Whether you characterize my post as "pumping bitcoin" or otherwise, there are probably several ways to slice bitcoin's 6-7 year price history, and I doubt that it can be characterized as linear.. and yeah, sure, currently there remains a decent possibility for another exponential growth period, and who knows the odds for such...

Yeah, ETH is being pumped right now, but I will be quite surprised if it doesn't get strongly dumped within the next two months (if not sooner), though I am not saying that there may not be additional pumping, even possibly bringing ETH from $14 to $50 in the short term.. though I am not planning to put any significant money on such a pump and dump gamble.

Anyhow, I will grant that we do seem to be in a very decent place for BTC that increases the odds for another exponential growth period, but, yeah, how much of an exponential growth period? how fast? and how far? and history remains only a small piece of such a speculative price prediction puzzle.

If we look at history, from which price point to which price point are we gonna select in order to make our claim about past growth?

For example: From mid 2010 to present the growth has been 8,860x - yet I understand that number to be a bit skewed because the starting point for BTC prices was close to zero... but if we go from June 2011 to present the growth is about 15x (but I would suggest that from 2011 to present the more representative growth rate would be about 45x from about $10 to $450).

Maybe only history will be able to shed light on which portions of BTC's growth curve are more representative and which parts are anomalies? 5 to 10 years down the road?

Here are the approximate historical BTC price points:

In much of 2009 and early 2010, bitcoin was virtually free to those in the "right circles" = $0

Starting in mid 2010, BTC was traded for around = $.05

January 2011 = $.30

June 2011 = $30

January 2012 = $5

January 2013 = $14

April 2013 = $260

July 2013 = $70

November 2013 = $1,200

January 2015 = $320

A large majority of 2015 = $180 to $300 (Mostly $230 to $260)

April 20, 2016 to May 20, 2016 = $435 to $470

Maybe ETH is being bought because it has great value?

(05-20-2016 03:48 PM)Satoshi Wrote:  Maybe ETH is being bought because it has great value?

Maybe NOT

(05-20-2016 04:02 PM)JayJuanGee Wrote:  

(05-20-2016 03:48 PM)Satoshi Wrote:  Maybe ETH is being bought because it has great value?

Maybe NOT

That's all? Two words?

You post two thousand words in here daily about the advantages of bitcoins.

Now give us two thousand words on the disadvantages of ETH.

(05-20-2016 07:11 PM)Satoshi Wrote:  

(05-20-2016 04:02 PM)JayJuanGee Wrote:  

(05-20-2016 03:48 PM)Satoshi Wrote:  Maybe ETH is being bought because it has great value?

Maybe NOT

That's all? Two words?

You post two thousand words in here daily about the advantages of bitcoins.

Now give us two thousand words on the disadvantages of ETH.

Look at you... Trolling.

By the way, i did two words and an image to your seemingly non-relevant and largely substance lacking post.

The burden seems to be on you to establish some connection between ETH and Bitcoin and then to make such an argument, if that is what you want to do, and then to post accordingly. Otherwise take such subject and/or argument, to the extent that you have any, to another thread (about alt coins or its own thread).

Like you suggest, I already post on a regular basis on various ideas related to bitcoin, and not merely because I am responding to a troll demand to post off topic.

In this thread, I attempt to respond to you to the extent that I can either quickly respond to your various stated concerns or to somehow attempt to relate such substance to bitcoin matters.

(05-20-2016 01:23 PM)JayJuanGee Wrote:  Yeah, ETH is being pumped right now, but I will be quite surprised if it doesn't get strongly dumped within the next two months (if not sooner), though I am not saying that there may not be additional pumping, even possibly bringing ETH from $14 to $50 in the short term.. though I am not planning to put any significant money on such a pump and dump gamble.

You said this. You are calling ETH a 'pump and dump gamble', now I'm curious why you think so, and why this coin does not deserve the value it's being trading for?

And yes this is not directly related to bitcoin, but you brought the topic up, so if it's not appropriate to disuse ETH in this thread, then don't bring the topic up in the topic, to later blame it on me that I'm discussing ETH in the wrong thread.

