Topic: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion - page 30658. (Read 26713617 times)

We are nowhere close to mass adoption, not by a long shot. I just spent dinner with my extended family where there were five middle aged wealthy men attending (not overly wealthy, just have nice jobs, equity in their homes,  investments, et cetera). Not a single one of them knew anything more than Bitcoin by name. NONE of them were interested at all in investing in Bitcoin, too risky, too strange, to difficult to even understand for them.

I spent 15 minutes discussing Bitcoin with the most open minded of the bunch. He wanted to know what he would do to even buy a single coin. Holy crap, what method was I going to suggest to this guy who can barely get Skype to work correctly. I chose a paper wallet and Local Bitcoins. He thought it was reasonable, however, i could tell by the look in his eyes there was no way in Hell he was going to invest a single dollar any time soon.

The masses ARE NOT early adopters, they will not do research, take a chance, learn about digital wallets, trust some web site exchange or anything of the sort. If it isn't offered by their broker, or banker, or something they can buy at the local Gold dealer, then they are not interested. BITCOIN right now seems a world away from this mass adoption. A WORLD AWAY.

We are still in speculative, niche phase that has a long way to go to play out. It is the biggest reason Bitcoin can fail because if another Crypto steps in and solves these access problems look out. Guys like those in my family DO NOT going to care about the virtues of Bitcoin's distributed, non-regulated, anti-govt protocol. They will invest in the first thing that is 1) accessible 2) available to them through standard channels 3) endorsed by things they trust: banks, govts, large companies.

That said the price may go to $2000 in the next month , or $200....

It doesn't seem like you've factored in the kinds of changes - "mass-adoption" (or at least evolving mass-awareness thanks to increased media coverage), developing services, etc. - that have led to some calling this the "tipping point" for Bitcoin. Of course it is impossible to give precise mathematical indicators in this respect but qualitatively speaking things are not the same now as they were historically. That said, the December 18 low of $450 fits well in comparison with history.

Image block? ChartBuddy is kicking asses again, no?

I think it's a matter of which kind of img format you're going to use. avoid gif, use png and you should be safe.

How do we avoid the image block? It makes drawing lines on charts less appealing this way.

He's also fundamentally missing it.  A part of why it is a reliable store of value is connected to the value of it being a terrific medium of exchange.  By carving out parts of his interlocutor's response categorically, shows that he hasn't taken a close enough look at it.

It is reliable.
It creates a public record of trade.  Stored for posterity.
By using it we enter into these records.  It connects us to each other.
It is fundamentally better in many important ways, even for governments, than what governments are getting from the central bankers.  If that isn't valuable, what is?

Interesting read:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/28/bitcoin-is-evil/?smid=tw-NytimesKrugman&seid=auto&_r=1&

Even more interesting though, are the comments of the readers. Am I the only one here that thinks that Krugman is paid to stand for fiat money? His arguments find me completely indifferent.



Heh... probably talking to the wrong people (intentionally that is...).

Don't know whether to sodl or hodl? The answer is always: buy more Dogecoin.

Interesting read:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/28/bitcoin-is-evil/?smid=tw-NytimesKrugman&seid=auto&_r=1&

Even more interesting though, are the comments of the readers. Am I the only one here that thinks that Krugman is paid to stand for fiat money? His arguments find me completely indifferent.



Heh... probably talking to the wrong people (intentionally that is...).

Don't know whether to sodl or hodl? The answer is always: buy more Dogecoin.

I'd totally be down for some bitcoin tarding again, but I hodl because I'm trying to put myself in a good position to pay long term capital gains (best, reasonable, compliance case) without any possible complications and obligation by having any USD or BTC on foreign exchanges.  

Given the position I'm trying to get into for compliance, short term tarding would just be foolish.  Add to that that I think by the time I'm ready to liquidate a significant portion they'll be worth more than they are today, I'm hodling, hodling from bitcoin tarding.

If you're a US citizen and you're trading with more than $10k, and haven't considered the implications of foreign exchange and tax implications of realizing profit, etc, good luck.

I have had and am continuing to have a dialogue with smart technologists who are very high on BitCoin — but when I try to get them to explain to me why BitCoin is a reliable store of value, they always seem to come back with explanations about how it’s a terrific medium of exchange. Even if I buy this (which I don’t, entirely), it doesn’t solve my problem. And I haven’t been able to get my correspondents to recognize that these are different questions.

Of course, but then I have a handful of cash though which is also nice thing to have these days. 

So if people don't panic sell their coins into your lap you'll be pissed off, right?

Let's go through a number of points how this is going to resolve. First, if you don't mention time frames, your analysis fails already, so I'll crudely break this down into short and long term.

Short term (say, this weekend, plus next week) I see:
a) several relevant short-to-medium term trends are active, among them 6h EMA30 (that performs extremely well in my backtests on recent data). Price remains above that one, as well as the quicker hourly EMA150. For a slightly slower perspective, 1d EMA30, i.e. the 1 month trend line is a focal point: price hovers just above it. I don't want to claim it provides support, not enough volume for that, but we should see if it holds in the next days.
b) bid/ask ratio is going down right now across all exchanges. That's usually a bearish sign, but in combination with a stagnating price, it's less drastic in my experience.
c) by a (relatively) crude method I use, based on a mean of the volume-weighted price of the peak and low of the most recent price swing, we're *right* on top of that mean. Similarly to my point about 1d EMA30, that's leads to a rather unsatisfactory "it could swing either way, but the next days should resolve it one way or the other".

Long term perspective is generally even more difficult to predict. Based on how peak/correction cycles played out historically, I would be extremely surprised if we've already seen the end of the correction. Late January/Early February is more likely based on how previous corrections played out wrt time. Price targets are difficult because it all depends on whether the December 18 low was really the bottom, or just an intermediate step in a larger more forceful downtrend, or alternatively, a long drawn out decline. I still see the possibility that daily SMA100 was active as support on that crash, and the final capitulation will be higher than the low of December 18, but that's not a strong conviction I hold, at best an informed guess.