Evidence or speculation? I saw the $300 sell wall, but that does not account for the previous week’s dip, which is when the “bearwhale” speculation started. I did see plenty of speculation to this end … but humans, particularly bagholders in a bubble, will grasp for any explanation that is not “we were foolish”.
Really, everything is based on the assumption of conspiracy:
December—Just a small market correction after bubble, soon we go up!
February—Price dropped because Mark Karpeles is an incompetent thief. (This one I’ll give them.)
May—China dropped the price, now all Chinese is priced in, we go up!
August—Wall Street dropping the price because they want to enter cheap. Hold and we’ll go up!
October—The bearwhale dropped the price, cheap coins that will go up!
It’s a cliche for good reason that everything and its opposite is “great news for Bitcoin!”
The ridiculously inflated prices peaking in December 2013 are almost completely explained by Mt. Gox’s blatant fraud and the Willy and Marcus bots. A decline from that would be the expectation.
So what was the solid evidence for (and against) conspiracy, as opposed to the null hypothesis that this is just one week in a bubble on its way down?
So what was the solid evidence for (and against) conspiracy, as opposed to the null hypothesis that this is just one week in a bubble on its way down?
Neither of those are true (probably).
The price is the result of normal market forces, not a “conspiracy’ to decrease the price, or ‘manipulation’ upward last november due to bots. All of the ‘manipulation’ talk is complete bullshit. There is nothing at all unusual in the price movements of bitcoin. It is completely normal for an asset that is growing from essenitally no value, into the billions of dolalrs range, in five years.
If there was a startup company that went public with shares at its inception, until a point of it having a $10 billion market valuation, over a 5 year period, it would look a LOT like the bitcoin price chart. Huge, massive increases in value as it reached new milestones of adoption. Massive contractions as it looked like it might fail. But the thing is, you DONT see the valuation of startup companies like this, because they are owned by a small number of founders and venture capitalists and angel investors. So the bitcoin price looks unusual to most people.
So the first hypothesis: “there is a conspiracy to manipulate the price”, is complete BS. (There are tons of idiots on places like bitocintalk.org that beleive things like this, because they are clueless. But this is not a truth about reality. it is a rationalization made up after the fact by people for whom bitcoin is essentially a religion that you must take on faith, to explain why the price is now going down).
The second hypothesis “Bitcoin is a bubble on the way down”, is also probably not true. (Though the chance that it is true is a lot greater than the idiotic manipulation theory). The reason why this is unlikely is that the blockchain is a truly revolutionary technology, whose impact on the world is goign to be MUCH greater than a mere 10 billion dollar company. (If you look at bitcoin’s market cap as a valuation of a company, it peaked around $10 billion).
It might be true that the bitcoin blockchain is about to be surpassed by a competitor. That is, if you think of bitcoin as a startup, as the first startup to pioneer a technology, it is possible that now it is losing its place to a competing startup. If this were true, maybe bitcoin is going down because some altcoin is doing a much better job and is going to surpass it.
Even if bitcoin is going to be eclipsed by a competitor, it is much more likely that bitcoin would have another rise, but during that rise, its successor will greatly outperform it, and eventually surpass it.
To summarize:
Chance that the bitcoin price movements, in the long term, are due to a conspiracy: Close to 0%.
Chance that the blockchain technology will just die, and bitcoin and all altcoins will just die: Very Low.
Chance that bitcoin is currently going straight to $0 because a competitor blockchain technology is surpassing it right now: Low.
I do think that bitcoin is at risk of being surpassed by competing blockchains in the future, but not so imminently that it is going straight to zero right now. I think that in the end, both bitcoin and a few different other blockchains will survive. Most of those probably have not even been created yet.
In the same way that there is not only one surviving internet company today, and in fact there are many, in the future there will be many surviving blockchain technologies. This is true, even while the vast majority of the coins currently in existence will fail, just as most of the dot com bubble companies failed.
but humans, particularly bagholders in a bubble, will grasp for any explanation that is not “we were foolish”
Yes. The conspiracy theories are rationalizations that have been invented because reality contradicted their belief system. It is absolutely possible for the price to decline the way it did. It could go much lower. It could even go a lot lower and still recover, and go much higher in the future! It already did exactly that in 2011-2013.
Random fluctuations have moved the price that much on a daily basis. The fact that we are trending downward generally is certainly expected—it is exactly what has happened 5x earlier in bitcoin’s history, and numerous other times in speculative bubbles. It’s possible for the near-term trend to be down 90% of the time, and yet the overall long term trend to be up. Indeed, this is expected due to the typical behavior of whales. They moderate demand so that prices continue to gradually fall, all the while accumulating coins. Eventually the bottom is reached when they no longer are in control of demand. Then the bull market starts and you have a very quick run up to an all-new high.
This is a very common pattern. It happens in commodities, it happens in stock markets, it happens in real estate prices. It has repeated over and over in the history of bitcoin.