I don't think that's fare.

(05-20-2016 07:59 PM)Satoshi Wrote:  

(05-20-2016 01:23 PM)JayJuanGee Wrote:  Yeah, ETH is being pumped right now, but I will be quite surprised if it doesn't get strongly dumped within the next two months (if not sooner), though I am not saying that there may not be additional pumping, even possibly bringing ETH from $14 to $50 in the short term.. though I am not planning to put any significant money on such a pump and dump gamble.

You said this. You are calling ETH a 'pump and dump gamble', now I'm curious why you think so, and why this coin does not deserve the value it's being trading for?

And yes this is not directly related to bitcoin, but you brought the topic up, so if it's not appropriate to disuse ETH in this thread, then don't bring the topic up in the topic, to later blame it on me that I'm discussing ETH in the wrong thread.

I don't think that's fare.

Am I repeating myself a large number of times in responding to your apparent attempts at derailing this thread?

Since the thread is not about ETH, there seems to be no need for me to substantiate an kind of ETH argument or connection any more than I already have. I generally attempt to post about ETH in a general assessment of its relationship to BTC and in that regard, their may be some correlation (maybe even causation) of some price movements that revolve around people getting in and out of ETH.. which can cause BTC price dynamics.. also, yeah, seems like many if not all ETH features will be absorbed into BTC (even though ETH has also created some features to play around with BTC on its platform, and I don't claim to be any kind of expert regarding a lot of this). Anyhow, Bitcoin has been creating a POW infrastructure for more than 7 years, and ETH has not been around very long and is largely fabricated supply and centralized in a lot of ways including production of coins and if or when it will convert from POW (which it probably is more premined than anything) to POS.. likely a kind of scandal, too, and quite a lot of the fund raising historically was centralized and the recent DAO crowd fund raising has some very likely dump incentives (I think prior to 5/28)... gosh if ETH can keep up its prices before 5/28, crowd funding is almost over no? I can hardly imagine the pump lasting much beyond that and even if there is some kind of ETH value above $5 in 2 more months I will be quite surprised by the various manipulators' abilities to continue to pump it.. and yeah, those dynamics will likely affect bitcoin's prices, too.. I'm thinking largely inversely... but what the fuck do I know? I'm one person taking into account a variety of factors including a seemingly likely upcoming ETH dump.

Like I suggested, if you have some kind of argument that attempts to make a connection regarding ETH and how it is going to surplant BTC or whatever happens to be your pro ETH and anti-bitcoin argument, then go for it (and you do seem to be inclined to want to get on talking points that are contrary to bitcoin, but whatever, that's your choice).

Yeah, there are some people, besides you - especially because ETH is getting a lot of hype right now (since the DAO crowdfunding), by "the hip cool folks" (who several of them are likely to get dumped on, by the way) attempting to make those kinds of pro ETH and anti-BTC arguments, and to me it seems sufficient to refer in this thread to those quasi-atopical arguments generally rather getting into the ETH weeds or into the bitcoin slamming weeds, which are frequently stupid and insubstantiated arguments.

Anyhow, since you seem inclined towards bitcoin slamming, then present an argument in favor of ETH, and maybe I will respond... hopefully, you can make some kind of connection to bitcoin, since this happens to still be the bitcoin thread, no?

Maybe we can get Roosh to change the name of the thread, though I doubt guys would want that? ?

See the below article for a list of "troubled currencies", which really just means that they are very volatile in comparison to the dollar, and bitcoin is at the top of the list for the three periods described therein.

http://www.cato.org/research/troubled-cu...watch-list

Funny that the time-periods do not go beyond 2014 because instead of seeing 20% up and 20% down, they would have seen up to 1000% up for 2013... hahahahahaha.. They would not want to show that in their lillie chart.

That's some better arguments against ETH than just say 'it's a pump'.

Now I don't follow ETH, but I don't agree that the fact that the funding and development of ETH was/is centralized is a bad thing. I don't know much about this ongoing crowdesale, did a quick google search and it seems like there is some good idea behind what they're doing, even if I didn't take the time to understand it myself.

