Topic: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion - page 18723. (Read 26709834 times)

We can't seem to figure out the calibration in between the sizes of blocks and why does Chinese seamen make great volume. Can you help us?

yes, any day now difficulty will be dropping and my 2 netbooks will make me a fortune again ...

The demand doesn't come from one buyer but from market as a whole, as a seller obviously i choose the highest bidder. Why would i sell it to you for $1 when someone else is willing to pay $575? Now i'd prefer to sell it for $10,000 each because i bought a bunch of these USB miners from my local retail store and my cost of electricity is sky high, but somehow i doubt that any buyer cares much about that. Miners must sell, and don't have an option not to because they don't like the price. Otherwise they become investors and carry additional FX exposure risk on their "inventory" (assuming utilities, salaries, equipment, is purchased with other currency). They're not kids mining in parents garage that can choose not to sell if they don't like the price, and somehow get a consortium going where everyone other miner does the same.

Your line of though only works if all (or majority) of miners collaborate together in kind of an oligopoly (think OPEC) and agree to artificially restrict supply bellow certain price, and even that probably won't work for long.

Or to use your example: I want to buy BTC from you for $575, you want to sell it for $1000 and explain how your cost of production is so high. I wish you good luck finding an idiot that cares, and just wait after you lower the price to my buy range or invest in something else. After spending few days trying to convince people to buy it for $1000 because of your high production cost you give up or get hungry or need to pay the electricity bill and sell it to the highest bidder. The fall in your logic is that it doesn't account for difficulty adjustments and that it can scale down.

Haven't been seeing you post in this WO thread for a while.   You been trading BTC the last couple of years?

Regarding China leading everything and leading since 2013, seems like you may still be in either 2013 or 2014.

That kind of characterization of bitcoin price dynamics is way too simple and inaccurate and could likely lead to mistaken price predictions in a large number of scenarios - especially in current times.

I will concede to you that sometimes it can be quite difficult to determine what event caused what when the price moved, and if there is merely a correlation relationship rather than a causation relationship.  Probably, since at least mid-2014, the west seems to have become quite a bit more skeptical about following china's price movement and skeptical of their purported volume on various exchanges.  Furthermore, the bitcoin space has become quite a bit more developed and complicated in terms of both on exchange and off exchange liquidation opportunities and investment vehicles.. and even in recent times having some ETH dynamics in actual physical relationship and in terms of the degree to which ETH has been touted in various regards in the press as BTC competition.

Anyhow I think that there's a lot of BTC price influences - and surely your underlying thesis regarding probable ongoing BTC price manipulation (and attempts at such) coming from various sectors will like continue to take place on a fairly significant level at least until BTC achieves about an additional 100x market cap increase (if that in the coming), which would put us close to a $1trillion market cap.  Not impossible to manipulate price, but a bit more difficult than the current status.

are we rich yet

A good point.

The liquidity is the interesting part to me. Fair number of trades taking place to balance that closely. Something you don't see with the lesser alts.

@dumbfbrankings: Yeah, a bit exaggerated by top one being BTC/USD, bottom being ETH/BTC (if ETH stayed flat rel USD, you'd see the same inverse/mirror image thing. The fact that ETH went up by 5.76% is just gravy)

Agree that longer term plays are still relatively easy.  Those would be the high "win rate" plays.  Losing edge on the shorter term plays will have a dramatic influence on variance tho.  It's where the bodies are buried !  A slow leakage, that slowly hastens in time due to excess activity.  The analogy being to the online poker player that met his own eventual demise by being overly aggressive and too "active" with other very competent players.  Variance skyrocketed with few people noticing or fully appreciating it.  Some of these otherwise competent players went bust from an extended "cold streak", farther stretched than anticipated.  Some of them had a "hot streak" of course, which only instilled a false sense of confidence in one's "game" and talents.  Those players would move up in stakes rapidly, with that confidence, before the variance would inevitably bite them in the ass.  

Least in Bitcoin there's a simple solution, focus on the higher win rate plays which sometimes require sitting tight.  Don't fly too close to the sun.

They dance well together, no?

While this is a neat analogy and may have some truth, another truth remains in the current trading landscape currently and that is that China leads. In fact China has led since at least late 2013, early stages of bubble #2 that year.

China is also easily influenced by things like devaluation of the CNY.  So patterns are still relatively easy to spot and understand. However, if you are just scalping maybe its more difficult, but longer term plays, are still pretty easy in my opinion.

Haha, it's socially acceptable modern degeneracy and legal gambling.        

Crazy when you think about it...  Fan Duel taking all the heat.  "Gambling is bad, mmmkay."  Yet anyone can go margin long Dogecoin or MaidSafeCoin, then flip it and go all-in short Litecoin 5 minutes later, then 3x Bitcoin long 2 minutes after that.  LOL

But did those poker amateurs have powerful scientifical tools like Technical Analysisis? How about Eliot Brainwave Transmutaion?
Yeah, we got science, bitch! That's why recreational trading will always stay highly profitable for us ("fish") bitcoin enthusiasts.

