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Recognizing the above picture for what it is is how I make a lot of my trades. Just work with the over-reaction of the herd, which is eminently predictable. Just grab the middle of those crazy moves and get back out till sanity (well...not that simple, it's never truly sane) returns.
 
DCFusor I like your strategy & SA's trading analysis (which I actually have a lot of respect for) but not for new technology/stocks/industry plays.

Because your potential returns decrease over time because as the Market Cap gets bigger the amount of new money required to produce similar returns obviously grows while conversely the threat to Bitcoin from governments only gets bigger as it becomes more of a threat.

Of course even without the technical/government threats there is obviously a lot of speculative money in there and I wouldn't be surprised to see major up and down 25%+ swings in the short term.
 
I was amused by a comment on a ZH article -

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-...n-money-future-or-old-fashioned-bubble?page=1

Dewey Cheatum Howe Tue, 04/09/2013 - 18:46 | 3428756

Here is a thought for you blind worshippers of shiny things. Why don't you set up your own equivalent crypto-currency style gold exchange, set up the rules and only use the currency as a stock equivalent. If it is fair and unmanipulated, people will jump out of the etf crimex market calling in their gold paper to reinvest in your exchange instead. It will break the price manipulation by pulling all the players out of the market except for the manipulators. I bet they have the gold and silver so rehypothecated it will only take about a 5% or so call in on the paper to crush it. The price of your precious will then revalue accordingly based of free market pricing mechanisms. If it proves better than bitcoin so fucking be it. That is free market, trust will be the ultimate decider as long as the playing field is level. That is something we should all strive for here regardless of any other differences.
Click to expand...
 
...except if you want to start your own exchange, you will not be alowed to :)
 
Haha... Some folks were trying to set up a fully allocated exchange, but it was sabotaged. You gotta jump through a lot of hoops and FedGov red tape to set up something like this and it takes capital - a lot of capital.
 
Hi guys

I was just wondering: technically, it would be extremely difficult to corrupt BitCoins. But rest assured, if BCs get any traction n the mainstream, because they are intrinsically outside of any centralized control, obviously, TPTB will do everything to bring them to heel.

Thus, I was just thinking about figuring out non-technical ways of taking them down. Put down your thoughts, kindly. My thoughts how it could have been attempted:
1. Smear campaign (mentioned before) - "only drug dealers and criminals are using it"
2. Security issues - and I am not talking about the protocol itself, but rather hitting big targets - like mtgox etc. Destroying trust that way.
3. Outlaw it outright, with some strawman explanation.
4. Fractional reserve lending, with BitCoin backing (hell, why not...)
 
Step 1: I think they'll raid the premises of MTGOX on some faulty charge. (Like they went into NZ and raided & arrested that file sharing guy.)
Step 2: They'll shut down or block known websites like they did with poker & file sharing sites.
Step 3: They'll make it illegal for banks to knowingly process Bitcoin transactions
(Like they did with poker in US)

Shutting down MTGOX would be the big one in the short term, it's one of the few reasons I want to cash out a bit, so that I can buy again on the 70-80% price dip when they do.

Fortunately I think gold & silver are much bigger problems for them in the short term.

(MTGOX also has a lot of tools in their arsenal now though. The rapid growth overwhelmed them initially but I think they've beefed up now.
1. They can block accounts (each one is manually verified) that they think is part of the sell massive while Ddos MTGOX.
2. They can take a few days to approve big accounts/buyers. In the case of an attack/artificial sell off they can approve lots at once so that there's a whole bunch of new money/buyers to counteract sell off.
3. Lots of top hackers seeing their net worth increase by small fortunes everyday. In their interest now to use their time, skills, resources to protect MTGOX. Counter-attacks, early warnings.
 
Good timing DSA.

I'm not selling any myself, but may regret that decision soon enough :)
 
If you get a bounce, bail.. This is silver in April 2011.. Way too many specs.
 
Last Price: 186.766 USD
Low: 123.016 USD
High: 259 USD
Volume: 19907 BTC / 4103421 USD
Server Time: 10.04.13 22:34
https://btc-e.com/exchange/btc_usd

animated-roulette-wheel.gif
 
Mtgox looks a bit suspicious, low volumes.
Main forum is down.

Could be fake. Like where they're in the elevator but they switch the camera to make it look like it's empty.
 
I read an article on ZH about a discussion over using leverage with bitcoin. Once you begin adding more imaginary paper to anything, in my eyes at least, it has been corrupted.

Disclosure: I think bitcoin will be a distant memory in the near term.
 
I just stand by my trading rule - if it's too good to be true, get out, because it IS too good to be true much longer. What constitutes too good is of course a judgement call, but...that's the key to all trading - better judgement than the next guy at the table.
 
