Bitcoin will NOT Hit the $10,000 mark this year :(

[Dr.Zaius]

Did you really expect it to rise forever? At 10k per BTC you would already have exceeded the protocol limitations with the 1MB block size. Transactional demand would need to be immense to support a market cap of 210 billion USD. It's amazing what people are expecting out of something that is still in beta. Also alternative blockchain's would take more and more market share away from bitcoin, we've seen this occur with every price spike. Spring 2013 brought upon litecoin, October-December brought upon a horde of altcoins. Bitcoin has already had close to 10% of its market cap drained via altcoins. This is about $60 on current prices.

Bitcoin's price is overvalued based on cost per transaction when counting miner subsidies.

https://blockchain.info/charts/cost-per-transaction

This is way too high $40 +

Miner's will consistently feed bitcoin's to the market from these obscene profits. The system is paying $40 per transaction at the moment to miner's and for what exactly? Demand as gauged via daily transactions has not grown as fast. We will probably continue trending down ever so slowly..

[pungopete468]

Did you really expect it to rise forever? At 10k per BTC you would already have exceeded the protocol limitations with the 1MB block size. Transactional demand would need to be immense to support a market cap of 210 billion USD. It's amazing what people are expecting out of something that is still in beta. Also alternative blockchain's would take more and more market share away from bitcoin, we've seen this occur with every price spike. Spring 2013 brought upon litecoin, October-December brought upon a horde of altcoins. Bitcoin has already had close to 10% of its market cap drained via altcoins. This is about $60 on current prices.

Bitcoin's price is overvalued based on cost per transaction when counting miner subsidies.

https://blockchain.info/charts/cost-per-transaction

This is way too high $40 +

Miner's will consistently feed bitcoin's to the market from these obscene profits. The system is paying $40 per transaction at the moment to miner's and for what exactly? Demand as gauged via daily transactions has not grown as fast. We will probably continue trending down ever so slowly..

The 1MB block size isn't a hard limit; it's easily adjustable and the block size will be set wherever we need it. The transaction cost will be modified as well.

I don't think the alts are taking much away from Bitcoin. Just because those people aren't holding Bitcoin doesn't mean they subtract value from Bitcoin. If anything, they diversify the marketplace and inspire some people who might otherwise have believed that it was too late to get in on crypto currency. Also consider the scrypt mining aspect, it's more inviting and that's an understatement.

[Dr.Zaius]

I think you misunderstood what I am saying.

The transaction cost I'm talking about is the blockreward miners are currently receiving. You know, the 3600 bitcoin's created on a daily basis that is being allocated to a few hands? This is a cost. That blockchain link shows total miner revenue(which came at the expense of someone) divided by transactions.

The entire bid book of bitstamp is $12million dollars. At current price of $600~, there is $2.2million dollar worth of bitcoin's created daily. Every week you are creating bitstamp's entire active bid side.

The current profit margin for the top tier miners is obscene, they have huge incentive to realize this gain. Miner's tend to hoard when their profits are low, and sell when they are high. They have been feeding this market since November 2013. Where do you think the ASK side is coming from? It's miners. Because mining is so concentrated, new bitcoin's are ending up in fewer and fewer hands. This leads to persistent volatility as supply is withheld when prices are low, and increased when prices are high. This makes settlement in bitcoin impossible as you cannot perform economic calculation. Hedging this is too costly since a small % of people can influence prices immensely in an illiquid market. I hope this makes it more clear to you. To put it simply, the distribution system of new bitcoins is hideously flawed because of that bitcoin will continue to trend lower as miners realize huge margins.

The competing side is demand, comprising speculative and transactional. Speculative demand can change on a whim, as it is more based on passions and emotions. Transactional demand is more or less fundamental and it has increased by only 25-30% from a year ago.

This is the flaw in bitcoin's distribution method.

As the purchasing power/real value (ie.how many goods/services bitcoin's can purchase)  increases, direct transaction fee's between users goes down. However the blockreward stays constant in bitcoin but INCREASES dramatically in real terms. This is a huge inefficiency and cost that must be absorbed by someone, ie users. Since mining has become so concentrated, a certain portion of the ecosystem is now rent seeking. They are being overcompensated for providing no new value.

Simple example.

1 year ago miners were earning $270,000 a day to secure roughly 55,000 transactions.
Today they are earning $2.2million a day to secure roughly 70,000 transactions.