With the games drying up, online poker professionals anticipated that other professionals would be what they'd need overcome to make a living.  Many of them focused their attention then on challenging these other professionals, with more aggressive strategies and so forth.  Ironically, it was really the poor fundamental understanding, and appreciation, of variance, and how it was dramatically influenced by the changing landscape, that led to the down fall of many.  What was once a clearly definable, theoretical win rate from a sample size of ~20k dealt hands all of a sudden took 2,000,000 hands.  And even then it wasn't obvious.

Traders should probably adjust appropriately, with the expectation that their theoretical "win rate" (percentage of time they're correct), at least from years ago, has almost certainly dropped.  Bigger market means bigger sharks.  And whales.  A Joe Blow with 20k bitcoins in 2013 could get to work and cause some damage.  Now, unfortunately for him, he can't.  He should trade less frequently, else be busted by trading fees and... variance.  Variance is a bitch.  And almost always underestimated from intuition.

Nothing is for sure in bitcoin.


1st phase was breaking passed the upper $400s, which we have done which seems very likely to bring us to about the mid 600s.. if the run goes better than anticipated, then could take us to the upper $700s.

if we break through well into the $800s then it becomes likely that we are going to go into the $3k to $5k arena.....


Yes, nothing is inevitable, so this earlier run could go better or worse than expected and the same is true for the next run.

Indeed...  Reminds me a little of the shifting online poker landscape.

In 2008, you'd take a virtual "seat" at a 6-handed online table, with 4 complete amateurs ("fish") and maybe 1 other competent player.  By 2012, you'd be lucky if you found one amateur at your table (assuming it wasn't you).  The easy money exploiting others at the table was gone.  The games were becoming more efficient and more transparent.  The large exploits that worked so well began working dramatically less.  In many cases, the outcome would be an almost hostile, and in some cases self-destructive, spatting between the competent players.  This led to significant spikes in variance, as aggression between those competent players picked up, naturally, and theoretical win rates began falling off.  Amateurs eventually went "bust" or learned a lesson.  In No Limit, those lessons come quickly and relentlessly.

If the "sharks" in crypto-currency are the traders and speculators, both at the individual and institutional level, they're certainly swinging at each other now.  I would cite the high variance and back and forth battling we've seen over the past ~week, with the price sliding up and down $20 regularly like it's nothing.  The amount of capital required now to push the market around is probably an order of magnitude higher, if not more, than when the exchanges were Mt Gox, Bitfinex and a few poorly understood Chinese exchanges.  Naturally, there is less fear when there's more liquidity and more order books.  It's easy when there's only one exchange that needs follow a move.  Much more difficult when there's 10 exchanges, some with banking charters.  

But some of the biggest Bitcoin mines are in Mongolia. They mine so many Bitcoins a week they can move the market whenever they choose. Those mines must be earning so much money that they can decide to buy or sell to make the market do whatever they want.

all one time zone.

either way, the vast majority of the money is on the coast no further inland than the north/south train lines

Great analisys, let the noise continue...

https://coinmarketcap.com/
Have no idea re. data/how accurate they are, just a convenient page.

>hedging against Bitcoin downside
I'm sure many BTC trades are hedges against ETH downside. Volume is volume.

It would be interesting to see a trading volume comparison (and liquidity comparison) of the NOV 2013 bubble verse this recent run up...

If I had to guess, the increased liquidity makes it a bit more difficult to crash/"manipulate" the market today, in an attempt to induce panic and profit off a quick move.  For example, imagine someone attempting to do that via market sell on, say, Bitfinex.  That might have worked quite will in Nov 2013, since practically only Mt Gox would need follow suit.  If it did follow suit, mad profits on the 40% panic dumps   I imagine it's far more difficult today, given the distribution of liquidity across so many licensed exchanges.  And the rise of heavy future markets (okcoin, etc.).  And, of course, false signal breakouts, one could argue, are somewhat less likely, since most traders are watching technicals on many exchanges and using that to paint a more complete picture.  For example, Huobi would generally not breakout if US exchanges were going in a different direction or overly stagnant.  Why?  Huobi traders are "aware" that they don't control the market, and that it's far more distributed today.  They could control the market in 2013.

It's certainly a very different market than it was 3 years ago (or even a year ago, for that matter).  I see a lot of the same anxieties, and traders would by wise to acknowledge the dynamic nature of these markets.  This is an entire emerging asset class (crypto-currencies).  With increased participation and liquidity, the same "tricks" that may have worked years ago may be far more difficult, or damn near impossible, today.  Many traders are trading Bitcoin too much, or too actively, for today's market.  They're reading signals left and right, over short time intervals, when it's just noise and, statistically speaking, meaningless.  Meaningless on the adrenaline pumping time scales many look at (5m charts, lol).  And, by extension, meaningless over the mid/long term.