Topic: Does anyone think the price is unsustainable? Only bears please and seriousness. - page 2. (Read 6940 times)

I honestly don't know. I am a bitcoin bear I own 0 coins.
The only reason I am in this forum is because I don't want to
miss it when someone smarter then me invents it.

I advise keeping a very close eye on every altcoin that comes out. One of them is likely to be at bitcoin killer. Until such a coin is released bitcoin will probably keep trending up because the narrative is so compelling it disguises the fact that it is in essence a giant pyramid scheme.

This is the interesting bit. How does your "better designed rival" look?

Bitcoin is the perfect asset bubble

1) Take a truly revolutionary idea (cryptocurrency)
2) Apply it to a pyramid scheme https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/is-bitcoin-a-pyramid-or-ponzi-scheme-what-are-the-ramifications-341594
3) Tell people they will be rich but only if the "have strong hands" and never sell
4) Threaten people that all their cash will be worthless in the future ie they will lose most of their wealth if they don't invest.
5) Sell gradually to all the "strong hands" until the game is up and bitcoin dies at the hands of a better designed rival that is not based on a pyramid

Not all day traders and even the successfull ones not everytime.

Price rise or go down, day traders are making money either way 

Try putting it in the context of a motive extension and things will make sense again. Also you might want to readjust where the impulse begins at. Good Luck!

http://www.elliottwave.net/educational/basictenets/basics2.htm

I've been studying the charts and I actually now agree that this is likely a bubble, a huge slow growing short-term bubble. Doesn't mean we won't see $10,000XBT i still believe we are heading there but on the short-term we may have a 60% correction from bubble peak. At this stage a 60% correction may only mean a price between $600-$900 after which we stabilize there for a while until the next bull run.

Either way i don't think we'll ever see below $500 again.

Well if there is a sell of and all the people borrowing money to get rich sell on the way down for a loss and lose. That is on them. Why invest in something you know nothing about. If you believe in Bitcoin, Which I do regardless of the price. If It goes to .00000001 so be it, ill just buy it up for cheap as hell until someone really realizes the potential and money maker bitcoin is. If you look at the tech and theory behind bitcoin, you will believe in it. No price will let you sell especially some created sell off to spoke the market. If the rich wanted Bitcoin to fail they would allow everyone to buy it super easy. Banks would be offering it and suggesting it. Its hard to get your money transferred and exchanges are being shut down is to keep every that sees the number $1000 and says I cant buy a bitcoin i don't have a $1000. So they will just stay broke.

Hoarding and not selling -by the some or the most- and taking loans to buy at these prices - scared money - infact will trigger bigger selloff , a normal healthy correction from the top is going to happen thats for sure , now when it happens all this scared money and the traders who didnt sell at the top will realize that their wealth is evaporating -20 or 30% correction- , then they will lose patience and start selling as well , thats how panic selling starts , its a domino effect , a normal healthy correction will turn into a bigger selloff .

You was right, $800 was really unsustainable with such demand.

I don't quite believe in EW myself, but I do think that how the fundamental valuation based on public perception is described is right.
The catalyst can be many different things, I just gave an example of which I think it would be obvious.

I don't think that some conspiracy is required to crash the price. Just demand and supply, at a certain price level we'll see a lot more supply.

And this is not a 5-5-5 EW, we are way beyond that. We already had 148$, 233$, 378$ (rebound to 395$), 900$ and now we probably are
close to the top of a humongous wave B, due to about 12M$ (on Gox) more than at the top 900$ crash.
The EW theory turned out to be just a particular case, it needs to be rewritten.

true that. I would tend to agree with some things said here, however on the other side you have all the investment, the media hype, and of course the chinese. reminds me a bit of how twitter started out with the media.

If you are calling a correction you aren't a true bear.
At the end, or as EW followers call it the wave 5-5-5 there would likely be a huge scandal acting as a catalyst to bring on a true collapse. My best tip would be some sort of fraudulent conspiracy which all Bitcoin exchanges, payment processors and funds were and are engaged in, or proof and public acceptance of it.
While I am not fully certain that this is going on I always keep the possibility in mind.

A simple correction like the ones we had before where the price ultimately rises above the peak is a dead certain giveaway. I hope you know to tell apart one and the other.

Have any of you read some of the posts by the bulls lately. They are all talking about holding and not selling, prices going to 10K. People are discussing taking loans out to buy bitcoins.

