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Bitcoin Climbs To Highest Since April, Led By Chinese Actions
Submitted by Jonathan Stacke via The Genesis Block,
The last week has seen dramatic upwards price action in the bitcoin markets, driven by a series of macro and micro events across the globe. The fallout from Silk Road’s closure turned out to be but a blip in bitcoin’s price history, with significant gains since then. Turmoil in global financial markets and recent news of leading global websites accepting bitcoin may have bolstered enthusiasm for digital currency, but most interesting may be CNY’s definitive recent price leadership.
Compared with prices before the brief Silk Road drop, bitcoin exchange rates have climbed 14% in the last two weeks. At $145/BTC on Bitstamp, bitcoin has reached a level not seen since late April, and the only time that level has been reached on more than three consecutive days was from April 3-11 during the bubble.
Notably, the market has been significantly less volatile leading up to this level recently, compared with April. The 3DMA volatility leading into this level previously was between 13% and 22%, compared with just 4% currently.
US Events
A number of factors may be driving the latest climb. For one, bitcoin price increases are known to often coincide with media coverage. Accordingly, even the Silk Road closure which highlighted bitcoin’s use for illicit purposes may have helped drive new participants into the market as a result of the exposure gained. The recent Money 2020 conference in Las Vegas may have similarly driven interest from a number of established financial players.
The global macroeconomic environment may be playing a role as well. As we’ve noted previously, bitcoin shares a generally inverse relationship with USD, an asset that has been negatively impacted in recent weeks as a result of the US debt ceiling impasse.
Chinese Events
Perhaps most important was the activity out of China. The Chinese government has recently been more vocal in its ongoing campaign to see the dollar removed from global reserve status. While such calls for an international reserve note are generally assumed to refer to Special Drawing Rights issued by the IMF, it may have bolstered enthusiasm for bitcoin’s apolitical nature. Also out of China was news that Baidu, the world’s fifth largest website, is now accepting bitcoin for certain services.
Perhaps not incidentally, CNY price movement has been a notable leader in the latest rally. Overlaying CNY/BTC and USD/BTC trading history, it becomes clear that USD/BTC trading has been largely responsive to the Chinese markets. The graph below shows bitcoin trading in CNY markets, as well as USD/BTC levels converted to CNY for comparison. Overlaid on top of them is the differential between their prices at any given time. The differential tends to normalize around 2-3% and spikes/sinks periodically with price movement. In reviewing this chart, a consistent pattern becomes clear: CNY price movement occurs first, increasing the differential, with USD catching up much later and eventually sending the differential back down towards 3%.
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This is what happens when the Algo's ain't around to prevert the process. How long until they come in and phuck up this too?
One of the beauties of the BTC is there doesn't seem to be much of a short market. I am sure that's coming, but I haven't figured it out yet.
Because the banks can't create BTC, the Wall St doesn't own BTC and the government does not protect phony BTC markets for the benefit of a few.
There are some short markets. One of the most interesting is bitfinex.com
It has a peer-to-peer lending system where you can borrow USD from other exchange members to buy and go long bitcoin, or borrow bitcoins and sell them to go short.
I was able to make some money shorting bitcoin there during the Silk Road mini-crash.
But it is tough to short. It either trades sideways or range-bound, then climbs. Its the suprise events that cause drops.
Just my opinion watching the charts this past year.
Wow, an informative, objective BTC article on ZH?
Nice one.
I won't bore anyone with my Bitcoin history but all I can say is... I'm sure as hell glad I didn't listen to a fucking word either the Tylers, or especially the commenters on ZH, had to say about Bitcoin a year ago.
Cue Xenofrog.
LOL, when I saw this article I was wondering where is that AltCoin powerhouse!
Hey leave Tyler Winklevoss out of this ;)
Hi Ho BitCoin.
The total value of all bitcoin is equivalent to a $0.25/ounce change in the price of gold. IE, it doesn't mean a fking thing.
Unless one has accumulated and/or realized real wealth and purchasing power over the last year while the only thing many commenters on ZH have offered-up is the ubiquitous "gold, bitchez" while bashing BTC as their purchasing power has gone into the toilet by comparison. I like Au and Ag too but let's not start in with useless rhetoric after the Tylers posted such a cool article...
gold, bitchez
btc has ZERO purchasing power for me. To use it with my local Canadian currency will instantly qualify as illegal money laundering. And no one anywhere for any goods I need, not even treats / goodies which aren't essential, will take bitcoin.
I'd be better off bartering my silver maples.
Patience, grasshopper. Bitcoin started from nothing, the first purchase was 10,000 BTC for 1 pizza. Look how far it has come. I'm willing to bet we'll see Gold/BTC parity within a year.
You're infatuated, but that doesn't mean that 6 billion people who don't have computers in their homes give a shit about your affectation of money.