I think like this, before ETH was set in action the price was around $1. So just the though of what ETH could do was worth $1. Now it's actually running and working, so obviously the price should move up. And it did not yet raise in value at all, especially if compared to say our beloved BTC. Actually, ETH needs to multiple in value times five so reach the same market cap as BTC. And the ETH protocol is way smarter than the BTC protocol, so I don't see such raise as unrealistic.

You seem quite convinced that ETH will fall in price, did you consider shorting it? That would make a good profit for you, if what you believe is right, that ETH will lose 60% of it's value and soon be trading below $5.

(05-22-2016 09:27 PM)Satoshi Wrote:  That's some better arguments against ETH than just say 'it's a pump'.

Like I already asserted several times, I see no real reason to make arguments regarding ETH beyond various conclusory assertions, and I believe the burden is on others to either make various bitcoin related arguments about it, if they believe there to be some merit to it.

(05-22-2016 09:27 PM)Satoshi Wrote:  Now I don't follow ETH, but I don't agree that the fact that the funding and development of ETH was/is centralized is a bad thing. I don't know much about this ongoing crowdesale, did a quick google search and it seems like there is some good idea behind what they're doing, even if I didn't take the time to understand it myself.

Of course there are a lot of good ideas behind ETH and there are a lot of good ideas around a lot of the other cryptocoins. I have nothing against good ideas and development.


Also, you seem to be asserting that you do not know too much about ETH, and I am saying that I do not know too much about ETH, but for some reason you continue to want me to discuss it with you in this BTC thread.... which I try to make connections, but seems more like off topic to me.

There is nothing wrong with various centralized systems for organizing various kinds of innovation, yet one of the main selling points of bitcoin is its decentralization.. which means that it cannot be censored and does not need permission... and really there is no one to go after regarding bitcoin itself. Of course there are a bunch of individuals who are involved in building various centralized systems on top of bitcoin... and they can be gone after, but bitcoin still survives.

In essence, you can build a whole hell-of-a lot of centralized systems ontop of decentralized system, but the other way around is not so innovative (building decentralized on top of centralized)

(05-22-2016 09:27 PM)Satoshi Wrote:  I think like this, before ETH was set in action the price was around $1. So just the though of what ETH could do was worth $1. Now it's actually running and working, so obviously the price should move up. And it did not yet raise in value at all, especially if compared to say our beloved BTC. Actually, ETH needs to multiple in value times five so reach the same market cap as BTC. And the ETH protocol is way smarter than the BTC protocol, so I don't see such raise as unrealistic.

Yes, there are a lot of alternative cryptos that improve upon bitcoin in a variety of ways, but that does not take away from the main values of bitcoin, which is the decentralized permissionless ledger that most of the others are not offering.. and if they are they are babies (such as possibly monero or dash) in comparison to the computing power and development of BTC.

(05-22-2016 09:27 PM)Satoshi Wrote:  You seem quite convinced that ETH will fall in price, did you consider shorting it? That would make a good profit for you, if what you believe is right, that ETH will lose 60% of it's value and soon be trading below $5.

Yeah right...

I put my money where my mouth is and that is investing in BTC and making various BTC related discussions. i am not trying to get involved in various topics such as ETH that I do not know, and I don't really give too much of a shit whether ETH goes up to $50 or $100 or whatever goes back down to $2 or below that. Various developments related to ETH are likely to be learning experiences for BTC, and some things including some of ETH's successful innovations are likely to get absorbed into BTC.

Basically, I have the sense that ETH has a lot of growth cycles to go through before it will get anywhere close to BTC (and I am not just talking about market cap), and people comparing ETH to BTC in order to pump it seems misplaced at best and scandalous in a worse assessment.

Actually, from my understanding Japan is in the bitcoin news more and more and developing into a fairly bit player in the bitcoin space


http://www.newsbtc.com/2016/05/25/japan-...gulations/

Bitcoin ATH uptrends through Local bitcoins in various other countries, too.

