7 ms·

I can't find the article now, but there have been several good articles explaining the lack of gravity on bitcoin in general. Basically, the price goes up quic

by eterm 13y ago

I can't find the article now, but there have been several good articles explaining the lack of gravity on bitcoin in general. Basically, the price goes up quickly when new people are attracted to bitcoin and rush to buy. When the price dips however, because so much is bought for long term speculation, the price doesn't really dip much, as no one is incentivised to sell and hold out for when it gets better. At some point the nerve of those holding out may crack, but if you read silly saurus2's post, its quite clear that many will hold out indefinitely on the belief or hope it will one day recover. So in this manner the bubble can deflate slowly. (If you call 10% in a day slow). There are no settlement dates or ways to easily move money out (especially now) so a crash is prevented. If a crash happens it'll probably happen before people realise it, but suddenly there just won't be anyone wanting to buy coins anymore. But even that might not happen as people already invested into bitcoin use how wealthy they feel to buy bitcoins from each other. That can cycle for a long time before people realise there isn't new money in bitcoin. If you had bought coins at 800-1000, why would you sell now? No one likes to cement a loss. Those with the most reason to sell right now are the early adopters, but it's not actually clear how many of those coins are actually reachable.

thisiswrong 13y ago
Wow this makes a lot of sense. I personally believe that this is yet again another one of BTC's large dips that will eventually recover onto it's upwards path. But then if people panic and see how hard it is to get back into fiat from BTC won't they just go into relatively stable altcoins instead? For example DOGE is skyrocketing as we speak and it's USD price was totally unaffected by BTC's recent plummet. http://coinmarketcap.com/ http://coinmarketcap.com/
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- gus_massa 13y ago
  Is doge inmmune to this multiple hash malleability feature? EDIT: "If" -> "Is".
  - jafaku 13y ago
    No coin is immune to this. What, you thought other coins had their own code? Nope, they are all just a copy/paste of Bitcoin's code. Specifically Dogecoin was "coded" (copy/pasted) in a Friday night, according to it's founder. So I don't know what you were expecting.
    - gus_massa 13y ago
      Just curiosity. I thought they copied the code from Litecoin and I was not sure if in any of the intermediate steps someone decided to fix this. It will be interesting to see how each developer set and community handle this problem (and the future problems). Disclaimer: I don’t own BTC or DOGE (or LTC or any other virtual currency).
      - jafaku 13y ago
        There isn't really any development team comparable to that of Bitcoin in a different coin. Things that get fixed in Bitcoin are not fixed in other coins. But if another coin happens to fix something, it will be fixed in Bitcoin too. Typically a copycoin will only have the same fixes as Bitcoin depending on when they decided to copy it. But then they will invariably lag behind.
        edelans 13y ago
        It is quite short sighted to think that all digital currencies are "forked" from bitcoin: see http://www.openudc.org/ http://www.openudc.org/ for instance: "The OpenUDC softwares are designed to manage a free money system as described by the TRM (Théorie Relative de la Monnaie), that means a money system where no human has privileges in front of money creation either in time or in space." The concept is therefore quite different from BTC which clearly gives some people a huge privilege in front of money creation in time
- jafaku 13y ago
  If by "stable" you mean "they are so small that no one will even bother attacking them"... http://imgur.com/0kcORBm http://imgur.com/0kcORBm
  - steveklabnik 13y ago
    5th largest cryptocurrency with more transations/day than every other one put together isn't exactly small...
    - vidarh 13y ago
      More like 4th, given that Ripples can't be mined, is controlled by a single entity, most of the existing coins are not freely circulating, and the transaction volume is consistently so tiny that it looks very much like the price is intentionally manipulated to make the coin look desirable.
      - oscilloscope 13y ago
        More like 3rd. In the 8 hours since vidarh posted this, Dogecoin surpassed the Peercoin market cap. The 24h trading volume of Dogecoin is also nearly 6x that of Peercoin right now.
        celticninja 13y ago
        Really that means nothing though. Neither Peercoin or Dogecoin have merchant or payment processor support. No one is interested in taking dogecoin in payment for goods and services, right now it is just a toy coin that people can use to learn about cryptocurrencies cheaply and that is pretty much what it will always be. If dogecoin had a maleability issue it does not have the dev support to resolve it in a reasonable time frame, a fork like there was in BTC last year would have a similar result. There are lost of transactions because you can send 10 or 100 or 1000 coins to anyone and you still have sent less than a few bucks. Lots of transactions does not equal a big currency it equals a lot of transactions. And in this situation these transactions count for very little economic activity.
pjc50 13y ago
Also worth noting: you can't buy bitcoins on margin. So no margin calls to suddenly detonate the market.
- febeling 13y ago
  You can p2p lend and borrow btc here: https://www.bitbond.net/ https://www.bitbond.net/
- ph0rque 13y ago
  You can margin buy/sell on bitfinex.com
- hangonhn 13y ago
  Hang on. Isn't that just a matter of someone setting up a market and contracts for it? What you mean is that no one has setup bitcoins margins market yet right? Or am I misunderstanding something fundamental about BTC that prevents margins?
  - pjc50 13y ago
    Transaction irreversability makes it a lot riskier, combined with the lack of support from the legal system. If you lend bitcoins to someone, and they run off with them, how do you recover your loss? Conversely, unlike stocks, you don't need a broker, so there's nobody who would take on that dealer role. Nobody has setup a "buy bitcoin on margin" service yet, and the first person to do so will lose a fortune to nonpayment of margin calls.
    - vidarh 13y ago
      You can protect against the risk by only providing the service between wallets held and controlled by you on your own exchange. There also are brokers providing indirect Bitcoin shorting with 1:10 leverage in the form of CFD's (contracts for difference). Of course they could opt to always or sometimes not actually trade the coins - to their clients it makes no difference, as no actual coins can be moved in/out of the accounts.
    - 13y ago
praptak 13y ago
This sounds like a general analysis of most bubbles in history - nothing very specific to BTC.
- Fuxy 13y ago
  Well I have bitcoin and I'm in no hurry to sell. I bought them at the tip of the previous bubble when they were £150 and was kinda disappointed when it dropped. Was hoping to have a large amount in bitcoin so i can buy online services relatively anonymously. Since then I more then recovered my loss even at the price it has now.
panarky 13y ago
The psychology part of this argument seems the same as with any commodity, not just Bitcoin. Maybe Bitcoin would be different if you could put money in but not take it out. But it's actually the reverse now -- it's harder to get Bitcoin out. So wouldn't that tend to increase the selling pressure? And if you don't want to sell to a sketchy exchange, you can sell to SecondMarket[0] and get a wire transfer to your bank account the same day. https://www.secondmarket.com/education/sell-bitcoin-secondmarket https://www.secondmarket.com/education/sell-bitcoin-secondma...
johnny635 13y ago
Sounds like the reason they gave for why houses always goes up.
- interstitial 13y ago
  You should know bitbugs don't like history.
  - MartinCron 13y ago
    Nobody likes history in the broad sense. Most people only like history that confirms their existing positions.
ekianjo 13y ago
> If a crash happens it'll probably happen before people realise it, but suddenly there just won't be anyone wanting to buy coins anymore. Not sure how true this is. Bitcoin has been going through a few major crashes in the past 3 years, yet the demand was still strong after it went down.
- celticninja 13y ago
  I dont think the person you replied to meant a crash, but rather an implosion. i.e. a massive failure in the bitcoin protocol that renders it useless. This is the only way in which no one will want to buy coins. In that situation your best bet is sending your coins to an exchange and selling them into the listed buy orders which have not been removed because the person who listed them is either asleep or unaware of the news. However this is incredibly unlikely, bitcoin went though a fork last year that caused some problems but was quickly rectified, this current maleability issue is also being worked on to get a resolution. These sort of network wide problems are problems with the fundamentals of bitcoin and should, by right, affect the price of bitcoin much more than say government regulations in China or India, that they dont is because most holders of bitcoin understand that these problems can be resolved with some dev time and BTC has some great and comitted devs working on it. Namecoin (NMC) had a similar issue where it meant that web addresses linked to NMC were not secure, that caused a crahs but no where near going to zero and that is a coin with minimal developer support.

