A few thoughts - Thursday, August 14, 2014

[Steve Sokolowski]

Good afternoon! A few thoughts for lunch today:

Buttercoin development team fired

As you can see at https://github.com/buttercoin/buttercoin/issues/71, all developers for buttercoin, an open source exchange project that begin in the wake of the April 2013 crash, were fired yesterday. There is little explanation for the firing, but this should come as no surprise.

Buttercoin has been vaporware for a year, and for good reason. A few days after Mt Gox caused that crash, some people decided that they were going to create a "better" exchange. They were correct in recognizing that it isn't that technically difficult or groundbreaking to create a bitcoin exchange, but they were completely irrational in believing that they could create an open-source exchange when the primary cost for exchanges is dealing with banks and lawyers.

The project was later granted funding by venture capitalists, but now appears to have failed.


Bottom continues to fall out

The bottom continues to fall out of the market. I remain bearish, as I have for a month, and have earned about 25% in the flair game. I think it became clear on July 24, judging by the perfect timing of the first fall in this bear market, that something needed to happen by that time or else people would start to lose faith. My opinion is that the current situation is a continued crisis of confidence. More and more people will decide to cut their losses and get out. This situation is more concerning than the Chinese bans from earlier in the year, because people will find a way around bans to do things they want to do. For example, while I abhor the idea, prostitution thrives even though it is illegal in most areas.

There's a great article that discusses why companies like Pantera are incorrect in their indices of bitcoin growth, and I agree with the author. The argument is that pageviews of bitcoin articles are not relevant to price growth. People who read Wikipedia are trying to find out more about bitcoins, but apparently many of them are disinterested by what they find. This would be in line with my idea that the only way that bitcoins fail is because, for whatever reason, people don't find them useful.

There is some interest about how the Chinese wikipedia article on bitcoin has seen a tremendous increase in visitors this week, but viewers does not equal buyers.

I still hold that transaction volume is the fundamental indicator that people should watch to see when things are going to turn around. If transaction volume increases, then the price needs to go up to support the increased volume.

Falling prices could be a self-sustaining cycle. If the price drops to $200 at the next low, then the ETFs that are being evaluated will have less of a chance at being accepted. It would be very easy at that point for governments to say that bitcoins are not a real asset, that their days are numbered, and that the fund is too risky. The denial of the ETFs would then cause further fallout, creating a negative feedback loop.


Looking at the dates of previous cycles

Obviously, /u/moral_agent's charts have lost predictive potential for absolute prices (not that I predicted absolute prices anyway). In terms of *timing*, however, which I've always considered as the most important indicator of those charts, we are actually pretty far along in this cycle if the high occurred earlier than expected in early June. If we overlay this cycle on top of the last cycle, we are already approaching the period where Mt Gox crashed. Time flies when we're having fun.

Supporting this idea that the change in fundamentals might have destroyed the lower boundary but not the periodicity of the chart, you can see that what is happening now is very similar to the downside of every bubble that came before: a stepladder pattern of a few days of low volatility followed by another crash.

I think that moral_agent has made a mistake in continuing to draw the chart by considering the present activity as part of the last cycle. If he drew the chart instead to indicate that the cycle ended months ago, then the usual downward spike to the absolute bottom would occur about 2 months from now, so there would be two months of this stepladder before the final fallout. Then there would be another month of stagnation like that which occurred in May, and the uptrend would begin during the holidays. If the shorter period of the last cycle indicated that cycle length is decreasing, then subtract a month from these figures.

Finally, despite much criticism, even after everything that is happening now, I still hold to the idea that news does not determine the cycle; fundamentals and sentiment do. You can see that there is loads of good news, and the price is freefalling. During downward cycles, people ignore the good news. Did you know that DiSH network bitcoin acceptance began today?


Ethereum posts budget

While I still disapprove of the way that Ethereum is holding huge portions of its coins for development activities, the developers did post a budget that goes far beyond what other projects in this area have been doing. They stated who they would be paying, for which services, and when. They also posted how many bitcoins they plan to save for future expenses. This is a laudable effort.

On the other hand, some of their spending is questionable. For example, they are spending huge sums of money on security deposits for three offices around the world. For an organization that doesn't have a product, the overhead of three separate offices seems a bit out of line. Blockchain.info pays all of their employees to work from home all around the world. If they have to have offices (which I've never found to increase productivity anyway), then I certainly don't know of any startup company that has more than one office.

Perhaps it might be useful to have multiple offices in the future if the organization needs to be located near a partner, but doing so adds a lot of overhead and travel expenses and requires personnel to manage all the extra physical property. This spending seems like a poor choice when the money could instead be used to hire people to accomplish Ethereum's objectives.


What happens if an altcoin exchange fails?

Yesterday, there was concern that Cryptsy wasn't responding to tickets, E-Mails, and calls. Fortunately, it appears as if the problem was due to poor customer service, rather than bankruptcy. However, I wondered what the ramnifications would be if an altcoin exchange like Cryptsy were to fail.

When Mt Gox failed, it was a one-off event. People lost money, but others could point to the event as not representative of the underlying technology. If an altcoin exchange were to fail, then a one-off event becomes a pattern. People could question if there is something unique to digital currency that causes such exchanges to be inherently more risky than forex exchanges. They, of course, would be right: you need trading partners with multinational corporations to get into forex, but it isn't possible to regulate the hundreds of decentralized altcoins.

An altcoin exchange failure would be catastrophic for additional reasons. First, each exchange has coins that aren't traded anywhere else, so if that exchange were to fail, then those coins would be worthless. Second, the news itself would probably crash the value of every coin by double digits across all the other exchanges too, destroying a lot of value from the economy.


Other

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