Do any of you true bears doubt that a huge correction will come? It seems that we have everybody holding and not selling and this is just driving up the price higher and higher. Why sell when you can sell higher as each day a new higher price is guaranteed. How long can this last if people are not selling and just holding?

I personally think that only a few people will benefit from the higher price as there has to reach a point when people want to cash out and the market will not be able to support such huge cash outs. They money is simply not there. New money is just too hard to transfer in, I am trying to buy some test fractional bitcoins and it is extremely hard dealing and finding exchanges to buy bitcoins. I can not see new people entering bitcoin fast enough to really make a difference.

I am really stumped here  .

Exactly, I agree with you crypto-currency is not widely accept as store of value as gold yet. That's exactly BTC is still only $1000 now, much lower than the cap of gold. All the risks you mentioned are valid, but actually I think a more serous  threat of BTC is just a new version of crypto currency. This risk is larger than the sum of all the risks you mentioned. However, we don't need to panic, since we will notice it if there's such a new technology. All your concern is that BTC may be dead before accepted by mainstream . It's possible, but more and more unlikely with what happened recently. I think I will bet on it and the odds is not against me.

Fair play, sorry for misinterpreting.

Let's try again then


Gold only has value as long as you can convert it into a currency. A lump of gold on it's own, for the most part, is useless. You can't go into 99% of shops and pay for things in gold, you can't eat it, you can't drink it. So gold is only has value by your definition as long as people are willing to trade it for something that is useful to you (e.g. fiat or food or an xbox.)
The exact same can be said about Bitcoin. It's only useful or has any value if people trade it, otherwise it's just useless hoarding of junk. So you're right, it is similar to gold in that sense.

So no we can look at your original argument that Bitcoin is safer than gold and all others as an investment (which was the point I was refuting in my original post you quoted.)

Gold is a tried and tested investment option (or store of value or whatever you want to call it) in so much as we have a better understanding of what it is, how it works, why it works, who wants it, how much we have, and who wants how much - it's part of our society and culture.

Cryptocurrencies are not. There are numerous things that could collapse the price of cryptos to near 0: a break of ECDSA & SHA-256, revelation that Satoshi & bitcoin = FBI sting, Satoshi dumps 2million coins, the internet stops working, a MtGox, bitstamp and BTCChina get hacked at the sametime and initiate a huge sell (like 2011.) If any of these happened, your cryptocurrencies would not be useful, because people would be considerably less likely to accept them as payment due to technical inadequacy or social stigma.

Society as a hole does not accept cryptocurrencies as valuable by default: e.g. it's not hardcoded into our society like the value of shiny gold. Psychologically, gold will always hold value to a large amount of people because it's part of our history and culture (even more so in other cultures.)

For this reason, I believe it would take a far more radical event to collapse gold to $0 than it would cryptocurrencies. And for that reason, I believe Bitcoin is a higher risk investment than gold.

Sure you can say if we all accepted and understood Bitcoin, then it would be worth something, and that may happen so it's a good investment. But that is pure speculation, and that's not the kind of value we're talking about, right?

Seems easy money to be made by trading, right?
Try it and you will likely be surprised it is not such easy

How would that work in practical terms?

I am afraid I did not express myself clear enough so forgive me to repeat myself here.

Compared with property and stock, bitcoin is more like gold. That means 1 BTC is always 1 BTC, it will never collapse, burnt, bankrupt, or diluted. So it just like gold, can be a very good way to keep value. In short, you buy BTC and keep them in paper wallet, and after couple of years, its value will not affected by all the inflations, no matter how much paper money has been printed.

I am talking about the value, not the price measured by fiat. The value of BTC only disappears when it is no long used to keep value, just like the silver, which is almost just a useful metal now. If BTC is replaced by a better crypto-currency, then it's value may goes to 0. Otherwise, it is always there. No one will deny using crypto-currency to keep value is a great idea, and once it is accepted by the mainstream it is not reversible.

As we know, one of the big value of bitcoin is its scarce. There's only 21m coins, and that's the key for it to keep its value. Therefore, we buy some when they are still affordable and then keep them to hedge all the fiat inflation risks. That's the investment I mentioned. In this sense, holding BTC is safer and easier than holding stocks, properties, or gold.

Most of what you said above, however, are related to price and trading. That is completely short term and manipulated by whales. Concentrating on the price is speculation, not investment, and is not related to what I am talking.

One more thing to add:
In stead of asking 'is the price of bitcoin sustainable', how about asking 'is the value of fiat sustainable'? I am afraid the latter has much more obvious answer.