by eterm 13y ago

thisiswrong 13y ago

Wow this makes a lot of sense. I personally believe that this is yet again another one of BTC's large dips that will eventually recover onto it's upwards path. But then if people panic and see how hard it is to get back into fiat from BTC won't they just go into relatively stable altcoins instead? For example DOGE is skyrocketing as we speak and it's USD price was totally unaffected by BTC's recent plummet. http://coinmarketcap.com/ http://coinmarketcap.com/

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
gus_massa 13y ago
Is doge inmmune to this multiple hash malleability feature? EDIT: "If" -> "Is".
- jafaku 13y ago
  No coin is immune to this. What, you thought other coins had their own code? Nope, they are all just a copy/paste of Bitcoin's code. Specifically Dogecoin was "coded" (copy/pasted) in a Friday night, according to it's founder. So I don't know what you were expecting.
  - gus_massa 13y ago
    Just curiosity. I thought they copied the code from Litecoin and I was not sure if in any of the intermediate steps someone decided to fix this. It will be interesting to see how each developer set and community handle this problem (and the future problems). Disclaimer: I don’t own BTC or DOGE (or LTC or any other virtual currency).
    - jafaku 13y ago
      There isn't really any development team comparable to that of Bitcoin in a different coin. Things that get fixed in Bitcoin are not fixed in other coins. But if another coin happens to fix something, it will be fixed in Bitcoin too. Typically a copycoin will only have the same fixes as Bitcoin depending on when they decided to copy it. But then they will invariably lag behind.
      - edelans 13y ago
        It is quite short sighted to think that all digital currencies are "forked" from bitcoin: see http://www.openudc.org/ http://www.openudc.org/ for instance: "The OpenUDC softwares are designed to manage a free money system as described by the TRM (Théorie Relative de la Monnaie), that means a money system where no human has privileges in front of money creation either in time or in space." The concept is therefore quite different from BTC which clearly gives some people a huge privilege in front of money creation in time
jafaku 13y ago
If by "stable" you mean "they are so small that no one will even bother attacking them"... http://imgur.com/0kcORBm http://imgur.com/0kcORBm
- steveklabnik 13y ago
  5th largest cryptocurrency with more transations/day than every other one put together isn't exactly small...
  - vidarh 13y ago
    More like 4th, given that Ripples can't be mined, is controlled by a single entity, most of the existing coins are not freely circulating, and the transaction volume is consistently so tiny that it looks very much like the price is intentionally manipulated to make the coin look desirable.
    - oscilloscope 13y ago
      More like 3rd. In the 8 hours since vidarh posted this, Dogecoin surpassed the Peercoin market cap. The 24h trading volume of Dogecoin is also nearly 6x that of Peercoin right now.
      - celticninja 13y ago
        Really that means nothing though. Neither Peercoin or Dogecoin have merchant or payment processor support. No one is interested in taking dogecoin in payment for goods and services, right now it is just a toy coin that people can use to learn about cryptocurrencies cheaply and that is pretty much what it will always be. If dogecoin had a maleability issue it does not have the dev support to resolve it in a reasonable time frame, a fork like there was in BTC last year would have a similar result. There are lost of transactions because you can send 10 or 100 or 1000 coins to anyone and you still have sent less than a few bucks. Lots of transactions does not equal a big currency it equals a lot of transactions. And in this situation these transactions count for very little economic activity.

