The Bitcoin Dumping Charade

When’s the next wave? Shouldn’t we be kajillionaires by nao??

– Someone, somewhere

In short, yes. If we applied the voodoo nonsense of TA to a chart of Bitcoin’s price over time, that was the plan. Of course, if life went according to plan, it wouldn’t be worth living.i Since life is very much worth living,ii that Bitcoin is unlikely to hit $10k by late November is neither here nor there. It just is.

Besides, things are better when they’re built slowly and from the ground up. They last longer too. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither will La Serenissima be. If this is going to be any kind of Empire and if we’re going to recruit any kind of Lords to it, it’s actually rather beneficial that the stones get thrown and that our hides toughen up a bit. We wouldn’t want the victors of this whole affair to be a bunch of limp-wristed softies now would we?

So that Bitcoin has fallen from its $1,200 peak 9 months ago and has yet to regain that plateau is a good thing, if for no other reason than because it means that salvos are being fired in an ebullient display of booms and cracks that fill the night sky with sight and sound.

This is the Bitcoin Dumping Charade:

ben_vulpes:iii ;;ticker
gribble: Bitstamp BTCUSD ticker | Best bid: 540.34,iv Best ask: 540.95, Bid-ask spread: 0.61000, Last trade: 540.32, 24 hour volume: 22676.31398977, 24 hour low: 524.55, 24 hour high: 572.0, 24 hour vwap: 546.408520967

ben_vulpes: hey is that the dump from ether profits?
mircea_popescu: ben_vulpes kinda what the usgv needs, more loans of this type. imbecile forumites are more than happy to provide.
asciilifeform: ben_vulpes: i immediately assumed that’s what it was, when it began. seems like other people also like this hypothesis. doesn’t prove it is true.

kakobrekla: it could be anything really
asciilifeform: kakobrekla: they more or less confessed

mircea_popescu: at least here we know it has a fucking end.
asciilifeform: everything has a fucking end.
mircea_popescu: no. fiction has no end. that’d be the principal problem with fiction.
kakobrekla: end can possibly never end.
mircea_popescu: as any successful fiction writer found out in short order.
asciilifeform: ‘that is not dead which can eternal lie and with strange aeons even death may die’ etcvi

ben_vulpes: mircea_popescu: ether is a loan to the usg? or meta-usg? or btc sent to ether addr is loan to usg?
mircea_popescu: redirects ben_vulpes to the hermetic http://trilema.com/2014/lets-pretend/
ben_vulpes: yeah, i get it i read it, but whence the source? there was the usms sale which is theoretically trickling into the market, and the ether sale which may or may not be trickling into the market. the former, clearly usg. the latter as well?

asciilifeform: ben_vulpes: usg << one possible explanatory hypothesis for why they bought straight from the vendor instead of mircea_popescu’s short.
mircea_popescu: ben_vulpes pretty much every single major sucking of chumps change you will see from about q1 onwards will be and has been a psyops riding on top of a usg-backed institutional lending for shorts. here’s the scheme : whatever usg affiliate, be it goldman sachs or herpy q derp that holds any sum of btc will lend it to the usg btc policy bureau in exchange for fiat guarantees. any usg affiliate or more likely, herpy q derp that looks like he may acquire any btc sum through any means will receive all the soft backing possible, from business insder news articles to an invitation to the fucking white house. anything whatsoever as long as it loks natural rather than spammy. all these loan contracts are promised to unwind in fiat eventually, and will be in fact profitable for all parties if and only if bitcoin actually fails. they are no major concern for the usg in either case, because man who hangs for a goat might as well hang for a goat and a chick. no matter how cool the chick was. and so here we are. part ii of the game is, how much do you ~actually~ like this thing, once money actually is on the table. unremarkably, the worthless shitheads that joined late have nothing to contribute. but suddenly, the large early holdings that all the shitheads-with-a-megaphone were decrying as dangerous to bitcoin. turn into a major point of support for bitcoin. which is how things work in moronia, down is up, etc.vii

asciilifeform: the large early holdings << these moved ?
mircea_popescu: nope.
asciilifeform: so isn’t it rather like saying ‘volcano was a major point of support for pompei until day x’
mircea_popescu: quite. if the volcano never erupts, the fertile land on its slopes is actually enough to make the village own the other villages and build an empire.

*:asciilifeform wonders if the dump wasn’t the work of an impatient man, but of a thinking one – trying to induce ‘stress fracture’ (what’s the correct term?) via stampede effects
mircea_popescu: anyway, this whole charade’d have worked a damned sight better if the various y-combinator bezzlers, the foundation hearn, gmaxwell and co would have actually had what they thought they had and everyone thought they should have, ie, actual respectability and bitcoin cred. thankfully, uncommon sense prevailed. so far at least.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform what i think on that topic is perhaps apparent from what i do, namely, that i’m even talking about all this. but yes, for momentum shorts soft landing is the worst fucking news imaginable. so far, we’re beating the shit out of a soft flubberyviii substance the size of a continent.
*:asciilifeform infers that, should a peculiar effect be seen and mircea_popescu is silent, then it must be truly interesting
mircea_popescu: or imaginary (ie, powerless). it’s kinda funny how this works in qmix terms. basically, an oracle of the wave function, but just on the real part. is this actually useful ? anyway, that’s the major change here. after the missed boat of govt mining last year, this year the us fed has actually given its infinite fiat backing to any scheme that convincingly may help, and meanwhile to trying to depress price. this isn’t something other countries can do, nor do they need to. this is the one opportunity they get to stock up.x

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: hard to see who else could have reanimated the corpse of the 2011-era human wave chump attacks
mircea_popescu: apparently it’s sopit boggles the mind what ends up being sop in a system that survives long enough. kinda best argument against survival, that. “you’ll end up weird.”

