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

[adamstgBit]

Delusional... is that one of the steps before a market turnaround? I'm thinking it comes before anger and finally acceptance. This place is full of delusional posts, so we're not going anywhere for awhile.

Here's the real deal: we're on the seventh daily red candle in a row, and (once again) weak volume, can't break $590. I think a re-rest of the $570 support is much more likely than a return to the $600s...

week vol?

vol has spread out across many new exchanges ...

your trading on invalid data.

[justusranvier]

it's an interesting idea, but seems this ATM would end up buying high and selling low.
someone loads the ATM with 10BTC the ATM gives him 6,000$ cash, then that ATM is considered overload in BTC so it offers to sell the same 10BTC for 5,500$  
you'd have to charge one hell of a fee to make buying high selling low profitable.

There's no such thing as "overloaded in BTC" - bitcoins don't take up space. Giving up cash would either cause the machine to increase the price more slowly, or reverse and start lowering.

You'd need to maintain a spread between the buy and sell prices, and probably also limit the amount of a sale such that you'd never get the situation where the customer could arbitrage the machine itself.

[mooncake]

People really need to be a little more long-sighted.

I don’t want to blow my own trumpet on this one, but I think GABI ending its subscription period and going live on the market will be a serious catalyst.

Mognetti says his firm’s bitcoin fund is aiming for $200m under management in a year’s time, which would put it $50m above current hedge fund heavyweight Pantera Capital.

$200m = 333,333 btc
What will the price be with a 333,333 btc buy?

[adamstgBit]

it's an interesting idea, but seems this ATM would end up buying high and selling low.
someone loads the ATM with 10BTC the ATM gives him 6,000$ cash, then that ATM is considered overload in BTC so it offers to sell the same 10BTC for 5,500$  
you'd have to charge one hell of a fee to make buying high selling low profitable.

There's no such thing as "overloaded in BTC" - bitcoins don't take up space. Giving up cash would either cause the machine to increase the price more slowly, or reverse and start lowering.

You'd need to maintain a spread between the buy and sell prices, and probably also limit the amount of a sale such that you'd never get the situation where the customer could arbitrage the machine itself.

right, very clever idea, hope to see some implementation of this one day.

[adamstgBit]

People really need to be a little more long-sighted.

I don’t want to blow my own trumpet on this one, but I think GABI ending its subscription period and going live on the market will be a serious catalyst.

Mognetti says his firm’s bitcoin fund is aiming for $200m under management in a year’s time, which would put it $50m above current hedge fund heavyweight Pantera Capital.

$200m = 333,333 btc
What will the price be with a 333,333 btc buy?

idk but one thing is for sure

[JayJuanGee]

This is the latest update from the willy report, please read it.

I want to start off by saying I agree with a lot of the criticism on this article that’s appeared the Web; my conclusions were a bit too opinionated and perhaps exaggerated, and didn’t really fit the tone of the rest of the report, which was intended to be an objective account of my findings. I’ve corrected that with this update. Still, I stand by the most significant conclusion made: Willy was the cause for the November bubble. Sure, it didn’t do it all by itself, but it was the catalyst, and prevented price from coming down by effectively removing all selling pressure with its extremely constant buying (why market sell when you can place an ask order, and know it will be eaten into anyway?). In financial markets, sentiment is driven by price, much more so than the other way around. People see price skyrocketing, get euphoric, forget all the negative and assume the asset must be something absolutely amazing for people to place so much value in it (that, or they see an opportunity to “get rich quick”). It gets media attention, and sparks this whole positive feedback loop thing. A classic bubble in every way, really; but something has to light the fire, and subsequently prevent it from petering out.

Willy was the cause for the November bubble. So yeah, there it is.

Gox is not true. Especially during the last bubble to $1200 Gox was becoming less and less relevant and with pathetic volume, while the chinese at BTC China started throwing hundreds of thousands into BTC.

I have my doubts about the Willy report as well, but concerning the volume: It doesn't matter if the volume was rather low or the volume only accounted for 8% or whatever of coins traded on Mt. Gox because if Willy really only ever bought coins, it wouldn't drive the volume up that much. Coins get sold and re-sold and re-sold over and over again. If Willy is simply buying, that low volume is enough to push the price up.
If this should really be true... Wouldn't we now sit on a vastly inflated bitcoin price that is about to collapse at any time?

I understand that this is a BTC speculation thread; however, you are speculating too much without specifics.  give us some specifics.   Possibly Willy caused a certain amount of BTC price inflation; however, that potential price inflation would dissipate over time, no?  If we were at 20% price inflation in November 2013, does it follow that we would still be at 20% price inflation - likely NOT...... give some numbers to support your speculation in order to make it meaningful - otherwise you are just spreading and/or encouraging the spreading of near baseless FUD.

The Report points out that those bots (Willy/Markus) have bought a total of about 650000 BTC over that time. Sometimes they didn't even spend money for those trades. These 650000 BTC (plus the recovered 200000 BTC) amount to the total amount of Gox's lost 850000 coins. So maybe those 650000 BTC never existed? Maybe they were stolen and Gox tried to buy them from the customers for fake FIAT. The bots were constantly buying in a way that made it almost impossible for the price to go down! Couldn't this be a very valid reason for a bubble?

Yes, it could be part of an explanation for part of a bubble... but such an explanation seems very incomplete in the way that you are depicting the situation.

[adamstgBit]

[ChartBuddy]

Explanation

[justusranvier]

Needs the Scumbag Steve hat photoshopped in.

[adamstgBit]

[JorgeStolfi]

Quote from the willy report.

Mt. Gox was always, always, the first mover. BTC China seemed to react within 1 or 2 minutes, sometimes leading to a higher proportional rise in price, sure, but it was NEVER the first mover. In my eyes, this means Mt. Gox and not BTC China was leading the market.