pjc50 13y ago

Also worth noting: you can't buy bitcoins on margin. So no margin calls to suddenly detonate the market.

febeling 13y ago
You can p2p lend and borrow btc here: https://www.bitbond.net/ https://www.bitbond.net/
ph0rque 13y ago
You can margin buy/sell on bitfinex.com
hangonhn 13y ago
Hang on. Isn't that just a matter of someone setting up a market and contracts for it? What you mean is that no one has setup bitcoins margins market yet right? Or am I misunderstanding something fundamental about BTC that prevents margins?
- pjc50 13y ago
  Transaction irreversability makes it a lot riskier, combined with the lack of support from the legal system. If you lend bitcoins to someone, and they run off with them, how do you recover your loss? Conversely, unlike stocks, you don't need a broker, so there's nobody who would take on that dealer role. Nobody has setup a "buy bitcoin on margin" service yet, and the first person to do so will lose a fortune to nonpayment of margin calls.
  - vidarh 13y ago
    You can protect against the risk by only providing the service between wallets held and controlled by you on your own exchange. There also are brokers providing indirect Bitcoin shorting with 1:10 leverage in the form of CFD's (contracts for difference). Of course they could opt to always or sometimes not actually trade the coins - to their clients it makes no difference, as no actual coins can be moved in/out of the accounts.
  - 13y ago

praptak 13y ago

This sounds like a general analysis of most bubbles in history - nothing very specific to BTC.

Fuxy 13y ago
Well I have bitcoin and I'm in no hurry to sell. I bought them at the tip of the previous bubble when they were £150 and was kinda disappointed when it dropped. Was hoping to have a large amount in bitcoin so i can buy online services relatively anonymously. Since then I more then recovered my loss even at the price it has now.

panarky 13y ago

The psychology part of this argument seems the same as with any commodity, not just Bitcoin. Maybe Bitcoin would be different if you could put money in but not take it out. But it's actually the reverse now -- it's harder to get Bitcoin out. So wouldn't that tend to increase the selling pressure? And if you don't want to sell to a sketchy exchange, you can sell to SecondMarket[0] and get a wire transfer to your bank account the same day. https://www.secondmarket.com/education/sell-bitcoin-secondmarket https://www.secondmarket.com/education/sell-bitcoin-secondma...

johnny635 13y ago

Sounds like the reason they gave for why houses always goes up.

interstitial 13y ago
You should know bitbugs don't like history.
- MartinCron 13y ago
  Nobody likes history in the broad sense. Most people only like history that confirms their existing positions.

ekianjo 13y ago

> If a crash happens it'll probably happen before people realise it, but suddenly there just won't be anyone wanting to buy coins anymore. Not sure how true this is. Bitcoin has been going through a few major crashes in the past 3 years, yet the demand was still strong after it went down.

celticninja 13y ago
I dont think the person you replied to meant a crash, but rather an implosion. i.e. a massive failure in the bitcoin protocol that renders it useless. This is the only way in which no one will want to buy coins. In that situation your best bet is sending your coins to an exchange and selling them into the listed buy orders which have not been removed because the person who listed them is either asleep or unaware of the news. However this is incredibly unlikely, bitcoin went though a fork last year that caused some problems but was quickly rectified, this current maleability issue is also being worked on to get a resolution. These sort of network wide problems are problems with the fundamentals of bitcoin and should, by right, affect the price of bitcoin much more than say government regulations in China or India, that they dont is because most holders of bitcoin understand that these problems can be resolved with some dev time and BTC has some great and comitted devs working on it. Namecoin (NMC) had a similar issue where it meant that web addresses linked to NMC were not secure, that caused a crahs but no where near going to zero and that is a coin with minimal developer support.