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

[niothor]

Does anyone know about a better one-stop shopping spot to obtain the measurement for the totality of bitcoin volume?

User @JorgeStolfi tried to do that for a while, but gave up some time ago, partly because he found that several large Chinese exchanges (perhaps 30% or more of the total) were not listed in any convenient source, not even in bitcoinwisdom.

And I was just going to nominate you for the job.
Such disappointment.

[niothor]

Hello,

I've been reading (only) this thread for some time now and would like to pose a question for discussion:

Doesn't the current low volume conditions make this market a potential "easy target" for someone (or some entity) to manipulate it for profit?

Seems likely to me.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts on this.

Mark

If you try to manipulate the market , you need a bit of volume to do so and that will wake up both bears and bulls changing the whole picture.

[RandomPedestrianN9]

Doesn't the current low volume conditions make this market a potential "easy target" for someone (or some entity) to manipulate it for profit?

Yes, it does make it easy target, Mark.     I too have been reading mostly this thread.    Miners have a huge reason to keep the price up so their mined coins pay off over consumed time, electricity and purchased HW.

[shmadz]

back on topic, this flatness is sucking big time.



I'm sure you all remember the this song


here is a slightly more upbeat version, I skipped to the proudhon song part, I recommend you go back to the beginning and listen to the whole thing, if you're bored.
http://youtu.be/K3zV4V4jZTk?t=51m

[Walsoraj]

http://www.coindesk.com/what-block-chain-analysis-tells-bitcoin/

Summary: capitulation from last December's bubble hasn't even begun.

[JorgeStolfi]

there should be no push to regulate bitcoin itself - it is self-regulating. The only thing they should be looking at is the conversion into and out of the fiat that they have jurisdiction over.

more than that, it is almost impossible to perpetrate fraud inside of the bitcoin system. [...]

I don't know what you mean by "regulate bitcoin" or "inside the bitcoin system", but fraud in bitcoin-only enterprises and investments is absurdly common, even of we ignore MtGOX and other exchange scams.  For example, Danny Brewster was able to pull the Neo & Bee scam because its shares were sold for bitcoins through a Panamanian company that was not registered as a stock exchange, not even in Panama.  He probably would not have been able to do a real IPO with ordinary money on a regulated exchange; his past "career" in the UK and the lack of a real business plan would have been exposed.

[RandomPedestrianN9]

Guys, if you dont care that merchants are not holding onto their coins.....and not many new people with fiat are arriving in the system...do you think current price levels are sustainable? Merchants care about USDs received from your purchases and as third party services are selling your coins = eating what little fiat there is left, shouldnt the price drop in the long term?

[shmadz]

there should be no push to regulate bitcoin itself - it is self-regulating. The only thing they should be looking at is the conversion into and out of the fiat that they have jurisdiction over.

more than that, it is almost impossible to perpetrate fraud inside of the bitcoin system. [...]

I don't know what you mean by "regulate bitcoin" or "inside the bitcoin system", but fraud in bitcoin-only enterprises and investments is absurdly common, even of we ignore MtGOX and other exchange scams.  For example, Danny Brewster was able to pull the Neo & Bee scam because its shares were sold for bitcoins through a Panamanian company that was not registered as a stock exchange, not even in Panama.  He probably would not have been able to do a real IPO with ordinary money on a regulated exchange; his past "career" in the UK and the lack of a real business plan would have been exposed.

apologies prof, what I mean is that fraud or corruption "within the bitcoin system" is almost impossible.

"within the bitcoin system" I simply mean to indicate bitcoin-only transactions, which are completely transparent on the blockchain.

I am positing that all of the fraud and corruption happens at the conversion level, and is a symptom of the level of corruption that exists in the current system.

[niothor]

Guys, if you dont care that merchants are not holding onto their coins.....and not many new people with fiat are arriving in the system...do you think current price levels are sustainable? Merchants care about USDs received from your purchases and as third party services are selling your coins = eating what little fiat there is left, shouldnt the price drop in the long term?

