Topic: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion - page 29002. (Read 26609850 times)

If the expected return of bitcoin is positive according to your probabilities, go ahead and invest on it.  I am not trying to talk anyone out of it.

But you cannot honestly tell others that it is a good investment, because you cannot claim that your probabilities are more reliable than mine or than those of that guy over there.

It seems that those investors whose expected value is 1,000 USD or more are very few, and they have run out of money; otherwise they would keep buying BTCs until the price gets over their expectation. 

Therefore, most of the "loaded" traders have expected values less than 700 USD right now.  To get that value they must assign  very small probability to "bitcoin will be eventually worth more than 700,000 dollars".  Specifically, they think that the chances of that happening are less than 1 in 1000. (Even if they do not externalize that probability, it is implicit in their reluctance to pay more than 700$ for one bitcoin.).

But why P = 0.001 and not P = 0.002 or P = 0.00001?  There is no logic or experience that will help one choose between those probabilities.  Yet they lead to very different expected values.   And indeed, in the last two days we saw that the price is pretty random: it can rally by more than 100 USD on a rumor, and remain there after the rumor is proven to be false.

instead of a lottery ticket, a better analogy could be an old piece of paper that someone claims to have found among their great-great-great-great-grandfather, with what appears to be the map of an island with a "X" and a note "three tons of gold buried here".  How much would you pay for such a map?  Is paying 700$ for that map a good investment?

Definitely, I appreciate you discussion of value and predicted value in terms of a lottery ticket; however, with all your smartness, you are certainly missing some essential points about bitcoin.  

First: Bitcoin does NOT need to win the lottery or have some exorbitant pay off in order for it to be of considerable value.  Actually, even if bitcoin maintains its value flat, it is doing a heck of a lot better than the dollar b/c the dollar is inevitably programmed to shrink in value due to dilution (too much expansion of the supply).    

So, you go wrong in a couple of respects regarding your bitcoin/lottery discussion, the first, as referred to above, is the anticipation that some major payoff is needed in order for bitcoin to be successful.  

Second:  The other aspect that you go wrong is to expect that any investment in BTC has to be for a predetermined number of years.  Markets have inevitably shown that investors are capable of playing their investments by ear and to go with the flow with whatever the investors perceive to be best to provide them with an acceptable return. ... and even though at this particular moment, bitcoin may be among the best of the long term crypto-currencies, yet if another and better cryptocurrency comes along, then certainly bitcoin money can be moved into that new and better investment.  So bitcoin does not need to be the best forever, it ONLY needs to be the best for the moment.  That expression .. ."dont let the perfect be the enemy of the good."

667 is the geometric mean of the Stamp ATH and post-ATH low. It is logical for the price to gravitate there now that the gox-shock has faded.

Jorge,

What if the axioms of mathematics that are used to compute EV for bitcoin are not the same as that of a lottery ticket?
In that case its not an apples to apples comparison.

To me, this $800 by the end of the week seems more like a wish of an outcome rather than a prediction of a very likely occurrence.  Surely, bitcoin has been volatile in the preceding months; however, what brought bitcoin into the $500s and then into the $400s within the past couple of weeks was a series of bad news events (china and mt gox and other concerns about bitcoin securty) and likely manipulation(by whales and bots) - yet I remain of the belief that Bitcoin cannot so easily overcome the downward pressure of such negative news and manipulation within the span of the week.

Personally, I DO believe that around this time in bitcoin history $800 would be a comfortable and reasonable floating point for a few weeks while some of the bitcoin news, expansion and network gets sorted out.. including continuing to let the travesty of the Mt. Gox circumstances sink in sufficiently in order that we are able to mourn somewhat before moving on to next higher grounds.  

Certainly, it seems that NONE of us here truly know the direction of bitcoin or have crystal balls - even though some of us here claim to be more omniscient than others.  I certainly cannot predict the irrational aspects and also the exponential growth potential of bitcoin.  Surely I believe that $650 to $750 would be manageable for this week, but likely we will NOT reach any kind of stable $800 ... I do expect also that possibly for a month or three or four  that we will regularly experiencing sub $1000 territory.. until we likely begin to transition past new ATH territory and into the $1500 arena.. for a while.... before going further up.... maybe 2-4k would be reachable by the end of the calendar year.. and maybe 6-8k by the end of 2015... ... of course speculation, to some extent.. but certainly conservative speculation, in my thinking.... so long as bitcoin does NOT become undermined in some major way in the interrim.