Do you see this massive inefficiency and rent seeking? They will be consistently feeding this market supply unless demand ends up picking up dramatically.

[windjc]

I think you misunderstood what I am saying.

The transaction cost I'm talking about is the blockreward miners are currently receiving. You know, the 3600 bitcoin's created on a daily basis that is being allocated to a few hands? This is a cost. That blockchain link shows total miner revenue(which came at the expense of someone) divided by transactions.

The entire bid book of bitstamp is $12million dollars. At current price of $600~, there is $2.2million dollar worth of bitcoin's created daily. Every week you are creating bitstamp's entire active bid side.

The current profit margin for the top tier miners is obscene, they have huge incentive to realize this gain. Miner's tend to hoard when their profits are low, and sell when they are high. They have been feeding this market since November 2013. Where do you think the ASK side is coming from? It's miners. Because mining is so concentrated, new bitcoin's are ending up in fewer and fewer hands. This leads to persistent volatility as supply is withheld when prices are low, and increased when prices are high. This makes settlement in bitcoin impossible as you cannot perform economic calculation. Hedging this is too costly since a small % of people can influence prices immensely in an illiquid market. I hope this makes it more clear to you. To put it simply, the distribution system of new bitcoins is hideously flawed because of that bitcoin will continue to trend lower as miners realize huge margins.

The competing side is demand, comprising speculative and transactional. Speculative demand can change on a whim, as it is more based on passions and emotions. Transactional demand is more or less fundamental and it has increased by only 25-30% from a year ago.

Yeah, this has always been the case. But in the November run up we literally ran out of coins in China. There were none left on the exchanges, except for profit takers.

There are a lot of coins never making it to exchanges with funds buying them up before. I don't see the ask side accumulation to suggest a glut of new coins.

[Dr.Zaius]

I think you misunderstood what I am saying.

The transaction cost I'm talking about is the blockreward miners are currently receiving. You know, the 3600 bitcoin's created on a daily basis that is being allocated to a few hands? This is a cost. That blockchain link shows total miner revenue(which came at the expense of someone) divided by transactions.

The entire bid book of bitstamp is $12million dollars. At current price of $600~, there is $2.2million dollar worth of bitcoin's created daily. Every week you are creating bitstamp's entire active bid side.

The current profit margin for the top tier miners is obscene, they have huge incentive to realize this gain. Miner's tend to hoard when their profits are low, and sell when they are high. They have been feeding this market since November 2013. Where do you think the ASK side is coming from? It's miners. Because mining is so concentrated, new bitcoin's are ending up in fewer and fewer hands. This leads to persistent volatility as supply is withheld when prices are low, and increased when prices are high. This makes settlement in bitcoin impossible as you cannot perform economic calculation. Hedging this is too costly since a small % of people can influence prices immensely in an illiquid market. I hope this makes it more clear to you. To put it simply, the distribution system of new bitcoins is hideously flawed because of that bitcoin will continue to trend lower as miners realize huge margins.

The competing side is demand, comprising speculative and transactional. Speculative demand can change on a whim, as it is more based on passions and emotions. Transactional demand is more or less fundamental and it has increased by only 25-30% from a year ago.

Yeah, this has always been the case. But in the November run up we literally ran out of coins in China. There were none left on the exchanges, except for profit takers.

There are a lot of coins never making it to exchanges with funds buying them up before. I don't see the ask side accumulation to suggest a glut of new coins.

What do you mean the price is down over 50% since. The ask's are consistently feeding bids. They don't wait. We have been trending lower with occasional pops since November, that is not going to change.

[pungopete468]

I think you misunderstood what I am saying.

The transaction cost I'm talking about is the blockreward miners are currently receiving. You know, the 3600 bitcoin's created on a daily basis that is being allocated to a few hands? This is a cost. That blockchain link shows total miner revenue(which came at the expense of someone) divided by transactions.

The entire bid book of bitstamp is $12million dollars. At current price of $600~, there is $2.2million dollar worth of bitcoin's created daily. Every week you are creating bitstamp's entire active bid side.