If I agree with you that bitcoin will go to 0 because of the merchants selling the coins , do you agree on not asking the same question again and again ?

[shmadz]

Guys, if you dont care that merchants are not holding onto their coins.....and not many new people with fiat are arriving in the system...do you think current price levels are sustainable? Merchants care about USDs received from your purchases and as third party services are selling your coins = eating what little fiat there is left, shouldnt the price drop in the long term?

dude, I get that you're new, but I think you just don't quite get what this means yet. You're well on your way, and no one can tell you this kind of stuff, you really need to figure it out for yourself.

good luck

[octaft]

Guys, if you dont care that merchants are not holding onto their coins.....and not many new people with fiat are arriving in the system...do you think current price levels are sustainable? Merchants care about USDs received from your purchases and as third party services are selling your coins = eating what little fiat there is left, shouldnt the price drop in the long term?

dude, I get that you're new, but I think you just don't quite get what this means yet. You're well on your way, and no one can tell you this kind of stuff, you really need to figure it out for yourself.

good luck

No one can tell him this kind of stuff because I suspect at least half the people on here act like they know the answers, but don't. You can spot them easily by the "look at the previous threads," which to me means "look at the previous threads, but I totally never did because TO DA MOON!"

[ChartBuddy]

Explanation

[EuroTrash]

Guys, if you dont care that merchants are not holding onto their coins.....and not many new people with fiat are arriving in the system...do you think current price levels are sustainable? Merchants care about USDs received from your purchases and as third party services are selling your coins = eating what little fiat there is left, shouldnt the price drop in the long term?

dude, I get that you're new, but I think you just don't quite get what this means yet. You're well on your way, and no one can tell you this kind of stuff, you really need to figure it out for yourself.

good luck

No one can tell him this kind of stuff because I suspect at least half the people on here act like they know the answers, but don't. You can spot them easily by the "look at the previous threads," which to me means "look at the previous threads, but I totally never did because TO DA MOON!"

But... But... It was debated recently enough (again) in this very same thread!

[JorgeStolfi]

http://www.coindesk.com/what-block-chain-analysis-tells-bitcoin/
Summary: capitulation from last December's bubble hasn't even begun.

With a link to an interesting article:
http://www.ofnumbers.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Learning-from-Bitcoins-past.pdf

[xalex]

According to my data, the number of new users learning about Bitcoin is still decreasing.

(This is an index number based on statistics from websites/webpages explaining about bitcoin.)

http://btc.pizzacat.net/threerabbitswithhatssittingonsantaslapdancingrockettothemoon/learnaboutbtc.png

Today's index (not plotted here but on hourly chart) looks like it's going to be a new yearly low for a Friday.

This is the most interesting thing I've seen on the wall thread in at least a week:  Lots of new bits of data.   Please, please give us more color on what is being charted, otherwise the bits are wasted.

tl;dr

Lots more people were looking up information about bitcoin when it was peaking in price. That chart starts in January when the price was still over $800. As the price relaxed there was less interest (other than when significant, fast drops in price occurred)

The chart would be FAR more meaningful if it extended back to about april of last year, when the price was stable at $90-120, so you could see the change in interest from then through the price jump and to now. I am sure its a few times higher now than a year ago

Aminorex: There are a lot of websites and webpages explaining about Bitcoin. If the statistical data is not public (only a few are), i figure out on what type of machine the website is running. Depending on the type of machine, i use common techniques such as remote resource load monitoring trough webserver response times to create an index number based on the difference compared to average load at stable times.
It looks like the data is dominated by the wikipedia page statistics, yet it is weighted relatively low considering it is linked within many of the other resources i get the data from.
It takes some work to consistently get an evenly weighted index number for the graph due to sites disappearing and new ones being made. To be honest, it is quite a mess due to lack of interest on my part to keep up   but hey, i'm a hacker (the good kind), not a financial analyst  

