Monthly average USD/bitcoin price & trend

[AnonyMint]

I do appreciate the excellent rpitelia's work and his insightful take on risk management of his position.
But as AnthonyMint points a constant slope is very unlikely.

There are different phases that have to depend on media coverage. We just got a major rally in prices which is attracting a whole new target of speculators, including myself.

So, considering that, the optimal smart's money scenario is a strong pump and dump that inflates a bubble from these levels (from 800 to 1800) and a symmetric crash after. Than we can reenter the old trendline after neutralizing this new dumb money possible play.

the slope is not constant, but the AVERAGE is.

or at least it has been since the last 4 years, and it's likely to continue so for the next couple of months/years.

I want to clarify that I did not say a constant slope is very unlikely. I don't know if it is likely or not. Can anyone suggest a past case that is similar to Bitcoin with good pricing data we can analyze?

I do want to take issue with the notion that the average has been constant the last 4 years. You can put a line there and say it is, but that is arbitrary. I can look at the same chart and see two different slopes.

We don't know yet which interpretation is the correct one.

how can it be the same average slope given:
1 much more media coverage?
2 different scale of possible speculators coming in?
if, in a logistic framework, we assume that average slope is given by the doubling of market participants every 3 months or so. How can they not TRIPLE given this different environment?
we just experienced a sudden, enormous, enlargement of the participants base.  We'd better check the media coverage on a logaritmic scale to understand if the environment really changed.

The fact that the price is increasing by a factor of 10 every year or so, means #1 and #2 should be happening. So we would need to actually quantify that the increases are moving faster than the recent slope of the period of the 10X (is there a word for 10X period, as we have "doubling" period for 2X?).

Since I can't quantify that, I have instead used the demographics to argue my side. I argue that the early stage and late stage will non-professional investors which pile in without raking and other measures to prevent a bubble. Whereas the middle stage was likely institutional and professional investors coming in, who are very experienced at trying to sell and buy at a lower price.

[diedicar]

from the google trends chart posted above we can have an estimate of the media coverage trend. It seems to confirm a 3X coverage frome peak to peak, according  with a constant slope model.

Not only: the technical target of the double top is exactly 440, and we have an interesting level at 460. These signals all confirm rpietila's view.

We are experiencing  a very bad press, i think smart money is loading to short.

P.S. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/decuple in italian "decuplicare" is very common, it seems i english is not the same. regards.

[diedicar]

one buys the bad news if the price is low, that's not the case. Btc decupled  ;)in one month...

Technical analysis identifies levels, which level the price is going to is a matter of probabilities, but not exactly 50-50. I'm more intersted in levels than in actual direction  of TA.

there  is a very, very accurate chart from wall street crypto in which you can see th 576 level, before the price touched it.
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/--QG-BMvrLqA/Up0wMQflIBI/AAAAAAAAABw/ArK8nAYNOdw/s1600/Fib+December.png

iff there is a dump, i'll buy @460 not before, and after that in the 200/300 area

[AnonyMint]

one buys the bad news if the price is low, that's not the case. Btc decupled  ;)in one month...

How did you determine the price is too high at any given point in time in for example the south seas bubble?

The only question to ask is if the slope was always constant in manias. I don't know. I can't find any detailed price data on past manias.

This is not an investment folks. It is a mania. It is entirely driven by demographics and emotions.

We don't have any earnings to calculate. There is no possibility of doing NAV discounting based on future revenue.

[diedicar]

one buys the bad news if the price is low, that's not the case. Btc decupled  ;)in one month...

How did you determine the price is too high at any given point in time in for example the south seas bubble?

The only question to ask is if the slope was always constant in manias. I don't know. I can't find any detailed price data on past manias.

This is not an investment folks. It is a mania. It is entirely driven by demographics and emotions.

We don't have any earnings to calculate. There is no possibility of doing NAV discounting based on future revenue.

indeed:on one side we have to calculate the emotions of people gaining big watching their gains desappear, on the otherside we have to calculate wall street guys stepping in and badly needing an accumualtion phase. No way it can go striaght up from here. I see 2 scenarios:
extension to 1600/800 and crash, direct crash to 460.

[AnonyMint]

one buys the bad news if the price is low, that's not the case. Btc decupled  ;)in one month...

How did you determine the price is too high at any given point in time in for example the south seas bubble?

The only question to ask is if the slope was always constant in manias. I don't know. I can't find any detailed price data on past manias.

This is not an investment folks. It is a mania. It is entirely driven by demographics and emotions.

We don't have any earnings to calculate. There is no possibility of doing NAV discounting based on future revenue.

indeed:on one side we have to calculate the emotions of people gaining big watching their gains desappear, on the otherside we have to calculate wall street guys stepping in and badly needing an accumualtion phase. No way it can go striaght up from here. I see 2 scenarios:
extension to 1600/800 and crash, direct crash to 460.

