I liquidated my 12 month mining hoard at $15.5 and will get back in when the bubble fully deflates. Sentiment has to be very negative for the bottom to set in, and expect premature false starts on the way back up.
Examples of negative sentiment would be
- mining difficulty - slower growth, leveling off, or decline
- miners selling their rigs
- long time hoarders cashing out at very low prices and giving up on bitcoins
- ASIC developers postponing their mining chip development due to unfavorable economics
- continued decline in the Google Insight popularity of "bitcoin" searches
- forum posts arguing that price watching/obsessing is not important
I plan to investigate bitcoin economy indicators to see if there is a way to predict bitcoin value due to merchant/consumer/miner activity.
Excellent analysis. Do you see the mining difficulty as being the most important factor affecting price?
If miners lose interest and sell their rigs, is BTC ultimately headed for oblivion?
What of the BTC already mined? Is there any residual value in this crypto currency?
Thanks for your insights,
Stew
No I think that mining difficultly lags the price increase, in that rapid price increases spur miners such as myself to add rig capacity. The reason that I think a leveling off or a decline in mining difficulty marks a post-bubble bitcoin price bottom is because miners got very excited during the bubble run-up and I expect them to be less excited - perhaps to the point of disenchantment - during the post-bubble decline.
Bitcoins are not headed towards oblivion in my opinion. The bitcoin economy must be distinguished from the bitcoin bubble. By way of analogy, consider Amazon.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=AMZN+Basic+Chart&t=myDuring the Dot-Com bubble AMZN soared from a low value to around $100 per share, as traders generally projected the expected Internet economy and Amazon's central role in that Internet economy. When the Dot-Com bubble deflated, Amazon's stock price sunk by two thirds or more, yet their participation in the Internet economy proceeded anyway. Now in the fully post-dot-com-bubble Internet economy AMZN is trading at $213. The point I am making is that the bitcoin price bubble is simply characterized as traders getting way ahead of themselves - eventually the bitcoin economy will get there too.
I believe that ultimately, the price of bitcoins will closely correlate with the size of - and fluctuations of - the bitcoin economy, which one might define as routine commerce transactions among merchants, consumers, and miners. The bitcoin economy will probably feel the bitcoin price bubble to some extent, but I expect it to keep growing as the advantages, e.g. efficiencies, of bitcoin transactions spread their way into the worldwide financial mainstream.