Was there a Serious event causing current drop?

[BitPappa]

Seems no one thinks a serious event caused the current drop.

My uneducated, newbie guess is manipulation plus fear. Not to mention, people are looking at the short term trend and saying to sell/short, helping to put more downward pressure on the price.

I don't think it means anything as far as the bit big picture goes (I keep making that typo).

And yes to kjj's comments.

[reg]

The difficulty increases only every 2016 blocks.  If a lot of hashing power comes online quickly, the network can find blocks faster, for a short time.  The same thing happens in reverse if the hash rate drops for some reason.

ok I get that-but if the pools hold the coins that should not affect the price . is it not only if there are more sellers than buyers the price drops? if so where are they selling? it appears mtgox and other exchanges are having difficulty in getting fiat into them to sell in high quantities?. reg.

You really need to learn to use the quote feature.

I was just answering the difficulty question.  The cause of exchange rate shifts is unknowable, no matter how many threads pop up asking about or blaming gremlins.

P.S.  The quantity sold is exactly equal to the quantity purchased.  Shifts in price reflect a change in the relative desires to hold of the parties involved, only.

ok thanks- so some must be selling believing the price will go lower stil. reg

[lch]

I think that we are in a bubble. So its not unnatural for price to drop quite a bit.

[Littleshop]

Well, in my personal opinion. I believe it was the manufacturers of the ASIC were simply cashing out.

I would agree with this.  Also small ASIC holders customers are more likely to hold and participate in the BTC economy while big players like ASICMINER are most likely to cash out.  The balance has shifted to larger players until BFL and Avalon clones ship more. 

The ASIC transition is rough but necessary. 

[doom309]

all this trying to guess why the drop happened, this could be addressed somewhat if mt gox had a live "market news" ticker on its website, so events could be interpreted better in terms of what is happening to price

[Mahn]

all this trying to guess why the drop happened, this could be addressed somewhat if mt gox had a live "market news" ticker on its website, so events could be interpreted better in terms of what is happening to price

There are no "market news" that triggered this, that's the whole point of the discussion here; we have to guess because there is no explicit reason for the drop to be found otherwise.

[Roy Badami]

most of the channels for buying have been taken out!

Get verified on Gox.  Pay by wire transfer.  Or for smaller amounts, if you're in Europe, and prepared to take the risk of going via Gox's Polish account, pay be SEPA.

Yeah, OK, if you're not in Europe you don't have the SEPA option, but really, I don't see what the problem is.   For people investing in BTC they can probably live with the fees.  Sure, the bank fees aren't much use for people who only want to buy a few dollars worth to spend, and we need better options... but the people buying a few dollars don't have any affect on the price.

roy

[BitPappa]

Get verified on Gox.  Pay by wire transfer.  Or for smaller amounts, if you're in Europe, and prepared to take the risk of going via Gox's Polish account, pay be SEPA.

Yeah, OK, if you're not in Europe you don't have the SEPA option, but really, I don't see what the problem is.   For people investing in BTC they can probably live with the fees.  Sure, the bank fees aren't much use for people who only want to buy a few dollars worth to spend, and we need better options... but the people buying a few dollars don't have any affect on the price.

roy

I was happy keeping money in Gox for awhile, and had a bunch of orders set up. But then I started getting nervous about the U.S. or Japan shutting Gox down (smarter people than me convinced me that was a possibility). If money transfers took hours or less, so I could buy and get the BTC out, I might think it worth the risk. But with it taking often a couple of business days to transfer money, I'm too nervous to put much into Gox now (with 20/20 hindsight, I wish I would have kept a little cash there to buy on this recent dip).

I also can't help but wonder, since Gox now seems to be in the U.S. government's line of fire, are all U.S. Banks still willing to keep wiring funds there?

