Topic: Does BTC Value Even Matter for Whales? (Read 2519 times)

While this is possible, it is not very probable.  All the belief in the bitcoin protocol would have to evaporate for prices to collapse that far again.  If Wall Street Injected a big stake like you said, their injection alone would keep BTC prices above the double digits.  Once Wall Street is publicly invested in BTC it gives it much more validity in a lot of people's eyes as well.

There is a huge pile of unfunded liabilities in the US and in the EU; the USD bubble will pop

Bitcoin is efficient to store wealth and transfer money among other things; the 6Billions USD market cap isn't that big in that regard

There is a HUGE BTC price bubble. Yes, a whale can easily manipulate BTC. All it takes is having enough money.

Because it's not possible. We saw what happened with the $100 spike, it was back up in minutes. Even with satoshis stash dumped on the market it would be a matter of maybe weeks before we were back up near normal levels, and then your grand conspirators would be out of their stash. It's simply not realistic.

Lots can happen in between A, B, and C, and nothing is a foregone conclusion. The USA thought they could sponsor a 'revolution' in Ukraine getting a pro NATO government into power who would then go about booting the Russian Navy out of Crimea thus nullifying the Russian Navy.......turns out they couldn't. Even for the most powerful things don't always go to plan. Nothing is certain with Bitcoin. For example, who is to say the price won't be depressed right back down to double digits as Wall St take their positions, or even due to the machinations, manipulation and vandalism of less high profile financial bandits?

Not to play devil's advocate or anything, but if that truly is the case, wouldn't you want to be on the right side of this then and stock up on as many BTC as possible?

Perhaps a prototype of such a currency. A pilot scheme perhaps whose ultimate implementation is aimed towards facilitating capital flight from economies that the US dominated West are wanting to or happy to see being crushed.

Putting the tinfoil hat to one side however, what is a more likely scenario?

Bitcoin, the ingenious and uncrackable decentralised digital currency using cryptographic algorithms developed by US intelligence is invented by:

a) A team of coding and cryptographic specialists, pooled together under one roof with unlimited resources thrown at them to develop and perfect the technology over many years.
b) Some lone working Japanese American model train geek who got tired of paying international wire fees when ordering toy trains from the UK, so came up with Bitcoin in his spare time, presumably.

For me, the unquestionably more likely scenario has me reaching back for that tin foil hat.

So you are thinking that bitcoin is the universal currency created by the New World Order?

Lesson learned! never ever ever short with leverage Bitcoin! ever!

It is not immune, this is something we see now afterall, but you can not buy large quantities no matter how hard you try. There's only so much gullible people you can take coins from, and they tend to not have much. 10, 20 thousand total? Possible, but anything resembling a controlling market share would be hard and would cause a rally to new highs. See, no large holder would sell you coins at this prices where we sit now, no matter how much you scare them So your only option is taking it from some monkey like Karpeles.

you need to think as a market maker ( those guys who match buy/sell orders ... ) so, imagine that you are an exchanger and Mister Nakamoto knock your door and say I want to sell my coins ... what would you do with such big order ?

Can't argue with your point regarding miners as I don't know enough about it.

Regarding bankers/financial pirates not taking over Bitcoin, With a market cap of around $6 Billion, Bitcoin is still very much a penny stock in the grander scheme of things. Any establishment financial house could grab as much of it as they wanted at any price that they wanted. If they were to take an interest in it however, the most likely price that they took the lino share of their stake in Bitcoin would be at a very very low price and they have both the expertise and the funds to ensure that the market was depressed low enough as to be to their liking. This sort of thing goes on in the finance world all the time. I find it amusing that you somehow think that Bitcoin is immune.

If any government really wanted to destroy Bitcoin, they could crash the price to single digits for the price of a few dozen cruise missiles.

Bitcoin is not going to 'beat the bankers'. Not ever.

This is completely wrong. The cost includes mainly the hardware cost. Once you have the hardware, turning it off is the most idiotic thing a miner could do. So scratch that conclusion from your mind Miners might stop selling if the price goes too low because they need to get back invested dollars, that is the only thing that would happen with (theoretic) low prices. Current price of bitcoin to make asic mining not profitable electricity-wise is about 30$.

You other ideas about bankers taking control over bitcoin etc were also fun to discuss in 2010. Now, there is no such danger (try to buy one million coins at these prices, good luck), we moved to a higher level, government regulation level. Once bitcoin takes another baby step, that won't be a problem as well, because it will move to a completely distributed acquiring network by 2015.

Dude I started buying at 135, all the way up to 1130 and all the way down to where we are. I'm currently something like 30% down. Doesn't matter, still buying whenever I have any kind of spare monopoly money. The long term is what counts. And I'm not relying on any of that stuff, the only thing I rely on is elementary mathematics: Limited supply means the price goes up as demand increases, and demand is increasing.

I know.