How do we know they haven't been accumulating on this correction already and that you shorts aren't handing them some of your wealth?

[diedicar]

one buys the bad news if the price is low, that's not the case. Btc decupled  ;)in one month...

How did you determine the price is too high at any given point in time in for example the south seas bubble?

The only question to ask is if the slope was always constant in manias. I don't know. I can't find any detailed price data on past manias.

This is not an investment folks. It is a mania. It is entirely driven by demographics and emotions.

We don't have any earnings to calculate. There is no possibility of doing NAV discounting based on future revenue.

indeed:on one side we have to calculate the emotions of people gaining big watching their gains desappear, on the otherside we have to calculate wall street guys stepping in and badly needing an accumualtion phase. No way it can go striaght up from here. I see 2 scenarios:
extension to 1600/800 and crash, direct crash to 460.

How do we know they haven't been accumulating on this correction already and that you shorts aren't handing them some of your wealth?

i'm not shorting! we know because not enough time passed. they need at least 300 millions worth of btc in order to manipulate the market.
Since they CAN crash the market they'll do, given the assumption there are new big players coming. Best way to do it is a pump and dump to 1800 with ALL newbies selling and a lot of veterans too. Or maybe they got already bullets. In no way the big players will leave this market unconditioned. I'm a trader from 1998 and i say: NO WAY. Maybe I'm wrong, of course.

[AnonyMint]

The price and volume are clearly trending downwards since the Dec 11 peak after bounce off the crash low.

[Equilux]

The price and volume are clearly trending downwards since the Dec 11 peak after bounce off the crash low.

"clearly"? I wouldn't say that at all, the volume is quite constant, on most exchanges, and viewed on different timescales as well.

[diedicar]

The price and volume are clearly trending downwards since the Dec 11 peak after bounce off the crash low.

"clearly"? I wouldn't say that at all, the volume is quite constant, on most exchanges, and viewed on different timescales as well.

that's an obvious pennant. It should last until christmas, more ore less.

The chart of the number of the wallets on blockchain is getting sigmoid.

http://stockcharts.com/school/doku.php?id=chart_school:chart_analysis:chart_patterns:flag_pennant_continu

[AnonyMint]

The price and volume are clearly trending downwards since the Dec 11 peak after bounce off the crash low.

"clearly"? I wouldn't say that at all, the volume is quite constant, on most exchanges, and viewed on different timescales as well.

I looked at MtGox and BitStamp.

I see a dearth of block-bluster news, thus euphoria is moderating near-term. Seeing mostly articles about why it is not a currency and that ilk.

Reality in China will take a while to overpower the misinterpretation of recent news. What is happening in China w.r.t. crypto-currencies ecosystem is out of the control of the government.

The price and volume are clearly trending downwards since the Dec 11 peak after bounce off the crash low.

"clearly"? I wouldn't say that at all, the volume is quite constant, on most exchanges, and viewed on different timescales as well.

that's an obvious pennant. It should last until christmas, more ore less.

The chart of the number of the wallets on blockchain is getting sigmoid.

http://stockcharts.com/school/doku.php?id=chart_school:chart_analysis:chart_patterns:flag_pennant_continu

Are you implying there is a higher probability of breaking out to the downside than upside?

[carvecrypto]

This is not an investment folks. It is a mania.

Maybe - maybe not, yet. It is difficult to see BTC at the moment in the mania, because so few have even tried it. More probably mania is still to come in the future.

Usually bubbles dont use fixed slope so most probably it is not wise to try to fit it this time either.

Does anyone know what is minimum price to mine 1 BTC at the moment if you would do mining as efficiently as possible?  (If you include some price for human work, hardware-investments, energy costs etc.) Or what could be estimated rough average price which miners have to use to get 1 BTC at the moment?

[wachtwoord]

This is not an investment folks. It is a mania.

Come back in ten years. Then there'll probably have been a mania as these things tend to overshoot. There hasn't been a mania yet though

[AnonyMint]

Appears to me that we've got an adjustment phase while it sinks in on what the recent government hearings and rulings really mean for Bitcoin and the overall ecosystem.

I haven't had a chance to look at the Litecoin chart, but if or when it is at or below trend then it may be a better buy given the ASICs are coming to Litecoin in early 2014.

What is happening here is that Bitcoiners think Bitcoin is a currency but we've already proved this is impossible unless the government makes it legal tender.

Only an altcoin with strong anonymity could be a currency without being legal tender, because it wouldn't be taxed by those who skirted the law with the anonymity. (note I am not advocating anything, just speaking factually).

And note Bitcoin even when used with mixers, altcoins, Tor, and a VPN is not assured anonymity. I have explained why, but rather than explain it piecemeal, I will soon publish a whitepaper on this.

Thus the Bitcoiners erroneously think that "free market use" requires it to be a currency. That is why 27 of them voted "No" which is the factually incorrect answer.