[Roy Badami]

I was happy keeping money in Gox for awhile, and had a bunch of orders set up. But then I started getting nervous about the U.S. or Japan shutting Gox down (smarter people than me convinced me that was a possibility). If money transfers took hours or less, so I could buy and get the BTC out, I might think it worth the risk. But with it taking often a couple of business days to transfer money, I'm too nervous to put much into Gox now (with 20/20 hindsight, I wish I would have kept a little cash there to buy on this recent dip).

I also can't help but wonder, since Gox now seems to be in the U.S. government's line of fire, are all U.S. Banks still willing to keep wiring funds there?

True... I don't keep any funds in exchanges, which means I can't trade - but then I'm not much of a trader.  I prefer to just buy and hold, so Gox and wire transfers work for me.

roy

[manfred]

The only serious event is "The NSA files" (PRISM). As SHA-2 is made by the NSA and sits right at the heard of Bitcoin it puts up a lot of questions.

[BitAddict]

Well, in my personal opinion. I believe it was the manufacturers of the ASIC were simply cashing out.

I would agree with this.  Also small ASIC holders customers are more likely to hold and participate in the BTC economy while big players like ASICMINER are most likely to cash out.  The balance has shifted to larger players until BFL and Avalon clones ship more. 

The ASIC transition is rough but necessary. 

+1 I think this is the key.

[BitPappa]

The only serious event is "The NSA files" (PRISM). As SHA-2 is made by the NSA and sits right at the heard of Bitcoin it puts up a lot of questions.

Did everyone trust the NSA before, but now with the exposure of PRISM, suddenly people think there's a greater chance that SHA-2 has a backdoor?

[firefop]

all this trying to guess why the drop happened, this could be addressed somewhat if mt gox had a live "market news" ticker on its website, so events could be interpreted better in terms of what is happening to price

There are no "market news" that triggered this, that's the whole point of the discussion here; we have to guess because there is no explicit reason for the drop to be found otherwise.

What about aurumxchange not dealing with bitcoin exchanges for awhile? Wasn't this the main way to move fiat between exchanges?

[bluemeanie1]

Well, in my personal opinion. I believe it was the manufacturers of the ASIC were simply cashing out.

they could be pumping it up as well.

It's fairly simple really, if ASIC Rigs were such a great asset, wouldnt the companies just be mining rather then vending hardware?

[AliceWonder]

Seems no one thinks a serious event caused the current drop.

My uneducated, newbie guess is manipulation plus fear.

My uneducated, newbie guess is that this is a relatively young currency and I would be far more suspicious of manipulation if things like this didn't happen.

[AliceWonder]

which honestly, to me, is a term made popular by Keynesian's to hide the real facts, as price inflation/deflation is simply the market exchange rate, reflective of the money supply into a currency from itself and other currencies

I'm not sure if it's just me but I had a hard time understanding the underlined. Is that redundant? from itself and other currencies?

Anyways, with the ASICs coming out soon, what do you think the value of bitcoin will do for the the first couple of months? I feel like it will start to drop rather rapidly as people are trying to get their hands on more USD to compensate for their expenses. Then they would start to keep the BTC and the difficulty would rise so it would go back up?

I feel like it will start to drop rather rapidly as people are trying to get their hands on more USD to compensate for their expenses.

That's from https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=140793.0 Post #7

Coincidence? I doubt it. I think he nailed it.

[BitPappa]

What the hell? How did the (gox) price just jump from 96 to 110???

[Swapster]

P.S.  The quantity sold is exactly equal to the quantity purchased.  Shifts in price reflect a change in the relative desires to hold of the parties involved, only.

That ignores depth of book. Who buys/sells only tells the story about the top of the book.

[Swapster]

I was looking one minute on CBX - price was $95... ten minutes later it's at $106.

The problem with the BTC market is there are no professional market makers to provide stability.

The Winklevoss twins should put their BTC to good use and create a MM firm.

[chufchuf]

What did they expect? btc is accepted at taobao, webmoney etc, its only ussa thats so political and liable and corporate and worried that their only export left is intellectual property, where the companies try to set up their own imitation coins lol