The difference between me and you is that I started buying Bitcoin in the midst of a blatantly speculative bubble. Had I just bought and held with the amount of money I went in with, I would right now, be considerably deeper underwater than the entirety of what I just loss in my worst ever and very last leveraged short trade, without having taken a single penny of profit. Unlike yourself, I have had to keep on my toes and I have been rewarded for doing so, although much of that reward was dashed against rocks over the past few days.

Calling trades is easy, until you are actually using real and significant amounts of your own funds, and worse still, are leveraged up to the eyeballs. I have proven to myself that I don't have the psychology or hard mental discipline that it takes to do it and now I expect to be tormented further as Bitcoin grinds right back down to my short sell 'buy-in' in level. I shall however keep my eye on Bitcoin with an investors mentality as opposed to that of a trader. My talent is definitely in taking a simple long position and knowing when the wind is about to start blowing against me.

And I wouldn't be so confident in your quad-digit coins. For that to happen, you are relying on this bear market finally playing out and Bitcoin finally creeping out from under the weight of the long term trend line in a steady, measured, and sustainable manner, as opposed to the manic, totally unsustainable, and probably manipulated vertical break-outs that we have been seeing. Bitcoin has to do this at price level that doesn't greatly harm the functioning of the P2P network. Thereafter, you will be basically relying on Bitcoin being used once again as a form of capital flight, preferably a form of emergency capital flight as this is when the most capital will be pile into Bitcoin completely insensitive to the price level.

Bitcoin could go back to quad digits and then some, or it could collapse completely.

Your problem is that you only think short term mat. I'm a shit trader too, so I don't do it. But I am not a shit investor.

Fundamentals say that the price has to go up over the long term, and history shows the pattern it follows in doing so. Once we break into the thousands we will never go below 1200 again, which means that anything below that is cheap. It doesn't matter if it takes a month or two years before we break out of the current phase. The longer it takes the more quad-digit coins I will end up with.

I don't need to understand 'what Bitcoin is' to know that any kind of technology, or utilisation of technology is always liable to be improved upon with early versions of things nearly always becoming redundant due to improvements in newer upgraded versions of a technology and/or the original technology running into unforseeable problems.

Failing for some X-Factor involving emergency capital flight, Bitcoin is going to $200 range. No doubt it will spike down here strongly and rebound back again to test the long term down trend as we have seen many times before. If demand for Bitcoin fails to take it over and beyond the long term down trend as currently seems to be the case once again at $540, then who is to say at what price level Bitcoin must trend or crash down to before organic demand picks up again. Now, without knowing a whole lot about it, I have read that the average cost of mining 1 BTC is somewhere around $300. If Bitcoin spends any length of time beneath this price level then the miners must surely start to switch of their rigs in droves, and with that down goes a great chunk of the Bitcoin network. Unless I am missing something, the whole system could come to a painstaking grinding halt and such a situation would spell out the need for a serious reappraisal of the way in which the Bitcoin system is structured and would have even the most hard bitten of Bitcoin investors cashing out in droves.

If I were a bankster wanting to destroy Bitcoin, I would make sure that exactly this happened. I could do this, and I could profit from doing it.

If I were a bankster wanting my establishment house to take a controlling stake in Bitcoin, I could do this, I could profit in doing it, and I could scoop up a million or two of BTC at unthinkable rock bottom prices before ramping the price back up to levels where the miners could turn their rigs back on and profitably mine.

I would suggest that a great many forseeable and unforseeable obstacles lie in Bitcoin's path and there is absolutely no guarantee that they will all be overcome without the need for some kind of crypto rethink.

Nope, very bad analogy, shows that you still don't understand what bitcoin is. Today we have tcp/ip, just as we had it back in 1990. Supporting network of tcp/ip communicating devices have grown tremendously since then, but the protocol is still the same. Google and Facebook are just some of the currently popular applications on top of that. Will there be a whole application layer on top of bitcoin network? Absolutely. Does it mean bitcoin network will be thrown away? Not faster than ipv4, which is being replaced with ipv6 for 20 years now. Any change that requires replacing hardware infrastructure worldwide is hard and is done only out of absolute necessity. I don't see such a necessity with bitcoin (yet?).

No.

But I think it will have it's moment in the sun as a means of emergency capital flight and will burn much more brightly than it ever did before. Saying exactly when or how this will happen though is more a geo-political area than a financial or technical area.

Ultimately I think Bitcoin will implode taking billions of wealth with it. Until then it will have it's 'uses' and will continue to enrich some people and impoverish others. With that said, I do think that crypto currency is here to stay but that none of the present applicants need reapply. Think of the early days of the internet (since it was before you were born you may struggle with that). Today we have Google and Facebook who are undeniably the two most prominent and instantly recognisable internet brands. In the early days, neither of those two even existed. Both of these took concepts that were already firmly established (search engines and social networking), but just done them a whole lot better. Same thing is bound to happen in crypto currencies.

Well i guess you have your reasons...But Do you think, realistically, that bitcoin will ever succeed as a currency? (Not caring if it does, just thinking if it will)