No, the author isnt. This is the full quote: "The price after the Silk Road seizure has remained fairly constant but the currency itself has fallen from a high of $260 to about $130 this morning."

It is a horrible worded statement as it doesnt specify the time frame within which the price fell from 260 to 130, but they clearly state it has been stable since the SR seizure

It has to be said: geuis appears to have deliberately doctored that quote to provoke argument. The first half of the sentence directly contradicts the claim about the second.

Because Techcrunch is full of hack writing, as we all have complained about since around 2010-2011 or maybe earlier.

Sometimes it seems to me like people are intentionally causing fear, uncertainty, and denial about Bitcoin just to swing the price in their favor.

There are also many commenters and bloggers that are writing bullish comments on Bitcoin because they happen to own a lot of them, believe in it's mission etc. I would argue many more since it's not even economically rational to spread FUD to depress the current market price of BTC and then buy it when its potential to appreciate in future also depends entirely on confidence since it isn't backed by any tangible assets or income streams.

Sure, it would be better journalism to add the detail that Bitcoin has actually risen since "only" falling ~15-20% in response to the Silk Road seizure and explain that the 50% fall from its peak price happened in a few hours on April 10 and had nothing to to with fears over Silk Road, but I don't believe that would leave readers with any more faith in BTC as being generally stable.

No insight either way on this, but I did buy a (very) small amount of BTC after the initial post-Silk Road fall on the chance that the market was acting too irrationally. I've been curious about Bitcoin for a while, and now seemed like as good a time as any to buy a little bit and give myself some financial stake.

If a currency fluctuates 300% in a year, I don't think it's out of line to note that it used to be 100% higher in value. Silk road's closer did drop the price a bit, after all.

It's also worthwhile to note, as long as this thread is engaged, that the value at 260 was a "spike" -- the only people who bought bitcoins at that price were speculators who couldn't bear the thought that the spaceship might fly away even higher without them on-board, and other I'd guess clueless users who didn't notice that what they were paying $260 for today could have been had for a maximum of $100 only two weeks prior to that date, with Bitcoin having never experienced such high valuations on any public market in the history of time leading up to that point.

In fact, bitcoin was only priced at $260 for a few hours in April 2013. Even then, the price was mostly between $80 and $140.

And it was only above $150 for six days.

I didn't read the last paragraph that way and you're taking only part of it:

>The price after the Silk Road seizure has remained fairly constant but the currency itself has fallen from a high of $260 to about $130 this morning.

I thought it was pretty clear that the SR seizure didn't have an affect but it was mentioning that it is down from a high earlier in the year.

I think that your read is a "rather bullish" interpretation of the charts, too. You can see pretty clearly that it did fall, http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg10ztgSzm1g10zm2g2..., or another way, the last few days have seen above average volatility and a large spike in trading volume following the news.

Now, had you said that only today's spot price, one week after the news, looks basically unmoved by the event from the trades before October, I would have simply agreed with you. But you can't read that chart and tell me there was "no effect."

To clarify, I was only responding to geuis' interpretation of what the article said, not whether the article was correct or not. I honestly have no idea if the article is correct or not, but I also think that geuis was misrepresenting what the article said as written.

EDIT: I think you meant to respond to notahacker and not to me.

I did read his reply and that's where I heard "rather bullish" to quote, but I meant to respond to you; sorry just being pedantic, I realize you were just trying to respond, but I just thought it should be clear: the market moved, even if it bounced back rather quickly. There was in fact a ton of activity and big motion at the time of the announcement.

Definitely not moving from 260 to 130 as one might infer, but certainly a lot more movement than the rest of the week (or month?) prior.

If we limit ourselves to when things got stable in Mid-May, we see that the price has indeed drifted down from ~90 to ~70 then back up to 140, then bounced around between 120 and 140 over a period of weeks[1].

"Relatively stable" is not the same thing as "stable". That's ~40% variance, perhaps more (glanced, didn't do the math.) While not as bad as 260-130, it still ain't pretty.

[1] http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg180ztgCzm1g10zm2g...