Back at 190 from an intraday low at 100. Intraday high was 260. A second wave of selling is pretty likely.
 
ancona said:
I read an article on ZH about a discussion over using leverage with bitcoin. Once you begin adding more imaginary paper to anything, in my eyes at least, it has been corrupted.
Click to expand...

I think you can make a paper product to reference anything if there's a market.
To me it doesn't mean the thing has been corrupted unless it takes over the price setting/discovery mechanism. For Bitcoin there may be a market for a way to short it or leverage it. But no one would buy and sell a Bitcoin ETF when they can just trade the actual bitcoins themselves. So Bitcoin is in a sense protected from that.

With gold and silver, a digital trading platform is useful as its hard & costly to move the physical product each time you trade. However if its not fully backed by allocated physical you end up with a corrupted sham, easily manipulated paper price that is usually insanely lower than what the physical price should be.
 
Looks like there was a major co-ordinated Ddos attack.
But I see what you mean about it being a trigger when something is in bubble mode SA.

As I said I haven't sold, it's not my style to sell during a panic, I'll just wait it out and see where the dust settles, if it goes down to 0 so be it.

Having said that I did get greedy and didnt take out my initial investment plus profits when I should have. I felt like my reasoning was logical but MTGOX weakness today showed it was flawed and I had some Tulip-Mania.
 
Unbeatable said:
Looks like there was a major co-ordinated Ddos attack.
But I see what you mean about it being a trigger when something is in bubble mode SA.

As I said I haven't sold, it's not my style to sell during a panic, I'll just wait it out and see where the dust settles, if it goes down to 0 so be it.

Having said that I did get greedy and didnt take out my initial investment plus profits when I should have. I felt like my reasoning was logical but MTGOX weakness today showed it was flawed and I had some Tulip-Mania.
Click to expand...

It's a market like any other afterall :cheers:

Regarding profit taking: Depending on your initial price, you could still cash out deeply in the green. Such a massive crash won't be retraced within hours. It's pretty likely that we're going lower during the next days.
 
Well my avg. buy price was $36 so still deeply in green.
& the current price is still round the $150 I planned to take out my initial investment & some profit.

So really it's good advice and I probably should. But I just have this thing about not selling when others are panicking. Which I think a lot of speculators are.
 
He who panics first...
You got a 400+% return.
I'm expecting another drop soon...

I'd at least take out my inititial investment plus a decent gain. Maybe sell 50% of your position?
This way you can lock in an overall guaranteed profit.
 
I think all the talk of a DOS attack is BS. DOS can only slow or stop things; it can't make people buy or sell, nor can it change their bids. The worst case scenario is that a DOS attack can add to panic or stop trade altogether.

EDIT: Also, a DOS attack would effect everything on the server, not just the BC exchange.
 
Yes, DOS attack cannot rather do much harm to BitCoins itself, but it might do a lot of harm to the herd's perception of BC$ - which in turn, changes demand/supply dynamics - and that dynamics is EVERYTHING that backs BitCoins perceived value.

Also mind it, it would be rather difficult to mount DOS/DDOS attack against BC$ network itself - this is peer to peer network, ie, no central nodes that could be easily targeted. Compare it to BitTorrent - any attempts to shut it down, were targeted at central hubs of file information exchange (ie. The Pirate Bay) - not at the peers in the BT network themselves (rather impractical)

What CAN be attacked (or even simply overwhelmed by genuine traffic in the mania phase), are the BC$ exchanges.

So to summarize, you can disturb (relatively easily) BC$ exchanges, but the BC$ network itself (thus, all the commerce, commenced in BC$), is rather robust and it would be extremely difficult to disturb it already - and the more popular it gets, the more difficult it becomes.






...but just you wait until one day (soon?) we get quantum computers, and that very day, we will have to throw away most (if not all) of our currently implemented cryptography - possibly, BitCoins will become so easy to mine, that it will amount to new California gold rush, or Spanish conquest of the South America - and their impacts on their respectiuve gold-based monetary systems :)
 
heres another possible explanation - from
http://www.naturalnews.com/039865_bitcoin_crash_prediction_Mike_Adams.html


According to The Guardian,

Wednesday's wild ride came as someone gave away thousands of dollars worth of Bitcoins on Reddit, the social news site. News blog Business Insider calculated a Reddit user under the name "Bitcoinbillionaire" had given away $13,627.69896 worth of Bitcoins to Reddit users over the day.

This giveaway is what apparently caused the bitcoin crash. But I have news for everyone. Having now made, on the record, the single most accurate crash prediction ever publicly announced on bitcoin, I think I've earned the credibility to tell you more: Bitcoinbillionaire is almost certainly not a friend of bitcoin. He is likely working for the central banks.

