Topic: I am predicting a spike above $3 - page 2. (Read 10622 times)

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.517942

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Clearly you are an experienced investor, since you've quickly seen through the facade of Bitcoinica and Zhoutong's posts. Also clearly, you must rely on somebody's else opinions about the actual underlying technology.

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What Bitcoinica facade? You call it a scam?

I'm not getting mad, I just like a little heat in my discussions.

Part of why I am arguing so strongly against excessive speculation is because I see the same bullshit being dished out by "investors" who want to do the exact same thing with bitcoin as they have done with every other asset, i.e. create artificial volatility so they can skim profits off the top while contributing absolutely nothing and simultaneously making the economic environment of bitcoin incompatible with legitimate commerce. This is my biggest grievance with the speculators here.

Few seem to understand that what has been happening to bitcoin over the past couple of months is a result of the exact same mentality that caused all the other asset bubbles we have seen since the 70s, only since the value of bitcoin is solely determined by investor sentiment, and the system has even less regulation than our current monetary system, the opportunity for pulling off these scams is incredible.

The only way to counter this is to persecute speculators who are in it solely for short term profit. Doing this, you often end up tarring all investors with the same brush. But I have nothing but respect for people who invest and hold long positions because of their belief in the future success of bitcoin.

It is the people who buy and sell only to realize short term fiat profit that I have a problem with, because they are siphoning value out of the system, away from those who believe in the project, and making the whole thing as unstable as an elephant on a pogo stick.

I really don't know what you are trying to convey.

I can say that I'm really interested in the perception of the Bitcoin project, both amongst those who can read the source code and those who wont understand it. For the project with about 25 thousand lines of hard-to-read code the amount of misunderstanding among the software professionals is within my expected boundaries.

For non-practitioners in software I just don't have a frame of reference. I'm just trying to comprehend what they are imagining or believing as the features of Bitcoin. And if they believe then whom and in what claims. I find this very interesting and this is what is continuing to draw me to this forum.

Clearly you are an experienced investor, since you've quickly seen through the facade of Bitcoinica and Zhoutong's posts. Also clearly, you must rely on somebody's else opinions about the actual underlying technology.

Geezus, why are we getting mad at each other?  precisely correct.

ok, so at the very minimum, whether Bitcoin works or not, i am in it for the principle and you would seem to understand that.

fundamentally the code is working, as in the blockchain marches on.  from an economically fundamental point of view, yes the merchant economy is not there yet.  but i see it getting there slowly.  rather than pronouncing it dead at this early point, i say lets give it time.

I disagree that we should stop talking because we can't agree

I don't think it was fiat currency alone that is to blame. It is a huge part of it, but it's a deliberately complex situation that the banking elites have tried to obscure from us. In my opinion, it is more to do with the perfect storm of fiat currency, the lack of fiscal discipline in the central banks, the advent of derivative investment vehicles, and of course fractional reserve banking which resulted in swathes of investment capital flooding into virtually every market you can think of, causing massive speculative asset bubbles the likes of which have never been seen before.

If fiat currency was regulated properly and banks were held to account for excessive risk taking we wouldn't have the ability to pump money into these asset bubbles, and they would therefore not reach the levels we saw in 2008 with the housing market in the US and some european countries.

The problem as I see it is the lag in information dissemination between investment bankers and the general public. The bankers begin to inflate an asset with their large purchasing power, after which, lower rung investors begin to pile in. The bankers know they are triggering asset bubbles, and are ready to sell their holdings at the height of the bubble and then short all the way back down. They artificially create volatility so they can enrich themselves and their shareholders, taking money off everyone else.

And when their tactics fail, the government is there to bail them out with public money. They take massive risks on the behalf of the rest of society, and when they win they take all the rewards but when they lose, suffer none of the consequences. Since the 70's, and Regan's policies of abolishing financial regulation, they can do this with impunity. Nobody is held accountable, as they just conveniently blame the market when these bubbles burst claiming that 'nobody saw it coming'.

Anyone with a brain could have saw it coming, in fact, the worst part is that the people who tried to bring some sanity to the table were completely ignored or silenced, and the rest kept the information to themselves so they would have a competitive edge when the inevitable occurred. This thing resulted from a wide-ranging conspiracy between banks, governments, the media and wealthy elites to enrich themselves at the cost of everyone else.

I too love bitcoin because of what it is trying to achieve. Whether or not it is successful or not, what keeps me going is the thought that one day, bankers will wake up to find that poison arrow lodged squarely in their chests.

maybe i should try to frame this differently.  

what i think has been the root cause of all our financial problems for the last decade or the last 100 years depending on your time frame is a "fiat currency crisis".  as central banks around the world print money to solve economic growth problems via sovereign currency devaluation as a means to increase exports, savers, elderly and financially prudent are punished greatly.

Bitcoin was designed as a poison arrow directed at the heart of the central banks of the world precisely to try and solve this problem.  whether it works or not remains to be seen and we can agree to disagree.

if we can't agree on these points then we should stop talking.

did i not say it right? how about the first p2p file sharing system that prevents copying?  how would you say it?

this is very true.  and if you have read my stuff on the gold thread you realize i don't view things traditionally too often. i prefer to think for myself acknowledging full heartedly that i could be incorrect.   but i just see too many similarities to gold in Bitcoin and i see the potential for a nexus btwn the power of the internet and a solution to our financial system problems. 

you're right.  whatever you want to call it; speculating or investing i don't care.  lets just say i'm putting USD's into what i consider an undervalued asset that has the potential to become a competing worldwide currency to gold and other fiat.  call me foolish.  thats ok.  i'm sure Jobs and Wozniak were considered foolish when they started up in a garage and after several years when they had 1% market share next to Microsoft.  even i thought they were dead.

its only irrational if you can predict the future and Bitcoin ends up destroyed.  none of us know for sure.  i just like the odds from what i see.

