Topic: Silkroad seized bitcoins to impact price? - page 2. (Read 4385 times)

What about the people that lose the auction?  They may decide they still want bitcoins and start buying off exchanges.

Oh - that will be fun to watch... I could see a whale push the price up and affect exchange rates upward as well.  I wonder what the duration of the auction would be.

Usually, the auctions are very transparent, with disclosures of number of bids as well as the bid amounts.
Have a look at the auction of this Toyota Tacoma
http://gsaauctions.gov/gsaauctions/aucitdsc/?sl=41QSCI14219001

If this is the case, then there will be price swings as each bid comes in during the auctions.

I agree on this point which is why I was wondering if the sale price will become public.  If it does become, public and it is much lower than current market rate, it could cause a correction in the marketplace.

All the people saying that a government auction of Silk Road seized Bitcoins won't affect the price of Bitcoin are wrong.

They assume that the people buying Bitcoin at government auction would not have bought Bitcoins otherwise. This is almost certainly false in the majority of cases. They are mostly people who want to buy Bitcoins, and decide to buy them at the government auction instead of an exchange. This means fewer bidders on the auctions, which will drive down the price.

Will the sale price be released after the sale?  I don't think these coins will be dumped on the market and I venture to guess that Winklevii, SecondMarket, or an exchange may purchase these coins.

It depends how many prospective investors there are out there who have not bought, waiting for an opportunity like this. Could be a lot of pent up buying pressure off the exchanges.

It will certainly have some impact on the price. It might drop a bit but will recover as it always does.
A whale might buy it all and sell it for the profit, who knows.

Short term it will but longterm no way.

The auction will certainly have impact on price.

Will be interesting to see which big whale will openly bid on controversial coin and how much discount will be given on the size.

This is true but in gambling generally the house has an edge and most people come out behind over the long run. Proper investing, stocks, bonds, gold, real estate most be -should- come out ahead in the long run.  Where does Bitcoin fall?  Hopefully in the investing side.

As far as the price drop.  It was certainly due to the news.  More coins to hot the market.  Same thing happens to stocks all the time.  Shares get released by insiders, price drop.  Simple dilution.  If a smaller company does a secondary stock offering (ie, more dilution) the price will drop.  This happened to Bitcoin.  The difference being 30k in coins is not a major dilution, but its certainly something.

That is true but the odds are more in your favor

Any choice we make is not really different than gambling. We choose based on our knowledge and experience and hoping the choice of one outcome is better the choice of another outcome.

This is technically true, however if you do your research and put your money in companies/investments that are less likely to fail then this is less like gambling.

Investing is often a kind of gamble. For examples, in stocks most of the people do not know if they will go up or down in advantage.

Noone can really tell you what will happen to the price of anything over the short term.

If you can properly analyze the underlying fundamentals of an investment then you can predict how well it will perform.

Some people I hang out with think bitcoin will go up to 20k usd per coin. These people are playing a really long game.

Psychology coupled with market technicals seem to be missing from the discussion here, so I think I'll add them.

The recent rally from $450 was starting to get stale.  We had two very strong moves upward to about $690, and then the price just kind of dropped to the $625-$675 range and stayed there a while--probably too long, as it turns out.  My general feeling was that the market was waiting for an excuse to sell off.  This is part of how auction markets work.  They never move in a straight line.  They go a ways, pull back, and continue on.

Think about the psychology behind this.  If you bought in at $450 and you're sitting there at $650 with a nice $200/BTC profit, and it doesn't break out to the upside, and then it still doesn't break out to the upside, how are you going to feel?  You'd probably start to get nervous because you don't want to give back part or all of your profit.  But you also don't want to miss out on more profit if it does eventually continue up.  So you wait it out, looking for a reason to either sell or stay in your position.  A potentially negative piece of news hits (the auction announcement), so you sell to lock in your profit, figuring the price will drop and you can buy back in lower (if you want to continue to trade).

In the short term, the market simply ran out of buyers around $650, and it looked like the auction news was a reason for some people to sell.  Whether or not the auction will actually affect the price after the auction is irrelevant.  We had reached a point of buying exhaustion and needed to pull back.

Hence people investing in bitcoin is really no different than gambling.

Quite a drop over the past 24 hours but a decent rebound.

Makes you wonder what'll happen when they announce they're going to sell the 144k coins