How do I know that? Because the "bitcoin giveaway" that crashed the market today was a calculated stress test to determine the "buoyancy" of the bitcoin market. By injecting a predetermined amount of supply into the market and watching the price reaction, it can easily be calculated how many bitcoins will be required to crash the entire market down to a desired price level, causing a runaway panic.

This engineered crash was, in effect, a currency war probe attack designed specifically to calculate what is needed for a much larger attack planned for the future -- an attack that will decimate bitcoin and cause long-lasting distrust in non-centralized currencies.

Again, I predicted this would happen almost word for word in yesterday's article, in which I outlined a 6-step "recipe" the central banks would use to destroy bitcoin:

Step 1) Central banks buy up massive quantities of bitcoin currency, driving the prices into the stratosphere and encouraging millions of people around the world to jump on board the "get rich" bandwagon.

Step 2) Once bitcoin valuations reach a sufficient level of insanity, start a massive selloff by dumping the bitcoins you already bought onto the market, offering them for sale at any price (i.e. sell into falling prices, accelerating the loss in valuations).

Step 3) Watch panic take hold as the bitcoin crash accelerates, ending in a catastrophic wipeout of "valuation" of all bitcoins.

Step 4) Find "victims" of the bitcoin crash who can tell a good sob story for the mainstream media about how they invested little Johnny's college money in bitcoin and lost it all. Roll them out on CNN and MSNBC where they cry on camera and talk about how they were ripped off by bitcoin and now they only trust the government from now on.

Step 5) Demonize bitcoin by characterizing it as a "libertarian pyramid scheme." Lash out against both decentralized currencies and libertarians.

Step 6) Once the demonization gains traction, have traitors in the U.S. Congress announce a "Consumer Currency Protection Act" that outlaws non-central bank currencies such as bitcoin. It's all "for your safety," of course. Shut down all online bitcoin wallets and exchanges, calling them "criminal pyramid schemes" and arrest a few people using bitcoin to send a warning message to the rest.

What we saw unfold today was step 2. Step 3 is next, but the central banks may wait weeks, months or even years before pulling the trigger in step 3. (The timing is impossible to know.)



Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/039865_bitcoin_crash_prediction_Mike_Adams.html#ixzz2QAJm5avX
Click to expand...
 
That's good stuff Rblong. I got thrashed for badmouthing the Bitcoin construct on another forum, but as I watched yesterday, it is apparently quite easy to wipe it out in a few sessions. If Uncle Stosh gets his central bankster in on it, all confidence will be lost and Bitcoin becomes a mere memory. I would advise anyone with Bitcoin to bail while the bailing is good.
 
Despite puff pieces in "press release science" the truth is a practical quantum computer that does real crypto is at the least, some decades away, maybe longer, maybe never. The results, for those that own one - which will be governments at first (expensive stuff here) would be far more disruptive towards other crypto, and probably kept quite secret for a good while to take advantage of that as a national security thing.

A few bit's worth of quantum Turing machine is barely reachable under current theory and tech - a toy at best. Even the theory says it's near-impossible to realize a real machine due to disturbances above absolute zero that de-cohere the quantum status regularly. In practice, practice is a lot tougher than theory in this case. We don't even have theory that lets us directly manipulate quantum states, only select things that are already in a state we want. Humans are stuck with electromagnetism, it's the only thing we know how to work with - chemistry, light, electricity. We have no powers over the weak, strong, gravity forces we think exist - none at all - even in a nuclear reactor, all we do is pile stuff up (the original name) and wait for the magic to happen...we don't actually have any direct means to mess with those forces/bosons.

The only result of that would be yes, you could mine the rest of the bitcoins that are possible (about doubling the supply), but there you stop - you can only fit so many into the "bitness" width of a standard coin. That's part of the design of the thing.

Now, whether I'd have BC's or not - probably not at this point. It's not inherently flakey, it's just too small, the moral equivalent of a penny stock very dependent on externals they don't (and probably can't) control till it gains more mass, so it's pretty dicey like any such thing where it just doesn't take much "big money" to screw with at present - and a DDOS attack or even just too many people trying to do legit things can currently screw up the exchanges, so there's a lot of risk like there is with anything that small, yet that public.

And of course we know it has some real enemies who now and then are quite effective if being effective doesn't take too many brains - which is the case here.

So, for now, a fun toy (not all fun toys are safe), but that's it.
 
http://www.cnbc.com/id/100633793

"The number of new [accounts] opened went from 60,000 for March alone to 75,000 new [accounts] created for the first few days of April! We now have roughly 20,000 new accounts created each day," the company said, adding that account creation had tripled in the last 24 hours.
Click to expand...

