Topic: Bitcoin will plummet to $10 by first half of 2014 - page 8. (Read 50087 times)

Williams also suggested that he is not alone in this prediction

I guess all the others are keeping their mouths shut. 

Okay. With respect to the horseless-carriage analogy, I was hinting at a Farmer-Joe type who looks at he car, thinks "nothing-but" and then says:

"I don't see why this contraption would be useful at all. What if it gets stuck in the mud? Where's the horse that's going to pull it out? Why does it have to be confined to a road? A horse can go anywhere it gets a foothold, even in the deserts of the Southwest. What if it runs out of fuel? The electric-horseless boys told me that you have to take this thing up to a railhead and buy some foul-smelling liquid from a fellow that ladles it out from barrels from the rail car. [This was, in fact, how gasoline was sold 100 years ago.] What if the thing runs out on the road? When a horse gets hungry, there's lots for him to eat right in place! Unless you're in the desert, of course, but there's no desert anywhere around here. If a horse runs out of 'fuel', he can just stop, eat and drink. He can live off the land if he wants to, if you have the rights or the owners of the property you're on don't mind. And I haven't even discussed how the horse's 'exhaust' makes all kinds of good things grow that feed you, me and lots of other folks..."

fud from a hundred years ago...which does illustrate that a lot of 'fud' comes from honestly skeptical people locked into an analogy that's not really proper because it screens out the potential.

As for good analogies: the best ones available got the core of first adopters here in '09. I suspect that a lot of them were C++ programmers who knew the ins-and-outs of P2P systems and had some knowledge of cryptography. That prior knowledge made it pretty straightforward to make the "leap of faith" necessary for all early adopters of a disruptive technology. 

     

well, a car is very much a horseless carriage.  i think the problem is that he uses the wrong analogies, very concrete ones that don't actually have relevant isomorphisms.  he needs to abstract a bit to find familiar models which have actual structural isomorphisms pertinent to the task of prediction.  presumptuously, i offer the analog of VIX.  as VIX isolated the factor of volatility, and made it an instrument, bitcoin abstracts the factor of scarcity, and makes it an instrument.  i expect other crypto to isolate other factors, and the resulting set of instruments will be interoperable, composable, to span a broad space of economic functions, opening up new forms of organization, which will be a vast ecosystem in which new homeostases will be selected for fitness as they are generated by the creative motivation of incentivized people, and eventually,  machines.  this is similar to the way in which a portfolio can be composed to achieve an investment goal.

Well, I'm back from the reservation, wherein I uncorked my bottled-up thoughts about this guy and what it means for Bitcoin. Thanks for the link.

That interview was revealing, as to the mindset of Prof. Wiliams. Fact is, guys like him make an excellent foil for Bitcoin bulls and crypto bulls like me. It's almost like going back to 2006, when gold first got into real trouble price-wise, and reading a gold skeptic as he explains why the good times for gold had ended when gold hit $650 before going south. If you can get past the entirely natural irk elicited by the fud, you'll learn a real lesson - although a lesson quite different from the learnings that the skeptic intends to pass along.

[Gold actually ended up marking time after going back to about $500 or so; it later resumed its bull trend. The good times in gold didn't end until 2011, when it topped $1900, and the subsequent flattening didn't drive gold down much below $1250. In the annals of burst bubbles, 1900 to 1250 is mild: the '74-75 bear market was worse, percentage-wise. More normal is the kind of carnage that knocks off ~two-thirds of the asset's price, which suggests to this half-grizzled, half-bemused fellow-traveller goldbug that we haven't heard the last of gold. But moving back to the subject...]

I pay attention to the words of people like Prof. Williams in part to see how the stopped clock "runs." In addition to being laced with fud, skeptics like Prof. Williams fit the behaviour pattern of all conventionalists during the rise of a new asset class. Like many people period, he relies on analogy to compare the new with the familiar old. You might say that he's the type that looks at a car a hundred years ago and sees a "horseless carriage" - and nothing more.

Note that he relies on the "unregulated" trope. That's classic analogizing, and itself is very revealing about the fud that forms the base for Bitcoin's Reputation-Management hurdle. If it's "unregulated" and rises too fast too soon, it's gotta be a scam or a bubble - riiiiight?

Now, we around here know that Bitcoin's sudden rise is more like discounting its future value as a cheaper and mostly quicker payment and money-transfer gateway, plus (eventually) the value in widespread use of it as a real cryptocurrency. But conventionalists like Prof. Williams - well, they just don't see it. As such, he fits a behavior pattern that's, in its own way, reassuring. If Bitcoin is destined to enter a real blow-off bubble, the presence and bankability of people like Prof. Williams is a sign that the blow-off phase is a long away coming. Just as conventional bull markets climb a wall of worry, bull markets for new or formerly 'obsolete' investment classes climb a wall of fud.