I have yet to see any good arguments against this report. [ ... ] Do you honestly think btc price would be in the hundreds if it was not for MtGox?

When I looked at the plots in that report, I had the exact opposite impression.  The price at MtGOX increased by large discrete jumps every time "Markus" did his buys, but there did not seem to be an immediate echo of those jumps in China.  My reading is that "Markus" was merely doing arbitrage with China, buying cheap coins at MtGOX and seling them over there (presumably on BTC-China, which at the time had the largest volume).

Later, when "Markus" was replaced by the "Willy" robot, it became harder to tell who was leading.

Note that the bubble started two months after Huobi's opening and 4 months after OKCoin's.  The volume at Huobi grew steadily from ~130 BTC/day during September and October to ~30 kBTC/day in November, and the other Chinese exchanges had similar growth.   In November OKCoin had ~30 kBTC/day too, and BTC-China had ~50 kBTC/day, whereas MtGOX barely had dubled its volume to ~25 kBTC/day.

On Nov/18 and Nov/19 there were large spikes at those three Chinese exchanges; at Huobi and OKCoin the all-time high actually was on Nov/19.  The corresponding rises at MtGOX on those days were much smaller (the high was only 3/4 of the Nov/29 ATH).  To me, all these details (and common sense) are more consistent with China, rather than MtGOX, driving the November bubble.

Whether "Markus"/"Willy" was doing its thing with real dollars or with virtual "goxDollars", and whether its owner eventually got the money out of China, are separate questions.

The claim that *I* find absurd is that a single trader at MtGOX could pump the price up from 100$ to 1200$ over a whole month, all over he world, including the huge Chinese market -- and that the the price would stay at pumped-up levels, six months after MtGOX's collapse.

[podyx]

[adamstgBit]

Quote from the willy report.

Mt. Gox was always, always, the first mover. BTC China seemed to react within 1 or 2 minutes, sometimes leading to a higher proportional rise in price, sure, but it was NEVER the first mover. In my eyes, this means Mt. Gox and not BTC China was leading the market.

I have yet to see any good arguments against this report. [ ... ] Do you honestly think btc price would be in the hundreds if it was not for MtGox?

When I looked at the plots in that report, I had the exact opposite impression.  The price at MtGOX increased by large discrete jumps every time "Markus" did his buys, but there did not seem to be an immediate echo of those jumps in China.  My reading is that "Markus" was merely doing arbitrage with China, buying cheap coins at MtGOX and seling them over there (presumably on BTC-China, which at the time had the largest volume).

Later, when "Markus" was replaced by the "Willy" robot, it became harder to tell who was leading.

Note that the bubble started two months after Huobi's opening and 4 months after OKCoin's.  The volume at Huobi grew steadily from ~130 BTC/day during September and October to ~30 kBTC/day in November, and the other Chinese exchanges had similar growth.   In November OKCoin had ~30 kBTC/day too, and BTC-China had ~50 kBTC/day, whereas MtGOX barely had dubled its volume to ~25 kBTC/day.

On Nov/18 and Nov/19 there were large spikes at those three Chinese exchanges; at Huobi and OKCoin the all-time high actually was on Nov/19.  The corresponding rises at MtGOX on those days were much smaller (the high was only 3/4 of the Nov/29 ATH).  To me, all these details (and common sense) are more consistent with China, rather than MtGOX, driving the November bubble.

Whether "Markus"/"Willy" was doing its thing with real dollars or with virtual "goxDollars", and whether its owner eventually got the money out of China, are separate questions.

The claim that *I* find absurd is that a single trader at MtGOX could pump the price up from 100$ to 1200$ over a whole month, all over he world, including the huge Chinese market -- and that the the price would stay at pumped-up levels, six months after MtGOX's collapse.

oh come on people, where you not there?
at one point there was so much activity exchanges all over were lagging / crashing constantly. it took me an hour to log in and make a trade!
this was no 1 man pump...
this what happened:



thank you Jorge, it is an absurd piece of FUD...

[ChartBuddy]

Explanation

[adamstgBit]

Current bitcoin trading recommendation:

[ChartBuddy]

Explanation

[Mervyn_Pumpkinhead]

Most of you guys seem to miss the point, that mostly the nutters are buying BTC, while it's unknown on what exactly happened to goxcoins.
The nutters are fanatical enough to ignore this threat, that those coins could have been stolen by a single thief, who would now have the power to crash the entire market beyond recovery.

Blind gambling isn't investing.

[Peter R]

This theory states that the 850,000 coins were stolen when MtGox was hacked in June 2011.  The thief sold them over the following several months, producing the brutal bear market of 2011.  Mark K covered up the theft and used Markus and Willy to buy BTC with customer funds as necessary to make good on BTC withdrawals.  This theory also explains why Willy was put into reverse and dumped like crazy immediately prior to the collapse (so that client accounts were missing BTC rather than dollars, making the original theft (and cover-up) look like a recent theft.) 

[ChartBuddy]

Explanation

[Mervyn_Pumpkinhead]

This theory states that the 850,000 coins were stolen when MtGox was hacked in June 2011.  The thief sold them over the following several months, producing the brutal bear market of 2011.  Mark K covered up the theft and used Markus and Willy to buy BTC with customer funds as necessary to make good on BTC withdrawals.  This theory also explains why Willy was put into reverse and dumped like crazy immediately prior to the collapse (so that client accounts were missing BTC rather than dollars, making the original theft (and cover-up) look like a recent theft.) 

Not a bad theory. Switching theories, that are based on guesses, is not a bad way to pass the time. Sadly, it still doesn't provide any clarity on what actually happened to the coins. There has to be more then theories, if you want to present BTC more then just a blind gamble.