Why is bitcoin price not going up?

[tigereye]

BTC value has dropped 15ish% in the last week?

The person I know who knows the most about the business side of Bitcoin shared an insight with me. A significant fraction of Bitcoins are held by miners. They are long-term bullish on Bitcoins, so they hold rather than selling, essentially hoarding Bitcoins and keeping the price high. Now, ASICs are about to totally change the mining landscape. They either have to give up on mining or buy ASICs. Since they're long-term bullish on Bitcoins, they believe it makes sense to buy ASICs and invest in mining. But to do that, they need cash. So they're selling their Bitcoins to get cash to buy ASICs. This is pushing the price down. Essentially, the value in the Bitcoin economy is being sucked out by ASIC manufacturers. If this person is right, we could see low prices at least until the vast majority of miners are on 28nm ASICs.

Why would they need to sell Bitcoins to buy ASICs?

Aren't ASIC sold mostly for Bitcoins now?

Didn't Avalon switch to Bitcoin pricing?

Yes, but play it through...

I buy an ASIC miner for bitcoin, and send bitcoin to the manufacturer.
The manufacturer needs to buy components, pay staff for labour, and otherwise spend bitcoin to make the ASICs. Many vendors and people don't accept bitcoin, which means the manufacturer needs to sell bitcoin to get cash.

[computerparts]

I saw this coming 3 months ago. This drop in price is just the beginning. You ain't seen nuthin yet 

[Fugger]

It's called 'cashing out' 

[NewLiberty]

The price decline is not due to ASIC.
Consider the amount of BTC that was liquidated. about US$5-10M/day.
Are the ASIC sales quotas that high?  What fraction of that might be ASIC business 3%?
(and that is just what shows on the exchanges, very much is NOT on the exchanges.)

[mechs]

Soon you will be able to get a condo on the moon, it will be made with a 3d Printer which you will be able to purchase with bitcoins.  A true libertarian geek utopia!

[Tonko]

Two things should be distinguished:

1) Bitcoin as a technological achievement, enabling (almost) anonymous, (almost) instantaneous, irreversible payments.

2) The vermin that jumped on it: script-kiddie Internet 'enterpreneurs', thieves/hackers and all the rest of starry/$$$-eyed bozos. The vermin just couldn't create economy around the Bitcoin because they are essentially leeches. The days when you can pull some shitty HTML/JavaScript and make a business out of it are long gone.

Thus, for a few years, until somebody honest and creative comes into the picture, it is all downward.

And let's not forget:

3) The elephants in the room, the biggest of which is US Gov and Financial 'elite' that owns it.

[m3ta]

The price decline is not due to ASIC.

To some extent, it is.
When anyone with a GPU could mine and make some coins, the economy was healthy.
Now, to truly create the aforementioned coins, you need to invest (a lot) in ASICs. Thus, it's not a "for all" game. It's elitist.
An elitist currency is not healthy. It's as simple as that - BTC needs "John Doe" to be able to mine, not only "John Trump".
What Bitcoin was at the start is no longer valid. John Doe is cashing out, and I do not blame him.

[joae1975]

Okay, BTC is at ~$68 as I write this.  I think it was just simply over inflated.  The March/April hype we saw is just now coming down.  But it's still up from it's pre-March price.  I don't see this as bad.  It'll take time for BTC to catch on.  The seeds are being planted and cultivated.  The crisis in Cyprus was a speck of dust.  Wait until the USD chickens come home to roost.  It's not over folks.  Just a bump in the road.  Imho.

[NewLiberty]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yf0Amcgxot8

[mdude77]

The price decline is not due to ASIC.

To some extent, it is.
When anyone with a GPU could mine and make some coins, the economy was healthy.
Now, to truly create the aforementioned coins, you need to invest (a lot) in ASICs. Thus, it's not a "for all" game. It's elitist.
An elitist currency is not healthy. It's as simple as that - BTC needs "John Doe" to be able to mine, not only "John Trump".
What Bitcoin was at the start is no longer valid. John Doe is cashing out, and I do not blame him.

I disagree only on one point: it was always an elitist game.  The same people who had hoards of money to set up massive GPU farms now have hoards of money to get ASICs. 

It's the same story - the rich get richer.

M

[Lohoris]

And BTC as a currency would be destroyed.

Mission accomplished.

What are you talking about?

Of course it wouldn't, people would be mining like crazy to get that reward...

Selling BTC and having BTC as a currency are two different things.

M

It would become a currency backed by dollars.
You can still use it as a currency, they can't force you to sell.
And knowing that there is an infinite bid wall, actually would help the currency a great deal.

[Bitweasil]

It's the same story - the rich get richer.

I prefer the phrasing, "It takes money to make money."