When people like Prof. William get excited about Bitcoin, I'd start to worry. He'd be like the Keynesian who suddenly starts talking like a goldbug. With respect to the latter, it's a sure bet that he's still a Keynesian. He's just talking that way because he just bought a haunch of gold and is hoping to make a killing on it. fud-spreaders turned late adopters are actually the worst kind of late adopter, de facto. When they jump on board, it's a red-flag warning of a real bubble in progress that's close to going the way of all bubbles.

But not yet, and not for a long time! In my own way, I'm glad Prof. Williams stuck to his old-fashioned but oh-so-bankable guns. I need all the time I can get to scrape up more fiat and stick it into the cyber-sphere.

With that off my chest, it's back to the reservation for me...

These old thread predictions keep scaring me!

Ugh, why doesn't Coindesk just publish the tanscript of the interview, instead of paraphrasing what he said?

Bitcoin's price today is obviously determined by speculation.  The projections of it "going to the moon" assume that people will one day buy it in order to use it as payment medium.  Dividing the estimated volume of e-commerce by the number of bitcoins available in the market gives an astronomical  price.  But that demand -- "buy to pay" -- is still much smaller than "buy to hold" and "buy to daytrade".

And "buy to daytrade" is still mostly in China, where "buy to pay" cannot grow.  If the Chinese speculators get tired of bitcoin, the price will fall at least to 350 USD.  This is no theoretical prediction, it already got down there for a moment one day, when it seemed that the Chinese government was about to close the exchanges in China.  How far could it drop below that? 

He sticks to his stand.
http://www.coindesk.com/mark-t-williams-bitcoin-bulls-time-will-vindicate-prediction/

What is guy saying now? Someone should interview him. 

"those who can do those who can't teach"...so taking generalizations, but yet in most generalizations there is generally some sort of truth in them...

you see it for yourself now;)

The thread itself is really not a troll, as the OP was accurate in saying that the professor said this as he really did predict that bitcoin will be at $10 by the 1st half of the year. I do think that he is not up to date on all the economic principles that drive markets and that drive prices as it was really very unreasonable to seriously think something like that would happen.

Dear Lordy, I really have wandered off the reservation.

Since you feel so strongly about that point you made, why not PM him to say that you stuck up for him in the way you did?

the big font becaise he is just having one eye. have respect for the disabled!

You may now kiss my ass.

Thank you.

Uhhhh...why he was wrong, and why he fits a pattern that might well be useful to people who don't max out the font size?

The guy was wrong!

What is it about that that you do not get?

But a revealing one. Back in 1998, I bought the then-new Contrarian Investment Strategies: The Next Generation by David Dreman. His "contrarian" strategy is essentially a low P/E strategy: its base is to confine your picks to the stocks that are in the lowest quintile of market P/Es while chopping out the small-cap issues. The strategy itself is great: I even gave a it fantasy-account real-time whirl from May '09 to May '10 at Marketocracy and it worked very well. The purely passive option - after chopping out the stocks with zero dividends and stocks with a dividend rate below the S&P 500's average dividend % - beat the S&P 500 handily and was in the top 20 percentile of fantasy accounts.

But...part of his training manual involves eschewing hot stocks. That gave his book a funny part in retrospect. In order to drum in the idea that chasing fad stocks is a sucker bet, he discussed bubbles past and popped. One of those bubbles was...the Internet bubble, which he implied had popped in 1997!

[Actually, a lot of mid-90s Internet IPOs like Yahoo! were decimated in late '97. One of them, Spyglass, never came back. At the time his book went to press, YHOO was still humbled.]

And that taught me a very important market lesson. People who are skeptical, rut-stuck but common-sensical - the ones who like to watch bubbles and handicap when they'll end while staying safely away - are good at spotting bubbles. But they always call the top of a bubble much, much earlier than the real top. In the case of 'ordinary' bubbles in the stock market, they call the top two to three years early. [Informed guesstimate.] With assets that raise emotions, like gold and (yes) Bitcoin, there's usually a bit of fud lurking in their heads so they tend to be significantly earlier than three years early.

I understand that the new meme in these parts is that crypto now is like the Internet itself as of ~1994. I not only agree with it, but I've also gotten several early-Internet tidbits that show what a good analogy it is. But the trouble is, when I buy into a concept I spend some time thinking about it.

And what I've been thinking in re the current meme is: if it holds up, there is going to be a rather big bubble in cryptocurrencies that will climax around 2020 or so.

Of course, that leaves six years for the analogy to break down, but...

Ya fuckin' think?

If Bitcoins do go that low, everyone will buy it then it will go back up.

It just went up one dollar in thirty seconds. If it continues at this rate in a month it will be over $86,000