Here's another one. Bitcoin thriving in India too... lot's of upwards BTC price pressures int he works, tell me no?

https://news.bitcoin.com/india-unregulat...-thriving/

Well BTC trade volume picked up in the past 18 hours, and we got movement from $453 and to thereafter largely float in this $471 to $478 price arena. Yes, too short of a time period to be able to determine exactly what direction seems more likely or not.

One scenario is that there could be a bit of a price battle in this sub $500 arena that could last for a few weeks, possibly.

Difficult to predict exactly how it plays out, and I really never try to predict exactly, except for suggesting that long term we be going upwards in price (yet no guarantees for sure).

In any event, today is a good day for bitcoin, and we are in a very decent place , especially for Bitcoin holders and those people who have been attempting to accumulate coins..... Not so great for folks who are bearish about bitcoin and who have been attempting to short bitcoin in the past about 10 months... Sure, you could still have made some money shorting bitcoin in the past 10 months, but you would have been fighting the seemingly retrospectively upward price trend during that period.. and fairly bullish at that to have a bit over 100% returns in the past year, if you had been largely betting long during that period.... which kind of supports my overall thesis that bitcoin is seeming to be the safest of the crypto currencies... especially if you can kind of play it in an accumulating sense (though sure going to continue to be volatile, that's not going to change any time soon.


Anyhow congratulation today to ... BTC HODLers and accumulators.

Maybe it's ok. to cash out 1 or 2% of your holdings in this price range or some other amount of your comfort, but continue to prepare for upwards price movements, if you are relatively bullish about bitcoin's fundamentals and future.

Hang on boys




I would say "boys and girls" but we only have boys here in our relevant audience.



Another good day in bitcoinlandia, and coin HODLers.

Prices pushing passed $509 on Bitstamp as I type.

Of course we have other numbers too, including currently pushing $572 on Chinese exchanges, and various other upwardly trending prices

(05-28-2016 04:00 PM)JayJuanGee Wrote:  Hang on boys




I would say "boys and girls" but we only have boys here in our relevant audience.



Another good day in bitcoinlandia, and coin HODLers.

Prices pushing passed $509 on Bitstamp as I type.

Of course we have other numbers too, including currently pushing $572 on Chinese exchanges, and various other upwardly trending prices

This is merely the beginning of what we HODL for!

(05-28-2016 08:30 PM)BBinger Wrote:  

(05-28-2016 04:00 PM)JayJuanGee Wrote:  Hang on boys




I would say "boys and girls" but we only have boys here in our relevant audience.



Another good day in bitcoinlandia, and coin HODLers.

Prices pushing passed $509 on Bitstamp as I type.

Of course we have other numbers too, including currently pushing $572 on Chinese exchanges, and various other upwardly trending prices

This is merely the beginning of what we HODL for!

I hope that you are correct.


Here is tweaked version of an analysis that I gave to someone yesterday who was asking me about shrinking BTC trade volume

I typed a close variation of this about 24 hours ago while BTC Bitstamp prices were still bouncing in the lower $490s, a few hours before it had broken through $500.




>>>>>We cannot know for sure what is happening in bitcoinlandia, and there can be a variety of explanations, and some of them are more convincing than others.

Over the past couple of months, when we generally went up from $403 to $470 on relatively low volume, and then had several price correction attempts to $435, that continued to be relatively low volume. During that price movement process, the theory is either that: 1) the bears (sellers) are running out of coins to sell (and no one else really wants to sell when the price goes lower than $440), or that 2) the price is being manipulated by whales (large holders of coins).

After we witnessed the last 48-hour period of fairly decent trade volume appreciation and also based on the extent of the upwards price movement from $450 to $470 and then additional movement nearly to $500, the second theory about BTC prices being manipulated becomes less convincing (although the manipulation theory still has a low chance of being true, and no matter what, with such a small market cap, there is always some manipulation that is going to be occurring… - we need at least a 100x price/market cap appreciation to considerably lessen the ease of price manipulations).