How weird is the world we live in?

So weird that Bitcoin seems weird. Weird, eh?

Thank God we’ve got charades to entertain us.

___ ___ ___

  1. I’m not necessarily arguing that there isn’t a plan, though I personally don’t think there is, more than if there is, knowing its details would very much spoil the ride.
  2. Why not, right?
  3. Via IRC. And aren’t Ben and I hipper now that we changed our IRC nicknames to first_last names? No? Well who asked you anyways.
  4. This represents a change of -15% in the last 30 days.
  5. United States Government… just on the off chance.
  6. Quote is from the book Necronomicon by H. P. Lovecraft.
  7. To summarize, ever since February 2014 when the Bitcoin price signal went more borked than a cat on catnip, nefarious but ultimately incapable state agents have been throwing everything but the kitchen sink at Bitcoin. This includes, but is not limited to, crowdfunding, mining hardware sales, altcoins, Bitcoin 2.0, you name it and they’ve tried it.

    And they’ll continue to try for the simple reason that their ego prevents them from submitting to their new Lords. This is nothing new for states, but nor is voluntary submission historically unprecedented. See: voluntary submission of Middle Eastern Crusader states and the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia to the Mongol Empire in the 13th century.

    Part ii of the game, that which started in early 2014 and will continue for some time yet, is where we sort out the wheat (palea) from the chaff (lemma).

  8. Given Robin Williams’ recent passing, how better to remember him than Flubber?
  9. QM = Quantum Mechanics.
  10. C’mon Canada! Eh, who am I kidding, this is the 52nd State. My ancestral lands, known to me only as far back as the Cernăuți area of Romania/Ukraine, have a better chance of stocking up this year.

14 thoughts on “The Bitcoin Dumping Charade

  1. The large holdings by #b-a members prevents the USG from actually stocking up on “real” BTC ?

    The market depth between fiat and btc is thin. If even a fraction of the capital held by MPEx investors found it’s way to the fiat markets, the price per BTC would likely plummet back into double digits. The market has incredible slippage, so what is really being built?

    I think any whale would rather give someone a dufflebag of cash and receive a paper wallet in a dark alley, reminiscent of “trapping”, rather than through an exchange.

    Also didn’t China try this in the 60’s/70’s with gold? (Now we hold their gold “supposedly”).

    • Pete D. says:

      thestringpuller,

      The large holders in general prevent this charade from having long-term impact. A few of these holders are in #b-a but the majority are keeping to themselves, just as they have for years. Charades like this show the strength of having a narrow distribution of holders. Whereas stampede effects could be created to fool the masses, having fewer, larger holders permits the system’s resolve to shine through the seeded clouds.

      The market has incredible slippage, so what is really being built?

      Nothing less than the future.

      I think any whale would rather give someone a dufflebag of cash and receive a paper wallet in a dark alley, reminiscent of “trapping”, rather than through an exchange.

      Naturally, which is precisely why, by process of elimination, it’s clear that the network is being attacked by state actors.

  2. Adam T. says:

    What are human wave chump attacks? What is a specific example of one? Who are the chumps? What are they attacking?

    • Pete D. says:

      Adam,

      “Human wave chump attacks” are schemes wherein a large number of BTC holders are duped into parting with their coins by wallet inspectors. This includes Butterfly Labs, Ethereum, and the Bitcoin Foundation, to name but three.

      What is being attacked? Their intelligence.

  3. Zeke says:

    I’m skeptical of the state actor hypothesis. It is also possible that some exchanges are selling bitcoin that they do not own. This is a simpler explanation, and I would think easy to disprove if wrong.

    • Pete D. says:

      It’s not inconceivable that the exchanges are being “encouraged” to do just that. “Oh, you want to stay in business?” sort of thing.

  4. Or, someone has enough balls to rape the margin longs at Bitfinex.

    If this is true, it ain’t over.

    There’s still $21m left!
    http://www.bfxdata.com/sentiment/longshort.php

  5. […] what does the Inquisitor do with your balls? He cuts them off and buys Bitcoin to tank the price so he can keep pretending like it’s 1999, he buys Chief Derpists to unconvincingly derp […]

  6. […] the price, the network difficulty, and the derps who try (and fail) to fuck with our lovely Bitcoin and turn […]

  7. […] These steel-toed stomps aren’t always reflected in the fiat-BTC price, however. Despite no shortage of popularity in the press this past year,v Bitcoin has tumbled some 50% since the start of 2014. This has much to do with the foggy price signal, as I noted last quarter: […]

  8. […] That’s right, buying 5.93107779 BTC for CAD$ 3,712.80 turned out to be a raw deal, much less a free lunch! Had I been paying my dues in BTC purchased at the outset of the wager, I would’ve already run out of coins last week with another four months to go in the year, to say nothing of ending up with coins worth >CAD$ 3,712.80.v Not that timing markets is the sanest thing to attempt, but my summertime bullishness, like that of Mircea Popescu, turned out to be unfounded in the face of the dumping charade. […]

  9. […] the charade would have you believe. But can you buy all 14 mn bitcoins for such a paltry sum ? Well, […]

  10. […] This ultimately separates the trustworthy from the scammers; the professionals from the amateurs; the palea from the lemma. As such, the truth always emerges in the Bitcoin world despite the endless supply of scammers and […]

Leave a Reply to thestringpuller Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *