to get started investing into BTC whether weekly or daily amounts or once a month.

 I personally believe that if you are just getting started then better to invest daily.... let's say for example $10 to $20 per day until you acquire a comfortable amount (but the amount and the time interval may vary depending on through what service you are buying), then maybe switch to weekly, but the key is to get started with whatever budget you have and whether you can time your buying of BTC during lower prices.. and then little by little, you will acquire a pool of BTC.

[JayJuanGee]

thought this was fitting

I'm bullish, but wer'e down a lot of percentage so far this year, and its Almost Q2, so I don't see how this is fitting.   Now... talk to me in July and it will probably be accurate.

One year is March 2013 to March 2014 - NOT December 2013 to March 2014... that is a different story. 

NOW, if you are measuring from July 2013 to July 2014, then that is still to be determined.

[JayJuanGee]

Finally he said, "But..." and there was a long pause as he was out of arguments. I interrupted and said, "What you're realizing in this moment is the paradigm shift. Western Union, out of business. Credit card companies, out of business. Banks? Well, we will see."

He recognized it could change all payments, credit, cash, checks, international, and that it could possibly put a hurting on bank fees. He held onto the fact banks still make loans. I didn't have the heart to tell him that might wane if they couldn't make absurd money from fees. He'll figure it out.

Credit cards aren't going anywhere. People live on credit.

NEVER say NEVER>  I would say that it would take a minimum of 5 to 10 years to transition out of these kinds of credit institutions...   but most likely in the 20-30 year time-frame... if we get success of crypto currencies.

Success of crypto = no more credit? Or do you mean crypto loans will eventually be extended?

I think that we are going to have both.... at least for a while.

There are also going to continue to be ways to exploit people and to keep them down.. and that will take a while to develop. 

I don't think any of us know how all of these dynamics will play out in the event that crypto were successful..... on a global level.... Personally, I do NOT want to rack my brain with such speculations b/c I believe that there are so many varying possibilities... Maybe at some point if we branch in a certain direction, then we can begin to narrow down speculations.  At this point, the more near future is just for bitcoin to become more widely adopted in a more and more ways by more and more people and businesses and governments... So in that regard, we have to crawl before we can walk and walk before we can run.

[JorgeStolfi]

I have seen some of your other posts on this particular topic, and your thesis in this regard seems ill-founded.  There may be some truth that some less than savory characters may have been first adopters of bitcoin, and potentially these less than savory characters would profit the most if they are able to HODL their BTC while the price continues to rise. 

The early adopters are not necessarily "scumbags", just that I do not see why the world would agree giving them such a large slice of their wealth.

But there are undoubtedly many bad guys among them.  The MtGOX thief alone got hold of 600,000 BTC, which is 5% of all existing bitcoins -- hence 2.5% of all the money in the world in that extreme scenario.  The SilkRoad operator is claiming 173,000 BTC that were seized by the FBI as being his property.  There have been already a couple dozen smaller versions and variants of MtGOX,  where thieves and scammers got away with various amounts of BTC, proably adding to hundreds of thousands.  (The BitcoinRain "theft" here in Brazil, for example, slurped up over 15,000 BTC from its investors.)  It seems likely that 10% or more of all existing bitcoins were acquired by criminal means.

[billyjoeallen]

I don't understand why people hate corporations more than governments. Corporations don't force you to do business with them. Governments do. Most of the evil done by corporations is enabled or facilitated by the governments anyway.

It shouldn't matter if BTC is concentrated in a few hands with a stable money supply. It doesn't do the holders any good unless they spend it and if they do, they don't have it anymore. The people who own it now and in the future are the people who value it the most, the people willing to pay the price it takes to get it and pay the opportunity costs of holding it.

[JayJuanGee]

Semantics, the term "this year" means just that (2014) it does not mean a year period between March to March. So as we read the text on the picture that says this year we should understand.

You are right about the picture saying "this year" which is ambiguous and accordingly needs to be understood in context.  Also, the text of the picture seems to be an exaggeration and quite less than specific b/c it does NOT exactly describe from when it is measuring.  Nonetheless, in order to understand the overall point of the picture, then it would need to be read as within the past year... b/c if you look at only this calendar year, then you get something like $720 to $560 - which is nearly negative 30%.... .. not an increase, but a decrease

Then in March of 2013... BTC price went from $30 to $100, so depending upon which measuring point is going to give varying statistics.  I doubt that the text of the picture was attempting to be accurate in that regard, and certainly, I would have phrased it differently had I been the author.  But the nature of a joke sometimes is to exaggerate and to make fun of specifics... like to give such exact percentage numbers without providing an exact measuring time (and hour and minute)

[cbutters]

I have seen some of your other posts on this particular topic, and your thesis in this regard seems ill-founded.  There may be some truth that some less than savory characters may have been first adopters of bitcoin, and potentially these less than savory characters would profit the most if they are able to HODL their BTC while the price continues to rise. 

The early adopters are not necessarily "scumbags", just that I do not see why the world would agree giving them such a large slice of their wealth.

But there are undoubtedly many bad guys among them.  The MtGOX thief alone got hold of 600,000 BTC, which is 5% of all existing bitcoins -- hence 2.5% of all the money in the world in that extreme scenario.  The SilkRoad operator is claiming 173,000 BTC that were seized by the FBI as being his property.  There have been already a couple dozen smaller versions and variants of MtGOX,  where thieves and scammers got away with various amounts of BTC, proably adding to hundreds of thousands.  (The BitcoinRain "theft" here in Brazil, for example, slurped up over 15,000 BTC from its investors.)  It seems likely that 10% or more of all existing bitcoins were acquired by criminal means.

Yes, but then those coins are sold or traded or used to purchase items, they always eventually make their way back into the regular economy or are lost. Just like 99.9% of US dollars have traces of drugs on them. If you don't think that every single paper dollar in existence hasn't been used or will be used for some sort of shady transaction, you are very mistaken. Just because people steal bitcoin doesn't mean that bitcoin shouldn't be used. Criminals should be stopped and prosecuted, not the currency they use. All currencies will be susceptible to monetary transactions that may not be legitimate, and I doubt a large percentage of these criminals are just hoarding the bitcoin, they are probably selling it, buying things, and probably losing their private keys to their shady partners / lost when things get ugly and they end up missing / dead. In the long run, its a non-issue IMO.

[schizoid]

On March 23, 2013 bitcoin was $70, so it's only up 700% YoY.

[JayJuanGee]

I have seen some of your other posts on this particular topic, and your thesis in this regard seems ill-founded.  There may be some truth that some less than savory characters may have been first adopters of bitcoin, and potentially these less than savory characters would profit the most if they are able to HODL their BTC while the price continues to rise. 

The early adopters are not necessarily "scumbags", just that I do not see why the world would agree giving them such a large slice of their wealth.

But there are undoubtedly many bad guys among them.  The MtGOX thief alone got hold of 600,000 BTC, which is 5% of all existing bitcoins -- hence 2.5% of all the money in the world in that extreme scenario.  The SilkRoad operator is claiming 173,000 BTC that were seized by the FBI as being his property.  There have been already a couple dozen smaller versions and variants of MtGOX,  where thieves and scammers got away with various amounts of BTC, proably adding to hundreds of thousands.  (The BitcoinRain "theft" here in Brazil, for example, slurped up over 15,000 BTC from its investors.)  It seems likely that 10% or more of all existing bitcoins were acquired by criminal means.

You are speculating again a lot with your facts, b/c the story about the missing bitcoins is still developing regarding GOX.  But let's assume for the sake of argument that 10% of bitcoins, at some point was acquired by criminals.  Does this assumption also mean that they are still holding those 10%, or have they already liquidated all or some of those holdings?  I would imagine that criminals do want to profit at some point, while they are still living, so just holding onto bitcoins is NOT going to do them any good.  But even if they do hold the bitcoins, so what?  Are they going to manipulate the bitcoin market with that 10%..?  What is the fear exactly?  Holding 10% does NOT give them any special power over bitcoin, except in a world where you are speculating about some plot that they may have to undermine bitcoin rather than to merely make some money off of bitcoin. 