Anyhow, so initially when the volume picked up at around $450 in order to push the price up, it appears that the volume had to pick up in order to successfully get through the seller resistance (there were a lot of for sale coins stacked in the $450s and $460s). It would not have been possible to push the price up from $450 on low volume, and that got us into the $470s.. so anyhow that volume pick up was a bit of a sign of a price battle… and I think that the bears would have been tolerant of staying in the $470s price range for a while, however, the bulls had different ideas to push us into the $490s… which is no problem with me (and any other BTC holders).

It’s not uncommon to have lessening trade volume coming after a major price movement, and that is considered a price consolidation period. Accordingly in a consolidation period there will tend to be some lower trade volume while each side attempts to figure out what to do next (it may not last long, but there may be some volume fluctuations based on some consolidation). In that regard, each side is considering whether they should attempt to push the price up or attempt to push it down.

Even though currently trade volume is going down a little bit, and it is really kind of soon to call it, I doubt that we are going to continue to experience low trade volume in the near future. Yeah, I don’t know for sure, but like I suggested above, I think that the bears would have been quite a bit more content with a price range in the $470s, because the various anti-bitcoin propagandists and corporate shills could have continued to relatively convincingly spew out their bullshit propaganda that bitcoin is dead, failing and gonna crash, blah, blah blah etc.

The ability to spew that kind of baloney negative information about BTC becomes quite a bit less convincing the higher and the longer that the BTC price remains above $470 and worse if BTC prices remain a significant number of dollars above $470 (like we are now in the $490s). Accordingly, if the price stays up, it becomes almost a self-fulfilling prophecy that people buy because they believe BTC prices are going up.. and maybe even people stop selling their BTC because they think the price is going up.. which also creates additional upwards price pressures.

So, in the end, my above description and assessment does not mean for sure that BTC prices are going up, but it pretty much means that bitcoin is not currently in a stable price position, so either there is going to be a price battle that brings BTC prices back down or we will be going up, and at the moment, there seems to be a bit more of an inclination towards upwards price movement, unless some bears can come up with a large number of coins to drive BTC prices below $470 or lower… NOT an impossible occurence, but I am inclined to think we are going a bit up from here… and prices going up could be on either low volume or high volume.<<<<<<<<

Thread has 371,817 views

(05-29-2016 02:12 PM)SunW Wrote:  Thread has 371,817 views

How many of the views bought?

It's great time to be selling if you have already bought lot of them... and yet, have to be careful because such a person does not want to sell too many BTC because this current price uptick could take us quite far.

Australia to sell £8m of seized bitcoins

Quote:A collection of bitcoins worth about £8m, which had been confiscated by police in Australia, will be auctioned off in June.

The 24,518 bitcoins will be sold mostly in blocks of 2,000 - each with a market value of about £680,000.

Ernst & Young, the firm organising the auction, said the bitcoins had been "confiscated as proceeds of crime" but did not elaborate on the case.

One expert said the authorities had chosen a "safe" time to sell.

Australian newspapers have previously reported that 24,500 bitcoins were seized by police in the state of Victoria in 2013, after a man was arrested for dealing illegal drugs online.

In 2015, Victoria's Asset Confiscation Operations department "confirmed it had recently taken possession of 24,500 coins and would try to make the most of it", according to the Sydney Morning Herald.


"This is a significant amount of Bitcoin," Dr Garrick Hileman, economic historian at the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, told the BBC. "It's about a week's worth of new Bitcoin that comes onto the market through mining."

Currently about 4,000 new bitcoins are generated a day, as a reward for "miners" who offer their computer power to process Bitcoin transactions.

The seized coins are auctioned in blocks because quickly selling a large number of coins for cash at a Bitcoin exchange could negatively affect the market.

"Generally the view is that any time 10,000 bitcoins sell, the market price can be moved significantly," said Dr Hileman.

The price of Bitcoin rose to $530 (£362) on Friday, its highest level since August 2014.

Dr Hileman said the Australian authorities had chosen a "safe" time to sell because there is some uncertainty about what will happen to the value of Bitcoin in July.

"The Bitcoin protocol is designed to reduce the number of new bitcoins miners are given as a reward for processing transactions every four years.

"The reward will be halved on 14 July, so prices could go up due to the reduced supply of new bitcoins.