Bitcoin is now legal in China to be used for everything except as a currency, because only legal tender is allowed to be currency and this applies in every country on planet earth today.

So the Bitcoin market has some psychological adjustments to make. And there likely will be competition coming in Bitcoin ecosystem, e.g. Litecoin and others even more like a Bitcoin 2.0.

Overall the cryptocurrency ecosystem is advancing, and Bitcoin is not the only component of the ecosystem. Bitcoiners will have to go through a mental adjustment process on this fact.

Thus referring to my prior post, China has just legalized this ecosystem and we go to work now on anonymity and others things to advance it.

While the govenments and powers-that-be are likely working on the plans of how to morph Bitcoin into a the Technocracy electronic currency tracking system they want.

All of the analysis thus far and including my prior post, is myopic and ignores the ecosystem networking effects.

The Chinese will own 10s or 100s of $billions perhaps even $trillions of value stored in BTC. Do you really think the market is not going to respond and try to market something to that huge capital base?

For example, the Chinese could go on vacation abroad and spend their BTC.

Or they could buy and sell abroad over the internet, e.g. such as for their homes abroad or running business virtually abroad. Especially they become wealthy investing in BTC.

Also the anonymous altcoin comes along, they leverage their BTC into that.

China is desperate to grow the consumer share of their economy because as http://pettis.com has pointed out, their economy will collapse if they don't. Do you really think they will allow all that consumer business to go abroad? No. The wall is coming down. China is transforming.

Etc.....

China can't put the free market use of Bitcoin back in the bag.

[zimmah]

The price and volume are clearly trending downwards since the Dec 11 peak after bounce off the crash low.

"clearly"? I wouldn't say that at all, the volume is quite constant, on most exchanges, and viewed on different timescales as well.

that's an obvious pennant. It should last until christmas, more ore less.

The chart of the number of the wallets on blockchain is getting sigmoid.

http://stockcharts.com/school/doku.php?id=chart_school:chart_analysis:chart_patterns:flag_pennant_continu

http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=bitcoin%2C%20family%20guy&cmpt=q

[diedicar]

The price and volume are clearly trending downwards since the Dec 11 peak after bounce off the crash low.

"clearly"? I wouldn't say that at all, the volume is quite constant, on most exchanges, and viewed on different timescales as well.

that's an obvious pennant. It should last until christmas, more ore less.

The chart of the number of the wallets on blockchain is getting sigmoid.

http://stockcharts.com/school/doku.php?id=chart_school:chart_analysis:chart_patterns:flag_pennant_continu

http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=bitcoin%2C%20family%20guy&cmpt=q

http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=bitcoin%2C%20family%20guy%2C%20crisis%2C%20dollar%2C%20%2Fm%2F045m1_&cmpt=q
 

[Arriemoller]

Friends don't let friends smoke and post.

[FiatKiller]

Congrats to the OP. It's back to the trendline.

[BitDreams]

from the google trends chart posted above we can have an estimate of the media coverage trend. It seems to confirm a 3X coverage frome peak to peak, according  with a constant slope model.

Looking at the english version of Google trends:

http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=bitcoin&cmpt=q



I see 3 spikes of interest, June 2011, April 2013, and Oct 2013. Those appear to coincide with my interpretation, i.e. the peak of the first phase June 2011, the launch from the bottom of the correction April 2013, and now the rocket launch from breakout over the $30 level from the first phase correction.

I am expecting we head to $10,000 over the next 6 months. I think the shorts are wrong and they will be forced to cover in January.

Not only: the technical target of the double top is exactly 440, and we have an interesting level at 460. These signals all confirm rpietila's view.

Technical analysis is correct 50% of the time, thus it is meaningless.

We are experiencing  a very bad press, i think smart money is loading to short.

Sell the good news, buy the good rumor. Buy the "bad news" (which was actually good news), sell the bad rumor.

P.S. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/decuple in italian "decuplicare" is very common, it seems i english is not the same. regards.

Ah my high school Latin training is fading now. I figured it must be "deca" something.

I plan on borrowing your parallel lines at some point. I'm looking for a rhythm in peaks - aggressive upward (and downward) price moves. Feel more comfortable with more than 2 rally inputs though but here's an idea of what I'm talking about using S&P500 eMini futures. I'm an amature chart technician but I'd place the performance of this fractal up against any chartist over the past 2 years. Notice how whenever price approaches the 'curves' off of this Andrews Pitchfork price seems almost magnetized to the trend line. Of course by the time patterns are recognized price of Bitcoin could reach spectacular targets.

Link to Off Topic SP500 futures chart demonstrating almost mechanical nature of price following a fractal:
http://ponziunit.blogspot.com/2013/11/looks-like-dippy-time-do-or-dont-cycle.html

Note about my blog handle, it was adopted in 2008 in response to US financial crisis - that's ongoing to this day.

[HairyMaclairy]

We know Mt Gox hit 1 million users in the last week or so. 

Can we chart estimated users against price?