Ill bite.
Bitcoin source code is changed first on Gavin's computer, preventing copying but when he commits new code to github, it allows public access.  Its one of bitcoin's underlying fundamentals that changes every night, as the sourcecode is updated, thereby influencing BTC exchange rate.  Smart investors use that data to calculate and predict price swings.

See, that wasnt so hard?

 

I'm curious. What does the above sentence mean? Anyone?

Nobody is disputing your enthusiasm for bitcoin, it is admirable. I have already read some of your thread on Gold over the previous weeks, and I know that you are not a run of the mill lemming like so many of the others.

You clearly know what you are talking about when it comes to gold, but that is the crux. Bitcoin is not like any existing currency, commodity, equity or any financial instrument currently in existence, so the traditional ways of viewing these things have to be called into question.

You cannot rationally be a investing in the bitcoin market and basing decisions on fundamentals alone, because there is very little change in fundamental economic indicators. As others have said, 99% of the speculation that is going on is speculation on the speculation of others. It has no grounding in the growth of the real bitcoin economy, and actually discourages adoption of bitcoin by new merchants, thus ultimately dooming your own investment.

The level of speculation we are seeing is completely irrational until the bitcoin economy is able to post figures that can, at least somewhat, back up the wild delusions of these zero-sum cowboys.

that thread encompasses not just gold btw.  its an incredibly in depth debate primarily btwn miscreanity and i about world economics, deflation vs inflation, investing, technical vs fundamental analysis, etc.  miscreanity knows way more than most of these clowns here too.  thats my baby and i've poured my heart into it while taking my time to post thoughtfully and with care. and i've have made some pretty damn good calls if i may so which is why its got so many views i think.

edit:  this board here.  yeah, they're right, its for children and i've never said i didn't have some of those tendencies.

keep going through the thread. we do debate Bitcoin as well.

this Spec forum is the Wild West.  it's hard to maintain and put the time in needed for in depth thoughtful posts here when there are so many crazies hanging around.

ok, if you insist i'll trot out all the fundamental positives that many here on this forum have already elucidated a thousand times.  i speculate or invest in Bitcoin based on those fundamentals for the following reasons:

1.  the first sourcecode that prevents file copying while allowing public access.
2.  that same sourcecode that has created a blockchain of financial data that still exists 3 yr since its evolution and has resisted all forms of attack.
3.  a stable rate of inflation thats diminishes with time and eventually goes to zero.
4.  a protocol which could eventually be used as a currency if a Bitcoin is perceived as a stable store of value.
5.  a dedicated group of devs that work for free in supporting and advancing the innovations of this same code.
6.  a continuous appearance of new technologies and implementations surrounding Bitcoin.  i won't bother to list them all b/c there's alot.
7.  a sourcecode that could be used as a different form of gold standard for the USD.  that is, a fixed supply commodity/currency whatever you want to call it, that the existing USD fractional reserve system could be upon in a rigid 10:1 ratio.  PM's IMO are too difficult to fulfill that role.  this one will generate all sorts of howls i'm sure but this is how i see best Bitcoin being used.
8.  the fact that i think the Bears on this forum are wrong
9.  that fact that i do have Libertarian tendencies and wish to express that outlook by supporting at technology that will hopefully change the system for the better.
10. i believe in open source projects and the many examples of how well these have played out the last 10 years.

howl away.

Thanks for the pointer to this interesting post, which I had ignored until now because I'm mostly paying attention to bitcoin.  It sounds as though you were actually thinking about gold's potential, and had thoughtful, substantial arguments behind your assertions.  I wish your posts about bitcoin were as thoughtful and thought-provoking.

That just made my day If only you could act as if you were smart.
Anyway, Ive made my point, unsubscribing and pulling out. Good luck with your lottery trading. Im sure your ability to discern trends and changes in fundamentals that simply arent there in a market as volatile as this, will make you rich beyond belief.

cypherdoc: I don't speculate on what other speculators will do.
mjcmurfy: that's bullshit. what do you speculate on then?
cypherdoc: how can i possibly answer that? stop acting so smart.

It's quite easy. Just tell me what it is you are speculating on if you aren't speculating on metrics that are directly related to the decisions of other speculators? It's only difficult to answer if you were lying, or didn't fully understand what you were saying, and now realize that you cannot answer the question without invalidating your original statement.

Either way, this only highlights and reinforces the assumptions I already have.
So, keep trying, or else stfu.

how hard is it to respond to that question?  sometimes it pays to follow the speculators, sometimes not.  this is a personal judgment based on what each individual feels they know about the underlying technology.

you can choose to be a momentum follower for Bitcoin or not.  i can choose not to be and be a contrarian to the recent price fall.  if the price starts to ramp up again, then yes, i'll become a momentum follower as i believe the fundamentals of Bitcoin support a further price rise. 

stop acting like you're so smart.

I will make whatever assumptions I like, based on the things that you are saying and the points you are arguing. My post was in direct response to a statement that you made claiming that you "don't speculate on what other speculators will do". This is just bullshit, and you have been called out. Feel free to prove me wrong, the onus is on you to refute my assumptions, not on me to read through a week-long thread. I am still waiting for the answer to my previous question, so my assumptions will remain until you answer it, and will be reinforced if you fail to answer it adequately.