Altcoins are surging at the moment, so I believe that lends some credence to the first group being people trying to move into BTC to get more free coin.
I don't know, only if they did not understand that it's a win-win-win situation... they would have equal amount of coins on both chains so none of the three possible outcomes would be actually losing.
Something bad for bitcoin? And it still can't stop it! Look at how resilient it is!
Something good for bitcoin? TOLD YOU SO to the moon!
Not to use the B-word, but bubbles will continue to inflate as long as there are enough new people to put new money in.
I daresay constant is not great. Goes up is better.
Price going up? PURE SPECULATION, DRUGS, AND MONEY LAUNDERING.
Price going down? I TOLD YOU IT WAS A BUBBLE THAT WOULD CRASH.
Price staying steady? JUST WAIT, IT'S A BUBBLE BEING HELD AT A PRICE ARTIFICIALLY, EVEN THOUGH I'LL NEVER MAKE A FALSIFIABLE PREDICTION ABOUT WHEN IT WILL CRASH.
The price will simply go up when the whales want it to, and go down when said whales want to cash out. Fees could go up or down, China could do X or Y, the Fed could regulate it or not, and the general opinions of the ecosystem don't matter whatsoever - price is fairly solely dictated by the whims of a few dozen elites nowadays.
In economics, the Gini coefficient is the standard measure
of how inequitable a society is. This is tricky to
determine for Bitcoin, as it's not quiet a "society" in
the Gini sense, one person may have multiple addresses and
many addresses have been used only once or a few times.
(The commonly-cited figure of 0.88 is based on one small
exchange in 2011.) However, a Citigroup analysis from
early 2014 notes: "47 individuals hold about 30 percent,
another 900 a further 20 percent, the next 10,000 about
25% and another million about 20%"; and distribution
"looks much like the distribution of wealth in North Korea
and makes China's and even the US' wealth distribution
look like that of a workers' paradise
Dorit Ron and Adi Shamir found in a 2012 study that only
22% of then-existing Bitcoins were in circulation at all,
there were a total of 75 active users or businesses with
any kind of volume, one (unidentified) user owned a
quarter of all Bitcoins in existence, and one large owner
was trying to hide their pile by moving it around in
thousands of smaller transactions. (Shamir is one of the
most renowned cryptographers in the world and the "S" in
"RSA encryption")"
I can't find any more recent study specific to the Gini coefficient, however these[1] charts show an improvement over this snapshot[2] from May 2015.
[1]: https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses.... [2]: https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/1-bitcoin-community-controls...
If someone were to have monitored IP addresses in the swarm it may be possible to correlate attempts from single users hiding their funds across many wallets. Simply looking at the blockchain balances of single addresses will not necessarily indicate a single person controlling many addresses.
Or if they can, then given that it's in their interest for the price to keep rising long-term, why not hold and go along for the ride?
But I guess most whales are in competition against each other, rather than cooperating. And that would be a good thing.
https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses....
Trading on attitude is not the best trading analysis strategy, I'm glad you sold before losing more money
I think you are looking at the wrong market fundamentals.
People getting into bitcoin right now, buy because it can double their money in 6 months. They do not understand anything about Segwit2x.
They see news about bitcoin, look at the price again, and say "Damn, why didn't I buy it already?", and buy. That's your market fundamental right now. That is the value of bitcoin right now: "double your money in half a year".
I'm not saying bitcoin doesn't have any other value, or that it is overvalued right now.
Even when the news were predictable or already known! Bitcoin has never been connected to any "market fundamentals", just hundreds of day traders trying to predict each others reaction to random scraps of news as they come by.
As someone who was there and paid close attention, this is not true. E.g. silk road's closure didn't impact BTC for more than a few days, but everyone universally would've said it'd tank BTC's price.
Not really.
If you look at, say, the 2010 to 2013, the first two big bubbles then you get something that looks like
The uncertainty keeps the price down. People expect a fine, but not how large it will be. I believe there are even cases where a company got the max possible fine and still their stock price went up.
Pre fork BTC price + risk premium ~ BTC post fork + BCH
Pretend like the fork actually taking place and working successfully as comparable to a company's earning reports. The second that news comes in, it prices itself in almost immediately.
However a rational (impartial?) actor should be willing to take that risk if the premium is big enough. That could mean buying pre-fork or selling pre-fork if there is an obvious opportunity. Which means in an efficient market the risk premium should be zero "on average". It's hard to reason about averages with one sample but that sample was distinctly not zero!
You could view Bitcoin + altcoins = total crypto market cap the same way..
You could also argue that if Bitcoin didn't fork previously, the total price of BTC alone would be higher than both forks now. Who knows?
The fact that is was called off gave temporary relief to the markets. It's hard to predict what will happen now, but at least it avoided tanking the market next week (for now).
[1] https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoins-bogeyman-cometh-segwit2x-5...
It's rise in price is none-the-less astonishing, and is somewhat a testament to the soundness of the security model.
The whole system does require new money coming in all the time to maintain current price levels, as miners need to sell their bitcoin to get paid. It's less than a zero sum situation, as some of that money coming in goes directly to paying for the mining costs.
Since the overall awareness of Bitcoin is relatively low, in terms of actually knowing what it is, and how to get some, this bubble could run a long time, as there is a lot of money in the world, in need of investing.
Does that mean gold is in a bubble? I mean, who are we to say either way? Bitcoin is arguably more useful than gold and it's supply is known with great precision. You could say that Gold is more speculative in a way since somebody could be sitting on a stockpile that is equal to half of the known supply.
> The whole system does require new money coming in all the time to maintain current price levels
That's only true for the next few years, then no new coins are created.
You can't see how it's not a bubble but frankly, I have trouble seeing how we can say it's in a bubble. Maybe it is, but I don't think anybody knows how to evaluate bitcoin... it's not like anything we've seen before.
When IBM started selling computers, their roadmap didn't include home computers because they didn't think that anyone would ever want a computer in their home. We understand the implications of bitcoin now about as much as IBM understood the impact of computers back then.
Because if you want anything(like cheese or furnace filters), you'll then search for it on Google.
Just playing devils advocate.
It was for sure. Where do you get your Bitcoin news?
There were many people that sold off a lot of their altcoins for bitcoin, so that they could be positioned for the fork coins. They are buying their altcoins again.
There are many people that can't make any decision in the face of uncertainty, and have shaky confidence in bitcoin to begin with, now the biggest uncertainty is gone and they are able to buy now that this is out the way.
k
Edit: Otoh, looks like it's seeing a bit of a drop now, but I doubt it will hit the pre-anticipation levels.