There is substantial evidence that a giant whale dumped $9m worth of coins at $300. Now that the sell wall is gone, the price is back up.
Otherwise, just the typical accretion phase of a boom-bust cycle.
Evidence or speculation? I saw the $300 sell wall, but that does not account for the previous week’s dip, which is when the “bearwhale” speculation started. I did see plenty of speculation to this end … but humans, particularly bagholders in a bubble, will grasp for any explanation that is not “we were foolish”.
Really, everything is based on the assumption of conspiracy:
December—Just a small market correction after bubble, soon we go up!
February—Price dropped because Mark Karpeles is an incompetent thief. (This one I’ll give them.)
May—China dropped the price, now all Chinese is priced in, we go up!
August—Wall Street dropping the price because they want to enter cheap. Hold and we’ll go up!
October—The bearwhale dropped the price, cheap coins that will go up!
It’s a cliche for good reason that everything and its opposite is “great news for Bitcoin!”
The ridiculously inflated prices peaking in December 2013 are almost completely explained by Mt. Gox’s blatant fraud and the Willy and Marcus bots. A decline from that would be the expectation.
So what was the solid evidence for (and against) conspiracy, as opposed to the null hypothesis that this is just one week in a bubble on its way down?
Neither of those are true (probably).
The price is the result of normal market forces, not a “conspiracy’ to decrease the price, or ‘manipulation’ upward last november due to bots. All of the ‘manipulation’ talk is complete bullshit. There is nothing at all unusual in the price movements of bitcoin. It is completely normal for an asset that is growing from essenitally no value, into the billions of dolalrs range, in five years.
If there was a startup company that went public with shares at its inception, until a point of it having a $10 billion market valuation, over a 5 year period, it would look a LOT like the bitcoin price chart. Huge, massive increases in value as it reached new milestones of adoption. Massive contractions as it looked like it might fail. But the thing is, you DONT see the valuation of startup companies like this, because they are owned by a small number of founders and venture capitalists and angel investors. So the bitcoin price looks unusual to most people.
So the first hypothesis: “there is a conspiracy to manipulate the price”, is complete BS. (There are tons of idiots on places like bitocintalk.org that beleive things like this, because they are clueless. But this is not a truth about reality. it is a rationalization made up after the fact by people for whom bitcoin is essentially a religion that you must take on faith, to explain why the price is now going down).
The second hypothesis “Bitcoin is a bubble on the way down”, is also probably not true. (Though the chance that it is true is a lot greater than the idiotic manipulation theory). The reason why this is unlikely is that the blockchain is a truly revolutionary technology, whose impact on the world is goign to be MUCH greater than a mere 10 billion dollar company. (If you look at bitcoin’s market cap as a valuation of a company, it peaked around $10 billion).
It might be true that the bitcoin blockchain is about to be surpassed by a competitor. That is, if you think of bitcoin as a startup, as the first startup to pioneer a technology, it is possible that now it is losing its place to a competing startup. If this were true, maybe bitcoin is going down because some altcoin is doing a much better job and is going to surpass it.
Even if bitcoin is going to be eclipsed by a competitor, it is much more likely that bitcoin would have another rise, but during that rise, its successor will greatly outperform it, and eventually surpass it.
To summarize:
Chance that the bitcoin price movements, in the long term, are due to a conspiracy: Close to 0%. Chance that the blockchain technology will just die, and bitcoin and all altcoins will just die: Very Low. Chance that bitcoin is currently going straight to $0 because a competitor blockchain technology is surpassing it right now: Low.
I do think that bitcoin is at risk of being surpassed by competing blockchains in the future, but not so imminently that it is going straight to zero right now. I think that in the end, both bitcoin and a few different other blockchains will survive. Most of those probably have not even been created yet.
In the same way that there is not only one surviving internet company today, and in fact there are many, in the future there will be many surviving blockchain technologies. This is true, even while the vast majority of the coins currently in existence will fail, just as most of the dot com bubble companies failed.
Yes. The conspiracy theories are rationalizations that have been invented because reality contradicted their belief system. It is absolutely possible for the price to decline the way it did. It could go much lower. It could even go a lot lower and still recover, and go much higher in the future! It already did exactly that in 2011-2013.
Random fluctuations have moved the price that much on a daily basis. The fact that we are trending downward generally is certainly expected—it is exactly what has happened 5x earlier in bitcoin’s history, and numerous other times in speculative bubbles. It’s possible for the near-term trend to be down 90% of the time, and yet the overall long term trend to be up. Indeed, this is expected due to the typical behavior of whales. They moderate demand so that prices continue to gradually fall, all the while accumulating coins. Eventually the bottom is reached when they no longer are in control of demand. Then the bull market starts and you have a very quick run up to an all-new high.
This is a very common pattern. It happens in commodities, it happens in stock markets, it happens in real estate prices. It has repeated over and over in the history of bitcoin.
Yes, this exactly. Its normal market behavior.