The current profit margin for the top tier miners is obscene, they have huge incentive to realize this gain. Miner's tend to hoard when their profits are low, and sell when they are high. They have been feeding this market since November 2013. Where do you think the ASK side is coming from? It's miners. Because mining is so concentrated, new bitcoin's are ending up in fewer and fewer hands. This leads to persistent volatility as supply is withheld when prices are low, and increased when prices are high. This makes settlement in bitcoin impossible as you cannot perform economic calculation. Hedging this is too costly since a small % of people can influence prices immensely in an illiquid market. I hope this makes it more clear to you. Bitcoin will continue to trend lower as miners realize huge margins.

The competing side is demand, comprising speculative and transactional. Speculative demand can change on a whim, as it is more based on passions and emotions. Transactional demand is more or less fundamental and it has increased by only 25-30% from a year ago.

I understood your original statement, I just disagree with some of it. I'll explain why.

 - The transaction cost isn't the block reward. After 2140 (Should Bitcoin even make it that far) the transaction cost would be the block reward because all new coins have been mined. Currently, the transaction cost is a tiny fraction of the block reward. The transaction volume will need to grow exponentially before the transaction fees constitute an appreciable block reward. 1MB block size won't cut it by then and the block size will be increased as needed to deal with the transaction volume.

 - The profit margin of top tier miners is obscene, but they aren't really holding Bitcoins out of circulation. The top tier miners are selling the Bitcoins to anybody willing to buy; spreading the wealth as the market allows. The medium and small miners may hold at a temporary loss but the cost of mining increases as the difficulty increases. This temporary coin-holding encourages market stability rather than volatility.

 - The distribution of Bitcoin is broadening, if you look at data extracted from the blockchain you will see that the number of coins in wallets containing greater than 1,000 XBT have decreased by more than 3% since January. The growth has been most prominent in the 1-5, 5-10, and 10-25 XBT wallets. The smaller holders are expanding rapidly while the large holders are dwindling down.

 - Withholding supply when price is low, and increasing supply when price is high is a price buffer; it encourages stability. If the demand is high enough that it exceeds the inflated supply, the price will increase, if not, price decreases and supply tapers...

 - Settlement in Bitcoin isn't impossible. I'm not sure which economic calculation Bitcoin doesn't afford which is required for settlement... The people you are settling with should understand that Bitcoin is volatile and if they prefer to be paid in conventional currency then that should be an option. However, you could always take your conventional currency, use it to buy as many XBT as it will afford at a fixed time, then the product of your purchase will be the settlement amount... Or you could use a daily set price, third party, localbitcoin price, there are plenty of ways to settle in Bitcoin while mitigating your risk. You don't need to base your settlement on a 1m chart...

 - You are right about the impact some wield over the market. This is a temporary problem left over from the birth of Bitcoin. This is a growing pain and soon it won't be easy for so few to manipulate the market.

 - 25-30% growth in transaction demand in a year is amazing.

 - If the price continues to trend downward it isn't solely the result of miners. The distribution of coins should be considered to determine which groups are buying and which are selling... The price today should be climbing, but the increased demand has been met with an abnormally high supply from some very large coin stashes. This is good for the long term but its causing a downward trend in the near term. Many more coins are being sold into the ASK walls right now than are being mined... The BID wall has been very strong considering the level of negative press.

[Siegfried]

I think you misunderstood what I am saying.

The transaction cost I'm talking about is the blockreward miners are currently receiving. You know, the 3600 bitcoin's created on a daily basis that is being allocated to a few hands? This is a cost. That blockchain link shows total miner revenue(which came at the expense of someone) divided by transactions.

The entire bid book of bitstamp is $12million dollars. At current price of $600~, there is $2.2million dollar worth of bitcoin's created daily. Every week you are creating bitstamp's entire active bid side.

The current profit margin for the top tier miners is obscene, they have huge incentive to realize this gain. Miner's tend to hoard when their profits are low, and sell when they are high. They have been feeding this market since November 2013. Where do you think the ASK side is coming from? It's miners. Because mining is so concentrated, new bitcoin's are ending up in fewer and fewer hands. This leads to persistent volatility as supply is withheld when prices are low, and increased when prices are high. This makes settlement in bitcoin impossible as you cannot perform economic calculation. Hedging this is too costly since a small % of people can influence prices immensely in an illiquid market. I hope this makes it more clear to you. To put it simply, the distribution system of new bitcoins is hideously flawed because of that bitcoin will continue to trend lower as miners realize huge margins.