How does fiat compare to a lottery ticket?

Certainly a national Catholic culture is correlated with corruption indices, relative to a national Protestant culture.  If you got any argument on that, a quick resort to public data would remove any reasonable question, and corruption indices seem a pretty good measure of the impact of some kinds of corruption on productivity and growth. (They don't capture what is meant by the term "corruption" in ordinary language.)  That is roughly the extent of my agreement.  I won't voice my disagreements.  It would be a pointless imposition.  But I will say this:

One brilliant, shining thing about Bitcoin is that it enforces its rules so well, without bias or favoritism, and they are very clear rules.  Despite the arguably pandemic corruption in the Bitcoin ecosystem and culture in recent years, the organizing kernel is remarkably pure and removed from all of that.  It is designed to be, yes, but what is truly remarkable is the degree of its success in fulfilling that design, and so creating a level meritocratic playing field.

No, I don't think so.

On volatile days I had several trades (high volume). On other days I had no single trade (low volume). That's all.

You can't sell lottery tickets or exchange them for goods and services at any time.  You can't transmit lottery tickets securely around the planet within minutes.

OK now I get it.

You are just trolling.  

 

The expected return on a lottery ticket is 50%, just going by the rewards(-taxes)/odds.

How do you calculate that for bitcoin? You dont. So its not like a lottery ticket. A lottery ticket is throwing money away. Bitcoin is betting on the success of a technology.

Bitcoin is not exactly like a lottery ticket, it is a bit better in some sense, a bit worse in other senses.

Bitcoin is just like a lottery ticket in that its price is known (its current market price) but its payoff is not (its value N years from now). 

Bitcoin is worse than a lottery ticket, because its expected value is not well defined.  The odds and prizes of a lottery ticket are known, thus one can compute its expected value.  Moreover most people who know a bit of mathematics will assign the same odds to those prizes, and therefore will agree on its expected value.  For bitcoin, on the other hand, there is no logical way to assign probabilities to the possible outcomes (possible values N years from now). So, there is no consensual expected value.

If N is less than 3, say, "value" can only mean the market price at that time.  One cannot predict the BTC price even 5 minutes ahead of time, much less N years from now.

If "N years from now" is taken to mean "after cryptos are in general use", then one needs to assign probabilities to "cryptocoins will eventually be in general use", "cryptocoins will be used in more than 1% of e-commerce transactions", "the same cryptocoin cannot be used more than N times per day", "X% of those cryptocoins will be bitcoins" and so on.

On the other hand, indeed Bitcoin is a bit better than a lottery ticket, in that it is not demonstrably a bad investment.  The expected value of a lottery ticket is invariably less than its price, so it everybody will agree that it is a bad investment.  Since the expected value of a bitcoin is not defined, one cannot prove mathematically that it is less than its current market price.  But by the same token, one cannot prove that it is a good investment, either.

So, how can one honestly recommend investing into bitcoin as a hedge against a possible dollar collapse, as a way of becoming a millionaire, or whatever the "salesmen" are saying these days?  It is like buying a ticket for a crazy lottery that does not tell its clients what are the odds and prizes, and may or may not be seeking to lose money.

Putin Economic Adviser Warns, - Russia Will Sell U.S. Bonds And “Crash” Financial System

http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2014-03-04/putin-economic-adviser-warns-russia-will-sell-us-bonds-and-%E2%80%9Ccrash%E2%80%9D-financial-

+1
The only sane opinion of the situation so far; not that I've managed to read all this word-fighting game on this WOT.

13 billion USD bidwall:



Anyone who understands localbitcoins, please keep to yourself

FYI most the Australian media is very biased regarding CO2 driven climate change - skeptics are rare (or suppressed) normally but they did show David Suzuki to be unqualified to talk on the subject.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hKdmQMVJ70

So Protestants are not less corrupt, only smarter? Bullshit. Some cultures are better than others.  Tolerance of corruption is a cultural value and it makes Catholic nations objectively inferior, poorer and weaker. -but also a lot more fun!

Wow. That's depressing as hell.  Only 28 too. Too young. Just too young.

This is progress: drunkards, poets and ne'er-do-wells becoming the moneyed elite and damn the rest

Potato/potato.

Not one iota.