All this new interest for an unstable, risky, beta digital product like Bitcoin. Can you imagine the rush into something real & time tested like silver when the paper market snaps & people are having their savings confiscated, it's going to be absolutely EPIC!!


Edit:
American broadcaster Max Keiser, a former Wall Sreet stock broker and inventor of the technology behind web-based game Hollywood Stock Exchange told CNBC.com that he was providing consulting for a new exchange to be set up in London.
"The 'market making' design for [Mt.Gox] is weak; as is the case across all the bitcoin exchanges. This is where we'll see some new initiatives - many are already in the pipeline," he said. "I'm consulting on a project now in London with some excellent people who are part of what I would call the core bitcoin community of developers and financiers and it looks to be very exciting."
Click to expand...
 
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As I said I will freely admit though that you guys and particularly SA were right in advising me to get some out in the 200's. Then again yesterday while it was still in the $150 range. I will no doubt dream about the beautiful bars of real silver I could have had if I'd listened to people I already knew gave very good advice.

Edit: Bitcoin now at $59

Regards quantum computing, I think most bitcoin people would love that to happen, because as I understand it, it would also destroy online banking and any
nwo dreams of a cashless society?
 
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I do not believe the crash was engineered. Looking at the chart, you could tell it was a speculative bubble. The guy who dumped wanted to cash out while he could. I can't say I blame him. it was trading irrationally.

What I don't think a lot of people understand here is that you had a ton of people trading these bitcoins that have zero experience trading currencies. That's why things moved the way they did.

There might be value here.. I have no real opinion on that. However, I don't think it was a conspiracy by the government to go after tech savvy libertarians. When they go after bitcoins, they will do so in the open. It will be through regulation, taxation, imprisonment etc. It wont be through creating a speculative bubble (which attracts attention btw) only to crash it. Instead we are starting to see market professionals get involved which is not what governments want. Changes will be coming.
 
Unbeatable said:
Edit: Bitcoin now at $59
Click to expand...

fk me Unbeatable, thats a real wake up number ..........
sorry you had to ride it both ways.

I do share your somewhat irrational desire to stand aside when 'everyone' is selling and it has helped me to stay detached from my shiny, which is more or less instantly tradable on the BV and GM platforms.

I used to have sleepless nights when the pog was falling and boast to anyone who would listen when there was an up day.

Guess I will never be any good as a trader :cheers:
 
Real quantum computers would indeed destroy *current* crypto schemes, but it'd still be a lot of work testing to see if the decode was correct in each case. A few, but not all systems are based on the difficulty of factoring large near-primes, the rest would be fairly resistant if another way to pass keys around was found - and it looks like certain developments in the quantum field might make that easy and tough to break - it solves the problem it creates.

But it's a double-edged sword. It would also make new cypto possible - but make hard-to-break crypto so expensive as to be out of the hands of normal people - advantage to the rich/powerful in that case. Because if such were available right now - the expense of the cryo cooling alone would mean you wouldn't want to have to afford it.

It's just another part of the age old saga of the competition between lock makers and pickers. This time the twist favors the powerful more than the average guy, but even that trend isn't new - we have the best IP and other laws corps and the rich can afford, and it turns out, it's not that expensive on their scale to get what they desire - a system where competition from disruptive startups is practically impossible. With the legal system as it is - you can simply sue them into submission, as the most expensive lawyers win even when not in the right, and who can afford that? The top of the current status quo only.
 
... wait, so 13k of giveaway BC$ had caused a massive sell of, or is there aproblem with the decimal point here??

Sent from my V1277 using Tapatalk 2
 
bushi said:
... wait, so 13k of giveaway BC$ had caused a massive sell of, or is there aproblem with the decimal point here??
Click to expand...

Ha, good point, yeah, I read it as 13 million dollars. Yes but it's just $13 000.

I know the market is not very liquid but pretty sure a $13 000 give-away had little to do with the crash.
 
I have been a big lecturer on digital - stocks, ETFs, and so forth.

I have good and bad news. Mostly I did not follow my own rule.

1- I lost $20. I had $35 in, now it is worth $15. This is the bad news.

The good news is on ebay- I bought 2 orders- one was $32.50, and one was $65- both sellers voided the sale as they wanted instant payment- and would not wait for a paypal echeck. So they backed out- the next day the price crashed. Instead of -$20- I could be -$80. Yay for greed
 
bushi said:
... wait, so 13k of giveaway BC$ had caused a massive sell of, or is there aproblem with the decimal point here??
Click to expand...

pretty much what i pointed out to the friend who sent me the link but there was some merit in the 'stress test' thinking .............
 
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