Gold, on the other hand, is recognized in more places than Amex and Mastercard combined.
IE, a tiny reallocation from gold to BTC will cause BTC price to skyrocket.
The idea of money it can't control scares Government $hitless.
I'd be surprised if NSA didn't have at least 3 programs going against BTC.
1. Use their supercomputers to mine them to inflate BTC supply and devalue it.
2. Crack BTC security to destroy confidence.
3. Identify BTC principals for "neutralization".
#1 isn't possible. To mine BTC you have to join the network, and the mining difficulty scales with the network computing resource. At best you could own 51% of the network and then be able to double-spend, but that's about it.
#2 not known to be possible, but nothing precludes it. However, if it is done, it would be more valuable for the NSA to keep it a secret than to use it against bitcoin, since it would announce to the world that modern hashes have been broken. (Odds are overwhelmingly in favor of this not actually being possible, btw, but I won't dismiss it.)
#3 winner winner chicken dinner. Hence the aggressive attacks on the BTC exchanges by regulators. This has been ongoing since summer. Note going after a few people accomplishes nothing, but attacking gateways between currencies can definitely slow things down. The problem is they don't have global control, and as long as any major exchange exists, people will find a way to get money in/out. Not to mention the death by a thousand cuts that localbitcoin represents.
Tell you what is easily possible:
locate bitcoin wallet files using a virus and erase them.
All of them.
That would make someone very sorry very fast, wouldn't it?
Only gold is money. Bitcoin doesn't have a 5,000 year history.
Once you can spend gold as money, accepted anywhere, it won't matter what the price of other vurrencies.
GoldBullionDebitCard.com
Gold has a 5000 year history of failure.
Failure to stop governments from confiscating it, taxing it, diluting it, and finally ignoring it.
Bitcoin solves all of gold's shortcomings.
> Bitcoin solves all of gold's shortcomings.
No, it doesn't.
It's virtual and fairly easily destructible (all it takes is to forget your password or misplace your wallet).
Gold has a 5000 year history of failure.
The mire fact you bring it up makes it so.....oh wait.
If you had advised people to buy silver at the start of the year rather than bitcoin then you would have advised them badly. We are all gamblers here.
No, you're a gambler if you think in terms of "trades" or timelines in months.
What lies.
Gold has never had such a failure.
For your statement to be true ALL GOLD IN ALL HISTORY must be successfully taken by ANY confiscation efforts.
The instant ANY large portion of gold was hidden from governments for all history, which is TRUE, your statement is false (and most certainly is false).
On the other hand it takes just one EMP or solar flare to wipe out ALL BITCOINS FOR ALL ETERNITY HELD ON EARTH. Just ONE.
Then it's all gone. For good.
Sucker.
"Only gold is money. Bitcoin doesn't have a 5,000 year history."
Only carrier pigeons can deliver messages. E-mail doesn't have a 5,000 year history.
such ignorance. anything with a grid is vulnerable but communications grids can't ever follow the same rules as money.
Communications, pigeon or email, can't follow the failure patterns of currencies. Currencies are centrally controlled machinations of tyrannical governments.
Pigeons, email, telegraphs, are not. satellites generally are BUT can escape detection for a while before being hit by other satellites if so desired.
Pardon, good sir, but copper, nickel, silver and even platinum or palladium are money. Real, actual money.
Gold by far is the best long-term money as a store of real wealth but for transactional purposes silver & copper served for millenia alongside gold, nickel for all of my life & my parents before me and I would imagine theirs too. I'm not sure when nickel started into mainstream currency but it's been useful.
Just be careful. The FRN counterfeiters will drum up a raid. Not a part of this system, just warning you to pack lead. winks.
http://bitcoinity.org/markets
With sincere and due respect to the Bitcoiners...
if you are partaking in the exchange of goods and services, fueled by Bitcoins, good for you.
if you have treated Bitcoins as an investment, and have realized gains, good for you.
But if you think the Bitcoin represents a solution to what ails us, currency included, I believe you do not understand the scope of things and the controls in play, currency included, or you do understand, and therefore you are playing essentially the same game that caused Bitcoin to exist in the first place.
Today, btc is a chink in the armor... Tomorrow it's idea/concept could be the end of centralization by banks etc...
it's an experiment at worst.
It's not an experiment -- it is an attempt to profit from a breaking currency and broken controls.
And there is no interest in the host at all.
It is a symptom of chaos.
You're truly ignorant!
It is a fungible means of conducting transactions. It wasn't pre-mined and just like with all things in limited (by algo) supply, folks who got in early on bought and mined it cheaply.
You and XenoFrog can buy it now and get rich later!
Bitcoin is primarily a means of cheaply and rather anonymously conducting online transactions and for that it's great. It is not an indestructible, physical store of value and it is not a good unit of account, so don't use it that way and you'll be fine.