Maybe we could try one of those other systems that has always failed?  Do it somehow differently, and see if we can avoid the problem of running out of other people's money?

[mdude77]

It's the same story - the rich get richer.

I prefer the phrasing, "It takes money to make money."

Maybe we could try one of those other systems that has always failed?  Do it somehow differently, and see if we can avoid the problem of running out of other people's money?

I didn't claim to have a solution. Was just pointing out the game didn't change with ASICs.  It was the same game as before, just magnified a bit more because the profit gained before by the rich make them richer this time than last time.

M

[tstang]

Personally,

Bitcoin started as proof of concept and mostly geeks are into it.

Then it grew big and financial people got into the bandwagon.

As with all financial instruments, speculation and hedging got into the game too.

Hence, price will move up and down.

The big boys will try to push up the price, and the rest of the boys will be chasing it. Then they will sell out (cash out), then there will be panic selling.  This is VERY COMMON in stock market .

There are two players in Bitcoin Price :

1. The Miners
2. The Traders.

Price will eventually stablised when it makes more sense to Trade rather than to mine. Anything BELOW that, is a BUY for Bitcoin, anything ABOVE that is speculative price.

This is the basic of ECONOMICS, DEMAND and SUPPLY curve.

[justusranvier]

1. The Miners
2. The Traders.

Price will eventually stablised when it makes more sense to Trade rather than to mine. Anything BELOW that, is a BUY for Bitcoin, anything ABOVE that is speculative price.

This is the basic of ECONOMICS, DEMAND and SUPPLY curve.

No.

The purchasing power of a Bitcoin is going to stabilize in one of two conditions: failure, or at ubiquitous adoption.

In a condition of ubiquitous adoption Bitcoin's purchasing power will be determined by the supply and demand of commerce, not currency trading. In fact, if everybody in the world was using Bitcoin, why would there be any need for currency traders at all?

Bitcoin is not like other currencies. There's no central bank to print it out at will and hand it to cronies in the financial sector to gamble with while they all pretend to be adding value to the economy instead of leeching off of it like parasites.

[tstang]

1. The Miners
2. The Traders.

Price will eventually stablised when it makes more sense to Trade rather than to mine. Anything BELOW that, is a BUY for Bitcoin, anything ABOVE that is speculative price.

This is the basic of ECONOMICS, DEMAND and SUPPLY curve.

No.

The purchasing power of a Bitcoin is going to stabilize in one of two conditions: failure, or at ubiquitous adoption.

In a condition of ubiquitous adoption Bitcoin's purchasing power will be determined by the supply and demand of commerce, not currency trading. In fact, if everybody in the world was using Bitcoin, why would there be any need for currency traders at all?

Bitcoin is not like other currencies. There's no central bank to print it out at will and hand it to cronies in the financial sector to gamble with while they all pretend to be adding value to the economy instead of leeching off of it like parasites.

At USD 1-2 Billion Market Cap for Bitcoin, I think we can say it has already passed the Failure and Adoption Side.

Centralised or de-centralised currency also depends on Demand And Supply Curve.
(Do you know that the Forex market is trading at more than 1 Trillion a day?)

IF the US Gov prints too much notes, then it will lose it's value and price will go down.

It's similar with Bitcoin, IF mining is profitable and easy, it will devalue the Bitcoin price. At USD 200 per Bitcoin, that is highly speculative price and it cannot sustained there.

I haven't got the time to calculate the FAIR value of Bitcoin. Maybe someone here already did that.

[Tzupy]

I believe that BTC will first drop to the 50-60 range, then major investors will push it to 120-140 through a massive buy,
just before the next financial crysis. Adoption of BTC has little to do with price now, this large price drop is mostly speculative.

[McGinS]

It's the same story - the rich get richer.

I prefer the phrasing, "It takes money to make money."

Maybe we could try one of those other systems that has always failed?  Do it somehow differently, and see if we can avoid the problem of running out of other people's money?

Avoiding the problem of running out of other people's money is generally how wealth is gained. It really only differs in how happy you make them about parting with it, and how much you have to fool them to do so.

I prefer the phrasing "the rich get richer" as it applies to systems without money, I think it causes the failure of a lot of systems, as well as the repeated failure of the most popular.

[polarhei]

The big bankers have been doing very well, Also the market is not fully ready for this.

So the dynamic is still great.

[Peter Lambert]

i would love to see something like average price from top 3-4 exchanges with most volume = price of Bitcoin.

Why would anybody be so stupid as to use only one exchange when there are several with slightly different rates? Of course the price of bitcoin is the average of all the exchanges, it has been since there were multiple ways of exchanging.

For an example, the Winklvoss ETF filing document says they will compute the price of bitcoins as the weighted average of MtGox, BTC-E and Bitstamp.