If the thieves already got away with the money, then so what?   We cannot catch them, they have crossed the border to mexico.. or whereever... and they are free... Same with dollars.. if the bank robbers got away, and they are living in the bahamas and sipping Pina colatas, then what can you do, you do not have the evidence... that does not undermine bitcoin, if they already got away.

[JayJuanGee]

On March 23, 2013 bitcoin was $70, so it's only up 700% YoY.

Part of my point was that the joker, Podyx, was being imprecise in some parts and then precise in other parts as part of the joke.. .so when we try to call him on the technicalities or to quibble about the various technical mistakes, then we become part of the joke.. b/c we did NOT get it.. he was exaggerating to make various humorous points..   Whether we appreciate Podyx's humor or not.

[schizoid]

On March 23, 2013 bitcoin was $70, so it's only up 700% YoY.

Part of my point was that the joker, Podyx, was being imprecise in some parts and then precise in other parts as part of the joke.. .so when we try to call him on the technicalities or to quibble about the various technical mistakes, then we become part of the joke.. b/c we did NOT get it.. he was exaggerating to make various humorous points..   Whether we appreciate Podyx's humor or not.

I got the joke. I just decided to do the math because I'm bored.

[chessnut]

is Huobi closed? I havent seen the price move for hours.

this is the quietest day I have ever seen.

[JorgeStolfi]

Yes, but then those coins are sold or traded or used to purchase items, they always eventually make their way back into the regular economy or are lost. Just like 99.9% of US dollars have traces of drugs on them. If you don't think that every single paper dollar in existence hasn't been used or will be used for some sort of shady transaction, you are very mistaken. Just because people steal bitcoin doesn't mean that bitcoin shouldn't be used.

The problem (actually, just an aggravant to the main problem) is not coins that have passed through the hands of criminals, but coins that are STILL in the hands of criminals.

Criminals should be stopped and prosecuted, not the currency they use.

Agree 100%, but very few of those criminals seem to be prosecuted.  (I know of one case in China,, are there any others?)  The vast majority of the "thieves" remained unknown and kept their booty.

I doubt a large percentage of these criminals are just hoarding the bitcoin, they are probably selling it, buying things, and probably losing their private keys to their shady partners

Is that so? If a thief spends a few bitcents of his booty now to buy a pizza, the payment will be visible and the police could catch him by following the delivery boy.  As long as he leaves the coins untouched, he cannot be traced through them, and they cannot be taken from him.  If he waits for a few yers he may even be beyond the reach of the law.

And the problem does not get solved if he has to give the keys to other criminals like him.

EDIT: furtehrmore, 600,000 BTC are not easily spent or sold...

[QuestionAuthority]

This thread is cool to watch. Because someone is continuously posting to it you can see the earth rotating around the sun as the people that participate in this thread slowly fade from country to country.

[JayJuanGee]

On March 23, 2013 bitcoin was $70, so it's only up 700% YoY.

Part of my point was that the joker, Podyx, was being imprecise in some parts and then precise in other parts as part of the joke.. .so when we try to call him on the technicalities or to quibble about the various technical mistakes, then we become part of the joke.. b/c we did NOT get it.. he was exaggerating to make various humorous points..   Whether we appreciate Podyx's humor or not.

I got the joke. I just decided to do the math because I'm bored.

I figured that you got the joke... b/c you came in to the conversation later.. and did not initially raise it... but only brought it up after the further posts...

Podyx is probably laughing his ass off to get such an effect from a silly ass picture...

[JorgeStolfi]

Huobi has been offline for "DDOS attacks" since 1pm China time; the note on their site said they would be back by 3 pm; it is now 5pm in China...