Can it become more? Yes, but it will take time.
I think we all recgonize, that bitcoins or not, there can be no solution that does not entail the mass hanging and disembowling of tens of thousands of banksters and their brethren.
Let's just take their money.
Or rather make our own money, and make theirs worthless.
They will have gold buried all over the place. The only way to be sure of their permanent defeat is to execute them and render their children into destitution.
Meanwhile the printing presses are on full blast.
You want to fuck the politicians? Buy bitcoin.
I recommend cold storage.
Best way to tell a central banker to suck a dick.
WOW, the DXY /BTC divergence is scary! I stacked some more xag today. Also bought a roll of platinum koalas.
http://www.apmex.com/category/121/australian-platinum-koalas
Bah. Smells like Eucalyptus.
I mined about 1/3 of a bitcoin just out of curiosity. If it gets to the point where I can get 3oz of silver shipped to my door for what I have, I will do so. Interesting concept, but I like stuff I can hold in my hand.
So do governments, because they can easily take stuff you can hold in your hand.
While they may have fun actually accessing them, they did seize the Dread Pirate Robert's Bitcoins. If you want something that is 100% secure, you'll be waiting a long, long time.
You can only seize coins if you move them from the seized wallet to a wallet you control. As far as I know this only happened with the wallets stored on the Silk Road server(s), not DPR's private wallet.
So you seize the physical devices that the wallets are on. While the government may not be able to do anything with them, they are gone as far as you are concerned. If you are dealing in the commerce of goods, there will be something physical at some point that the government can take.
Well, that's up to DPR how many wallet.dat files there are. If I had that much BTC it wouldn't be on just one or two devices. Call me once the wallet contents move. It'll be front page news regardless who does it. But "seizing all the devices" would only be as hard as the owner wants it to be.
You're 2/3 of the way there...
http://www.amagimetals.com/silver/1-ounce
Baidu sucks....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baidu#Services
Just tried their image search
lol
ZHers may find this interesting. A ranking of Bitcoin vs other global payment networks.
Yes it is small, but it is kind of amazing that an open-source, de-centralized currency and payment system has made it this far.
Next target is Western Union.
http://coinometrics.com/bitcoin/btix
I see ZH played it safe and let The Genesis Block do their Bitcoin writing for them this time. Good idea after that embarrassing post when The Silk Road got busted.
"Let's all make fun of Bitcoin because Silk Road got busted, even though the government couldn't access any of the money because it was encrypted."
A few weeks later: Bitcoin 65% higher.
and a few weeks more bitcoin will be 80% lower.
Such foolishness.
Could be getting silver & gold real money instead of electronic pocket-lint.
There are two major problems with Bitcoin and none of them are the ones anyone here is talking about.
The first and biggest is the fact that one cannot directly import their Bitcoins into a new electronic currency that in the future obsoletes Bitcoin in the way that one might melt down their gold coins into bars or a central bank might redeem an old paper currency in exchange for a new one, and thus as the world migrates away from Bitcoin into some future competitor, the value that people paid to get in is lost forever, in that you can only get your money out of Bitcoin if someone agrees to buy it off you, and once it is obsoleted the amount of buyers is zero and thus at that point you're out of luck. It's still a lot less than the amount lost by the printing press though, thus it's really not THAT big of a problem in the grand scheme of things.
The second is that if you forget your passphrase or wallet address, your coins are gone forever, for you, and for the whole market. This is arguably not that big a problem however, as I believe people should pay for their ignorance, and additionally rewards everyone else still holding their Bitcoin through deflation.
There are two major problems with everything in this world.
But you can aconvert bitcoin into any other altcoin etc
https://mcxnow.com/exchange/MNC
All I see is peripheral issues and red-herring arguments.
Fact is, TPTB actually want cyber currencies to condition the sheeple to get used to them, so they can once again pull off the Ponzi of the Century, by soon/eventually introducing their own version, which is based on the bearer's biometric data.
"He shall deceive the whole world" it is written, in regards to the 'Beast'.
To this day people still do not know the difference between knowledge and wisdom, alas.
Absolutely...
Once paper currencies head into the abyss, the "solution to the chaos" will be implantable identification, directly linked to "The System".
ID verification, medical records, bank debit/credit systems, retail PoS, internet access, facial recognition, psychological profiles, school transripts, DNA sequence, all linked to 1 system...with varying degrees of access, depending on who you are.
If you earn your way onto "The System's Enemies' List", they simply shut off your chip.
Some of the theories I've read on the subject, even talk about a small vial of toxin that could be housed in the implant...and could be used to remotely "shut you off", should you even think about questioning/disobeying the system.
competing currencies is what we should be fighting for - be it bitcoin, fiat, gold, silver, sticks, stones. competition is what we need and the winner should be determined by which of the options preserves purchasing power and fights the elites/governments monopoly of money.
