Bitcoins drastically tumbling | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoins drastically tumbling

bitcoin.clarkmoody.com

17 pointsdutchbrit19 comments

I have http://bitcoinwisdom.com/markets/bitstamp/btcusd open on my second monitor. I'll say one thing about bitcoin: it's certainly entertaining!

Talk about a rollercoaster :)

Ps ^^ handy link, thanks

This one is easier on the eye, IMHO: http://bitcoinity.org/markets/bitstamp/USD

If anyone didn't see the price changes over the last few days and think "bubble" then....

Whatever you might think about the long term future, prices going up exponentially in the course of a week does not look like sustainable growth to me.

Mining difficulty has been rising exponentially for months.

http://bitcoindifficulty.com/

While this is interesting, there's no direct link between that dictates increasing the difficulty has to increase the value, especially as new (ASIC) methods come online. In fact exponential difficulty rising doesn't even necessarily mean more people getting into it, just more people moving to higher hash-rate machines.

The opposite may well be true - higher value may well lead to more mining as it becomes economically viable to commit more funds to the activity.

Anyone can call out 'bubble!' on a market. It's the people that correctly predict when the bubble bursts that have any skill. Markets can stay irrational for a very long time...

The last week was pretty obviously a market gone nuts, but you're right, calling the moment it will burst (if it ever does) would not be easy.

It's definitely nuts! I don't own any bitcoin, nor do I plan to, but I can't stop wishing that I bought some when they were worth pennies....

You and me both :)

It was always just a little bit too much effort somehow, and I always had a bit of a problem with the underlying economic assumptions. Ah well...

Interesting LTC's mini-bubble has also burst.

What is inevitably going to happen is it will plummet to near its value before the bubble ($200 if I remember correctly) and people will want to buy into it so that they can catch the next upward curve. BTC/LTC are probably going to be extremely volatile for some time to come.

I don't think $650 a BTC qualifies as a "drastic" tumble. Flagged

I wonder how easy it would be to manipulate the market of bitcoin. If a few people were selling between each other would they be able to inflate the price ? It's below $500 now, and it peaked at over $900 on mtgox a few hours ago.

Right now while the market is ~6 billion US and liquidity is fairly low, it's pretty easy for deep pockets like hedge funds and their ilk to manipulate, as might have happened just now.

As Bitcoin grows in market cap, volatility will reduce, quite considerably I think.

Eventually BTC might have a very low volatility and become to investors more like gold or silver.

The market is not $6 billion!

The notional value of all bitcoin is/was $6 billion. The actual market is some smaller value that you would have to estimate from transaction volume.

"drastically" — ugh.

Does anyone HFT bitcoins?

Would doing that break the block chain?

Given a high volume exchange, the trades would not have to hit the blockchain.

Missing the drastic tumble. $700 yesterday. $700 right now.

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