The competing side is demand, comprising speculative and transactional. Speculative demand can change on a whim, as it is more based on passions and emotions. Transactional demand is more or less fundamental and it has increased by only 25-30% from a year ago.

This is the flaw in bitcoin's distribution method.

As the purchasing power/real value (ie.how many goods/services bitcoin's can purchase)  increases, direct transaction fee's between users goes down. However the blockreward stays constant in bitcoin but INCREASES dramatically in real terms. This is a huge inefficiency and cost that must be absorbed by someone, ie users. Since mining has become so concentrated, a certain portion of the ecosystem is now rent seeking. They are being overcompensated for providing no new value.

Simple example.

1 year ago miners were earning $270,000 a day to secure roughly 55,000 transactions.
Today they are earning $2.2million a day to secure roughly 70,000 transactions.

Do you see this massive inefficiency and rent seeking? They will be consistently feeding this market supply unless demand ends up picking up dramatically.

It is true what you are saying, the distribution model is not optimal and the miner profits now may be obscene. However, there is still the fact that the supply of coins is absolutely limited and the demand is very low relative to its utility. A relatively minor increase in demand could send the price up to 10,000 dollars, and you forgot to mention an extremely important aspect of demand, store of value. Imagine that one Russian billionaire who has just been sanctioned by the United States decides to put a mere 100 million dollars into Bitcoin, at any price. It is reasonable to think that this will happen. It is only a small portion of an oligarch's wealth, and with international sanctions there are not really any other options for global mobile wealth transfer. At 600 dollars per coin, that is 166,667 coins, the number of new coins mined in 46 days. The 100 million this guy wants to put into Bitcoin would dwarf the increasing supply from newly mined coins and all the coins on offer at all the exchanges, and would send the price way up, possibly to 10,000 dollars. I think it is very likely that this will happen this year as the stability and security of the Bitcoin system becomes more clear to everyone.

[TERA]

I don't need a bunch of news-related events and speculation to tell you that we're not going to 10,000.  I simply need to take note of how the price trend has clearly diverged from that of previous cycles.

The poll is poorly worded. My opinion about the price trend has nothing to do with hackers.

[Dr.Zaius]

I don't need a bunch of news-related events and speculation to tell you that we're not going to 10,000.  I simply need to take note of how the price trend has clearly diverged from that of previous cycles.

The poll is poorly worded. My opinion about the price trend has nothing to do with hackers.

+1

[Siegfried]

I don't need a bunch of news-related events and speculation to tell you that we're not going to 10,000.  I simply need to take note of how the price trend has clearly diverged from that of previous cycles.

The poll is poorly worded. My opinion about the price trend has nothing to do with hackers.

The perception and actual condition of Bitcoin in the real world has also clearly diverged from previous cycles.

[windjc]

I don't need a bunch of news-related events and speculation to tell you that we're not going to 10,000.  I simply need to take note of how the price trend has clearly diverged from that of previous cycles.

The poll is poorly worded. My opinion about the price trend has nothing to do with hackers.

Please explain this historical divergence. You shouldn't just go around making these sweeping suggestions, especially when you've been wrong as many times as you have. Explain yourself.

[pungopete468]

I don't need a bunch of news-related events and speculation to tell you that we're not going to 10,000.  I simply need to take note of how the price trend has clearly diverged from that of previous cycles.

The poll is poorly worded. My opinion about the price trend has nothing to do with hackers.

Bitcoin is such a small-fry right now. Obviously we can't assume $10,000 this year if nothing else changes. The trend can change in an instant and will change from previous cycles as unforeseen events happen... Look at the variables.

I think $10,000 is entirely possible before the end of the year. Our divergence from the previous cycle is expected. We lost Gox... That's a lot of hurt for a lot of people... That doesn't mean nothing good will happen this year. It just means that the "trend" has changed in light of a different market atmosphere...

The distribution of coins is shifting, only 39% of all Bitcoin in circulation is sitting in wallets with greater than 1,000 XBT; down over 3% from late Jan...

You offer some fine TA, but perhaps you should be reminded that TA isn't nearly as effective in a market as malleable as Bitcoin...

The Bitcoin price is pretty much like Play-Doh...

[trcwhale]

I think you misunderstood what I am saying.

The transaction cost I'm talking about is the blockreward miners are currently receiving. You know, the 3600 bitcoin's created on a daily basis that is being allocated to a few hands? This is a cost. That blockchain link shows total miner revenue(which came at the expense of someone) divided by transactions.