The true fear of Bitcoin:
"Bitcoin is scary cuz I'm sick of learning new stuff."
"Fiat money is scary cuz I'm sick of learning basic math."
It is time for the BTC first adopters to feed off the people who create the federal reserve note rather than the other way round.
Finally! Something I can short AND cause to drop by my own devices.
So explain to me how the SDR will matter. Instead of the US FED hitting ctrl-p, there will be a basket of countries hitting ctrl-p to create an advantage for itself by borrowing out a devalued currency at full price.
Of course, if the plan is to give smaller non SDR countries in the world a fraudulent wealth effect while planning to enslave them through austerity later like the Eurozone, then the SDR sounds like it will work for their purposes.
Understand the growth in the hash rate.
https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate
Today it is 3 petahashes. A few days ago it was 2 petahashes. That is 50% growth in days.
THIS HAS BEEN GOING ON ALL YEAR.
This is the measurement of the compute power of the bitcoin network.
The smart money is investing in the future stream of BTC block rewards, currently 25 BTC every 10 minutes. The hash rate is the size of the pie.
When you buy ASIC minining rigs, you don't push up the exchange rate in the short term.
This is the most parabolic, no exponential, no, HYPER exponential chart I have ever seen.
So the value of Bitcoins went up in USD terms. That only helps you if you are in Bitcoin as a speculative investment to make more USD. Which is what I suspect is what the majority of people dabbling in Bitcoin are looking for.
That makes Bitcoin worse than stocks, since a Bit coin doesn't represent anything. People heard something was skyrocketing in value and jumped in to get a piece of the pie.
Through most of last year the prices of items in Bitcoin didn't really change that much. You'd be insane to tie the price of your item in Bitcoins to a USD value. Of course that is also what made many people rush into Bitcoin commerce. They tried to sell items at USD value in Bitcoins in the hope the Bitcoins they received would skyrocket in value soon after, making themselves a massive profit.
Nearly every Bit coin advocate I have ever seen does nothing but gloat about how they got in at price X and are sitting on massive gain Y. I wonder what the percentage of people who own Bitcoins that have ever bought something with Bitcoins is? If the percentage is as low as I presume, then most people are only in Bitcoin because they believe their investment will be worth more of the currency they traded in the future.
That is why I do not like Bitcoin. It promotes rampant speculation, and all speculative investments disrupt the economy and breed corruption, rampant greed, and just about everything that has made our current economic system worthless. Bitcoin should never be able to be used as a vehicle for currency exchange. Allowing the exchange of Dollars, Yen, etc into Bitcoin defeats the entire purpose of the currency in the first place. Bitcoin was created to be an alternative to our current monetary system. To disrupt that system. To be a true alternative it needs to be stable.
A stable currency has a stable value so long term economics makes sense. If I am producing products, I want to know what my cash flow will be down the line. I'm not going to use Bitcoin if I don't know what its value will be any given day. You have to be able to project profit, expenses, cost of raw materials. Which is why the Fed has destroyed real business. It is impossible to forecast cost, you can barely quote anything longer than a week out.
If I have a stash of Bitcoins, why would I ever buy anything if I can wait a few days for their value to go up and use less of them to purchase what I want. It would be like going to the store and seeing a TV go down in price every day. When do you actually pull the trigger and buy it?
Something skyrocketing in value is just as bad as something plummeting in value. Both disrupt the balance you need for a functional economy.
Consider that prices for things you want, such as gasoline, will be set in bitcoin or other hard currency in the future.
Now, you need to own this new currency, and so does everybody else. There is no way to keep it from rising against other currencies. In fact to try would be to commit the same mistakes of the Fed.
considered: impossible.
I'll see gas in silver dimes, gold coins for vehicles but bitcoins shall be rejected at all future times for all goods in all stores and for all barter exchanges in my future any place I will be in the world.
"As we’ve noted previously, bitcoin shares a generally inverse relationship with USD"
Ladies and gentleman, we have a new flight to safety asset.
TPTB have got to be hating bitcoin more with every day that passes and every company that begins accepting bitcoins as payment.
BTC is here to stay and there's not a damn thing they can do about it. They may be able to slow it down. But there's nothing they can do to stop it.
Beautiful.
except shut down the power grids and/or any suspected packet on any internet subnetwork.
That would work very well.
Every rational person has already converted their assets into bitcoins and a little bit of gold.
The rest will wish they did.
Right?
ow! I stubbed my toe on a brick of .9999 fine sarc left lying on the ground.
Did you drop that there by chance?
I changed my mind, Bitcoin is the bre-x of Currency's.
They will be tossing servers out of the helicopter.
Killer stuff.
LOL - shitcoinz. Suckerz never learn.