A few thoughts - Monday, May 12, 2014
Posted: Mon May 12, 2014 12:00 pm
A few thoughts for today:
1.
People around here need to take a longer-term view. Every time there is a price drop of a few dollars, some people begin talking as if it is a harbinger of doom to come.
This is bitcoins. The price rises and drops frequently. People who think that this latest "crash" of $20 was very significant obviously weren't around last year, when there would be $20 swings at much lower prices. Instead, people should be noticing that the news gets worse and worse, and the pricing effects get less and less.
2.
On a similar note, why does everyone change their flairs to bearish right after these crashes occur? Isn't the point to make money? One way to lose the game for sure is to change your flair to bullish every time the price starts moving up, and to change it to bearish right after every crash.
3.
I've now invested my full stake. You might recall that I earlier mentioned buying a bitcoin on Thursday, and then eight more on Friday. I decided to buy everything because:
* The bubble chart has always superseded all other TA or news.
* Even if the bubble cycle is broken this time, the price won't remain low for long, and will probably be low in the middle of the night.
* Most importantly, the price of bitcoins is going to be so high a few bubbles from now that it will be irrelevant whether I bought 1/6 more bitcoins at $350.
* The fundamentals of bitcoins are unchanged, and at any point, something big can and will happen that is going to sweep any Chinese news under the rug.
In addition, I will never sell any bitcoins that the mining pool makes after launch. My big worry is that, since my employees have not been as motivated as I have been to get it to launch, the bubble will occur first and we will earn fewer bitcoins, even if those bitcoins are worth more money.
4.
How many actual investors are there in China? The only exchanges with significant volume are the zero-fee exchanges, so there could be many bots on these exchanges from the West. Most of China consists of extreme poverty, people who could care less about things like this. And the marketplaces started by these exchanges have very few "trusted sellers."
Consider how ludicrous it is that the Chinese government releases news with some deadline months in the future, and five minutes later everyone sells. The news itself obviously isn't causing people to sell within five minutes, because actual Chinese people can still do the same thing tomorrow if they wanted to. At this point, everyone knows that bitcoins will be illegal in China; the price action consists mainly of people who think that there is going to be another drop.
But as the bubble cycle is starting to turn, those people are losing money, so the drops are getting less.
5.
This bad news doesn't have to stop completely for the bubble cycle to continue on schedule. Instead, as you can see has been happening over the past few days, the price begins to rise, but the crash doesn't go down to a level below the beginning of the last rise. Then the price rises above the level before the previous crash, and the Chinese government releases more news that only temporarily slows the rise.
6.
I can't help but wonder if the Chinese could have done a better job at what they are trying to do. The only new thing they can do at this point is to arrest some exchange operator over some white-collar crime. They can't close any more bank accounts, or place restrictions on charge codes, or censor conferences any more than they already have.
They erred in taking their actions too quickly. A better tactic would have been to stretch out the timetable across an entire bubble cycle or longer, putting more time between each action. They could have done much more damage if they were still at the stage of cancelling bank accounts during the next uptrend.
7.
People who are waiting for the lines on the chart to converge before making a decision are going to lose money. If you plan to buy, make a decision on what is going to happen when the lines converge and follow through. By the time the lines converge, everyone else will have already bought or sold.
8.
If you have a great product to release, please release it and let your product speak for itself. Don't put up a flashy website with a countdown timer that says "revolutionary colored coins coming in X hours..." We have enough flashy marketing and not enough working stuff around here.
Other
1.
People around here need to take a longer-term view. Every time there is a price drop of a few dollars, some people begin talking as if it is a harbinger of doom to come.
This is bitcoins. The price rises and drops frequently. People who think that this latest "crash" of $20 was very significant obviously weren't around last year, when there would be $20 swings at much lower prices. Instead, people should be noticing that the news gets worse and worse, and the pricing effects get less and less.
2.
On a similar note, why does everyone change their flairs to bearish right after these crashes occur? Isn't the point to make money? One way to lose the game for sure is to change your flair to bullish every time the price starts moving up, and to change it to bearish right after every crash.
3.
I've now invested my full stake. You might recall that I earlier mentioned buying a bitcoin on Thursday, and then eight more on Friday. I decided to buy everything because:
* The bubble chart has always superseded all other TA or news.
* Even if the bubble cycle is broken this time, the price won't remain low for long, and will probably be low in the middle of the night.
* Most importantly, the price of bitcoins is going to be so high a few bubbles from now that it will be irrelevant whether I bought 1/6 more bitcoins at $350.
* The fundamentals of bitcoins are unchanged, and at any point, something big can and will happen that is going to sweep any Chinese news under the rug.
In addition, I will never sell any bitcoins that the mining pool makes after launch. My big worry is that, since my employees have not been as motivated as I have been to get it to launch, the bubble will occur first and we will earn fewer bitcoins, even if those bitcoins are worth more money.
4.
How many actual investors are there in China? The only exchanges with significant volume are the zero-fee exchanges, so there could be many bots on these exchanges from the West. Most of China consists of extreme poverty, people who could care less about things like this. And the marketplaces started by these exchanges have very few "trusted sellers."
Consider how ludicrous it is that the Chinese government releases news with some deadline months in the future, and five minutes later everyone sells. The news itself obviously isn't causing people to sell within five minutes, because actual Chinese people can still do the same thing tomorrow if they wanted to. At this point, everyone knows that bitcoins will be illegal in China; the price action consists mainly of people who think that there is going to be another drop.
But as the bubble cycle is starting to turn, those people are losing money, so the drops are getting less.
5.
This bad news doesn't have to stop completely for the bubble cycle to continue on schedule. Instead, as you can see has been happening over the past few days, the price begins to rise, but the crash doesn't go down to a level below the beginning of the last rise. Then the price rises above the level before the previous crash, and the Chinese government releases more news that only temporarily slows the rise.
6.
I can't help but wonder if the Chinese could have done a better job at what they are trying to do. The only new thing they can do at this point is to arrest some exchange operator over some white-collar crime. They can't close any more bank accounts, or place restrictions on charge codes, or censor conferences any more than they already have.
They erred in taking their actions too quickly. A better tactic would have been to stretch out the timetable across an entire bubble cycle or longer, putting more time between each action. They could have done much more damage if they were still at the stage of cancelling bank accounts during the next uptrend.
7.
People who are waiting for the lines on the chart to converge before making a decision are going to lose money. If you plan to buy, make a decision on what is going to happen when the lines converge and follow through. By the time the lines converge, everyone else will have already bought or sold.
8.
If you have a great product to release, please release it and let your product speak for itself. Don't put up a flashy website with a countdown timer that says "revolutionary colored coins coming in X hours..." We have enough flashy marketing and not enough working stuff around here.
Other
- The most insidious bugs in development are generally not complex system design features, but simple typos and math errors. For example, selecting the share payout value from the table with alias pp instead of app, which cost six hours. Or, did you know that when you divide two numbers with 8 decimal places, you get a number with 16 decimal places (not 8)? That cost another 6 hours. In development, the simplest typos cause far more problems than the largest system design oversights.
- Days until July 24: 73