"But there is a question about whether security could decline, if rewards for miners are reduced significantly. So it's a safe time to sell, as there is no guarantee about what might happen in July."

The Australian Bitcoin auction, which will be open to bidders worldwide, is the first such sale outside of the US.

In 2014, the US Marshals Service began auctioning a collection of about 175,000 bitcoins that had been confiscated from the founder of internet marketplace Silk Road.

The final auction of those bitcoins attracted 11 bidders, possibly due to the high cost of each block on sale.

Dr Hileman said the sale of Bitcoin by the Australian authorities was an acknowledgement that the cryptocurrency was not illegal.

"Any time a government sells Bitcoin, it is acknowledging that this is a different asset to drugs, for example, that would not be sold in an auction," he told the BBC.

"That was one of the big takeaways from the US Marshal Service auction - they set a precedent that Bitcoin was not illegal.

"Australia has been going through its own regulatory process - and this makes a standing that Bitcoin is legal to use in Australia."

It seems pretty likely that the Australian government is going to do well with this auction of bitcoins, and surely, as the article asserts, it seems safer for them to put their large number of coins up for auction during an apparent BTC bull run (which if you recall seemed to have been the case in late October / early November 2015 when the US government auctioned off the final batch of the confiscated silk road coins).

I'm curious to know what the logistics were in the seized bitcoins in Australia. Don't criminals specifically use bitcoin because it's hard to trace and confiscate? What's the point in using it if governments can just get their hands on it instead of cash?

(06-01-2016 07:20 PM)booshala Wrote:  I'm curious to know what the logistics were in the seized bitcoins in Australia. Don't criminals specifically use bitcoin because it's hard to trace and confiscate? What's the point in using it if governments can just get their hands on it instead of cash?

I'm assuming that the criminals were caught using other means and then either the bitcoins were seized during a raid or the criminal was incentivized to turn them over.

(06-01-2016 07:29 PM)Peregrine Wrote:  

(06-01-2016 07:20 PM)booshala Wrote:  I'm curious to know what the logistics were in the seized bitcoins in Australia. Don't criminals specifically use bitcoin because it's hard to trace and confiscate? What's the point in using it if governments can just get their hands on it instead of cash?

I'm assuming that the criminals were caught using other means and then either the bitcoins were seized during a raid or the criminal was incentivized to turn them over.

Also, just to add a bit. I am no computer expert, and I don't really claim to understand the specifics of a lot of cases involving seized bitcoins.

Nonetheless, my understanding is that the "anonymity" selling point of bitcoin has frequently been oversold, especially in the first several years of bitcoin's existence. In the last couple of years, folks in the bitcoin space have become more aware about anonymity limitations, especially when it comes to the potential employment of governmental investigatory resources once a person ( or a transaction) has become an investigatory target.

In this regard, it remains difficult to be completely anonymous when a lot of transactions are on a public ledger and can be traced, especially at various exit points or even once one or two addresses are identified in one or more transactions, then authorities may be able to trace a person with a bitcoin address.

Bitcoin still has a lot of value, even if the anonymity matter had been overhyped, and there still seem to be ways that bitcoin can be used in various anonymous ways, but if your goal is to be anonymous by engaging in some kind of widespread illegal activity, then there are likely ways to trace you unless you do happen to have a real high degree of computer knowledge.


So yeah, like Peregrine indicated, there were likely some basic mistakes made along the way that caused the linking of coins and persons.

Also, if you want to engage in some illegal activities, there may either be better coins to use.. or possible ways to use cash in some of the more illegal parts, to the extent that you want to attempt to evade authorities in your illegal or arguably illegal activities.. not that I am advocating anyone to engage in illegal activities, yet frequently a lot of us guys recognize that there are situations in which illegality is arguable and construed rather than clear... and the government may still be successful in confiscating the bitcoins, which seems to have been the case with the confiscation of silk road coins that involved Ross Ulbricht.

Thanks for the input Peregrine and JJG. I don't really follow the intricacies of Bitcoin or Ethereum, now that I've just bought a little as a lotto ticket and also to try and spur my interest in cryptocurrency. What you're both saying makes sense.