The entire bid book of bitstamp is $12million dollars. At current price of $600~, there is $2.2million dollar worth of bitcoin's created daily. Every week you are creating bitstamp's entire active bid side.

The current profit margin for the top tier miners is obscene, they have huge incentive to realize this gain. Miner's tend to hoard when their profits are low, and sell when they are high. They have been feeding this market since November 2013. Where do you think the ASK side is coming from? It's miners. Because mining is so concentrated, new bitcoin's are ending up in fewer and fewer hands. This leads to persistent volatility as supply is withheld when prices are low, and increased when prices are high. This makes settlement in bitcoin impossible as you cannot perform economic calculation. Hedging this is too costly since a small % of people can influence prices immensely in an illiquid market. I hope this makes it more clear to you. To put it simply, the distribution system of new bitcoins is hideously flawed because of that bitcoin will continue to trend lower as miners realize huge margins.

The competing side is demand, comprising speculative and transactional. Speculative demand can change on a whim, as it is more based on passions and emotions. Transactional demand is more or less fundamental and it has increased by only 25-30% from a year ago.

This is the flaw in bitcoin's distribution method.

As the purchasing power/real value (ie.how many goods/services bitcoin's can purchase)  increases, direct transaction fee's between users goes down. However the blockreward stays constant in bitcoin but INCREASES dramatically in real terms. This is a huge inefficiency and cost that must be absorbed by someone, ie users. Since mining has become so concentrated, a certain portion of the ecosystem is now rent seeking. They are being overcompensated for providing no new value.

Simple example.

1 year ago miners were earning $270,000 a day to secure roughly 55,000 transactions.
Today they are earning $2.2million a day to secure roughly 70,000 transactions.

Do you see this massive inefficiency and rent seeking? They will be consistently feeding this market supply unless demand ends up picking up dramatically.

wow i just did calculation for dogecoin.

The dogecoin miners are securing the network for 270000 a day.

amazing eh.

[TERA]

This is the first time that the "final capitulation phase" hitting the bottom at support levels did not result in an immediate mid term reversal breaking out of the major downtrend within 1 month. Instead, all of the indicators are back down. This is the first time the 1D MACD has gone down again before the 3D or any longer periods went up.

Final capitulation has not occured - just a series of flashcrashes based on news events.

[jubalix]

There is no time for two growth spurts within the next 9 months. Therefore, it will only get one shot at $10,000 this year.

I place my hopes in your hodling.

why not it had two growth spurts in 2013

[Cassius]

Granted that capitulation hasn't occurred yet and overall sentiment is bearish, witnessed by the constant slow trudge downwards in the last month or so.
When we do get there, which presumably will be on the scale of weeks rather than months and 400-500 rather than 200-300, then what?
I'm not a "$10,000 by Christmas to da moon choo choo!!!!" type myself. I can see more measured appreciation rather than new bubbles (we've been there, done that...). On the other hand I have no idea what developments VC funding, Winklevoss ETF, new investment etc will bring.

[jubalix]

Did you really expect it to rise forever? At 10k per BTC you would already have exceeded the protocol limitations with the 1MB block size. Transactional demand would need to be immense to support a market cap of 210 billion USD. It's amazing what people are expecting out of something that is still in beta. Also alternative blockchain's would take more and more market share away from bitcoin, we've seen this occur with every price spike. Spring 2013 brought upon litecoin, October-December brought upon a horde of altcoins. Bitcoin has already had close to 10% of its market cap drained via altcoins. This is about $60 on current prices.

Bitcoin's price is overvalued based on cost per transaction when counting miner subsidies.

https://blockchain.info/charts/cost-per-transaction

This is way too high $40 +

Miner's will consistently feed bitcoin's to the market from these obscene profits. The system is paying $40 per transaction at the moment to miner's and for what exactly? Demand as gauged via daily transactions has not grown as fast. We will probably continue trending down ever so slowly..

the blockchain data is way out not based on asics, and given the transaction rate, how will it exxceed protocol imitations, its not even going close

[maurya78]

This is a year of consolidation, sustainably in 4 digits by year end hopefully

[Gotgoxed]

The question should be: will it reach 1000$ this year?

[superresistant]

Will US economy not collapse this year ??

Will US dollar worth the paper it is printed on this year ??