Klondike_bar: The script has been monitoring (and mirroring) this data for bitcoin, litecoin, peercoin and feathercoin since about june 2012. However, the data folder is over 1300Gb and the code to analyze it is slow, even after a lot of efficiency updates. I'ts not exactly high end hardware. I have it running right now and i was wondering the same thing as you, so the last couple of days i'm spending my time trying to speed up the process.

tl;dr
Used some fairly unknown techniques to get usage data from websites combined with publicly available data.
Hacking around my code to speed up the 1TB+ of data filter to generate graph back to april 2013.

[shmadz]

Guys, if you dont care that merchants are not holding onto their coins.....and not many new people with fiat are arriving in the system...do you think current price levels are sustainable? Merchants care about USDs received from your purchases and as third party services are selling your coins = eating what little fiat there is left, shouldnt the price drop in the long term?

dude, I get that you're new, but I think you just don't quite get what this means yet. You're well on your way, and no one can tell you this kind of stuff, you really need to figure it out for yourself.

good luck

No one can tell him this kind of stuff because I suspect at least half the people on here act like they know the answers, but don't. You can spot them easily by the "look at the previous threads," which to me means "look at the previous threads, but I totally never did because TO DA MOON!"

Hi Octa, I think no one can tell anyone about this kind of stuff.  I think you can make suggestions and observations, but this kind of stuff is so far beyond most people's reasoning that it is pretty much a waste of time trying to explain it.

 I didn't mean to imply that looking at previous threads would have any meaningful impact on the level of understanding of an individual (although it probably would) - what I meant to convey was the idea that -in today's world- a person's consciousness will tend to reject ideas that are not placed there by TV and gov't. I'm trying to say that this is the kind of stuff that you really need to figure out for yourself, because it is completely different from everything you've ever been taught or told.


anyways, the way that I try to tackle the problem is first I try to first understand or identify the limits of the technology, then try to understand the ramifications of the implementation of this technology in our current system. after that I might try to imagine the impact going forward... after the mass adoption and infrastructure has been built.

[ChartBuddy]

Explanation

[JorgeStolfi]

Huobi's volume for today (Sat May/17 UTC) is only 8.8 kBTC.

There are still 4 hours left before 24:00 UTC, which would be 08:00 Sunday morning in China, so perhaps it may still grow a bit.  In any case it will probably be the lowest this year, much less than the 18.0 kBTC of Mar/23 (a Sunday when the exchange was down for ~4 hours in mid-afternoon), and the 15.3 kBTC of Jan/31 (the Chinese New Year Day).

Previous comparable lows were 9.6 kBTC on Dec/03, 2013 (following the first crash after the all-time high; was the exchange down during that day?); and 8.7 kBTC on Nov/03, 2013 (the eve of the big rally, after the price had been mostly flat at 200$ for some ten days). 

Considering the latter, this low volume may be taken as a bullish sign. 

[shmadz]

Huobi's volume for today (Sat May/17 UTC) is only 8.8 kBTC.

There are still 4 hours left before 24:00 UTC, which would be 08:00 Sunday morning in China, so perhaps it may still grow a bit.  In any case it will probably be the lowest this year, much less than the 18.0 kBTC of Mar/23 (a Sunday when the exchange was down for ~4 hours in mid-afternoon), and the 15.3 kBTC of Jan/31 (the Chinese New Year Day).

Previous comparable lows were 9.6 kBTC on Dec/03, 2013 (following the first crash after the all-time high; was the exchange down during that day?); and 8.7 kBTC on Nov/03, 2013 (the eve of the big rally, after the price had been mostly flat at 200$ for some ten days). 

Considering the latter, this low volume may be taken as a bullish sign. 

When even Stolfi starts turning bullish, then you KNOW it's time to buy.

[Feri22]

Just found this chart from November 2013....I am starting to believe 100 000 USD in 2016 is inevitable