You are looking to gain more by short-term trading, profiting from short-term variations of the price.  That is not a rational strategy, since the expected gain of that activity is slightly negative.  Some traders may make a profit, but some will lose money, and the average gain of all traders (compared to the long-term expected gain) will be negative.

If your expectation of the price increase over the next few years is more than the expected increase in value of other possible investments, then the best strategy is basically invest all your disposable money as soon as you can, and hold until you want to spend your profit.

Otherwise, the best strategy is not to invest at all.

Short-term speculation makes sense only if you believe that there is some key attribute -- knowledge, skill, luck, courage, determination, intelligence, reaction speed -- that increases one's expected profit at day trading, and that you have more of that thing than the average speculative trader out there.

Indeed, it seems that the only reason why day-trading exists is that most people think that they are better than average in that regard.  Which is not likely, since the traders that are dumber than you will go broke and drop out before you do, while the super-traders with robots and privileged information, who are surely better at the game than you, will hang around to the end and will probably take your money before you can take theirs. (You may have noticed the absence lately of several posters who apparently enjoyed eating dog food in order to pay for Risto's cigars and for KnC's global warming plants.)

If you accept that you are no better that the average day-trader, and you have a positive expectation for the price in the long run, short-term trading will give less expected profit than just buy and hold -- because you will not profit from the end-to-end trend during those times when you are holding dollars. For example, if you expect a 20% valuation over 3 years, but you keep 50% dollars and 50% BTC, on the average, over that time frame, then your expected profit will be only 10%. 

A similar conclusion holds if you have a negative expectation for the price in the long term: day-trading is a bad idea, because  you are expected to lose money while you are holding BTC.  If you expect the price to drop 20% over the next 3 years, then, by day-trading with a 50% BTC average position, you will have a 10% expected loss.  Whereas, if you don't invest at all, your loss will be 0%.

Well, it seems that SMBIT is listed at OTCQX finally.

Is trading there open yet?

Will SMBIT re-enable redemptions?

The SEC filing does not seem say much, unfortunately.  Anything that we did not know already?

How could they think that 1 BTC is worth 255$, if they haven't even heard of it? 

You mean, those who will buy bitcoin for ideological reasons, at any price? They must all have all run out of money, because they are not buying for 255$, either.

Just rounded the number.  To get a more accurate value one should consider also the chances of it reaching 1200 but not 1300, 1100 but not 1200, 1000 but not 1100, etc.  Then one would get much less than 20% for "will get above 1300".

The 20% number is the upper bound, assuming that those buyers consider only two possibilities: "will get higher than 1300$ sometime in the next 2 years" or "crashes to 0$ right after I buy it, and stays there forever".  Then p*1300 + (1-p)*0 < 255, which gives p < 255/1300.  If they are considering other cases besides those two (which of course they are), then p must be even less than that.

Anyway, note that it is what "the market" must be thinking, not what I think.

It is not a survey, just math.  If anyone with money to invest thought that the chances of BTC hitting 1300$ in the next 2 years were higher than 20%, they should buy it even for 300$.  But they aren't, so...

Well, the price being 252$, it means that everybody who who owns bitcoin thinks that they are worth more than 245$; but, on the other hand, everybody in the world who has some money to spare thinks that 1 BTC is not worth 255$.   The latter think that the changes of it being worth more than 1300$ anytime in the next few years are much less than 20%.

Did you know that the ancient Egyptians thought that the brain's only function was to make nose goo, and therefore removed  the brain of a dead man through the nose, with a metal pick, before mummifying the body and other organs -- since, who would want to show up before Osiris and Isis with a runny nose?

Since I am 90 km north of the tropic, would this be an off-tropic post?

Actually it ends with

Are you Sigmund Freud reincarnated?

Today I expect to see many spock uppets too.

I can confirm that you have posted the above.  You are welcome.

That was cruel. 

IIRC, someone objected that it would become an advantage for a miner to assemble empty or very short blocks, because that would give him an edge over miners who work on full 20 MB blocks (which would take significantly longer to propagate).  Thus there was a proposal to force all blocks to be 20 MB long, irrespective of their actual contents.  Does it make sense?

Is that a list of bitcoin symptoms?

  Homogeneity: "there can be only one cryptocurrency, bitcoin"

  Centralization: of miners -- we went through that already.

  Division: any governance or coordination of players is a mortal sin, by definition of the protocol.

  Imitation:  "Look at me, I invested in 2011 and I got rich, just do the same"

  Emotionality:  need I belabor?

 

My, nerves are badly exposed here. 

I though that it was people buying that made price to go up.  Sorry for the stupidity.  What is the real cause? the Mystic Vital Force of the Triangular Fibonacci Retracements, or whatever?


The giveout was only 10'000 BTC total and spread out in time.  This jump was too sharp to be that.

Could it be Gavin's tweet?  It seems that many people read it as some breaktrough that would boost the block rate 60x and/or solve the problems of 20 MB blocks.

Couldn't that jump have been just a large buy by Kim Dotcom?

Gavin tweeted the link to the github page: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/5835

Gavin was testing his proposed changes, that include increasing the max block size from 1 MB to 20 MB.  He noticed that the nodes  were taking too long (hundreds of milliseconds) to validate a block, even when the node had seen all transactions before and thus did not need to validate them again.  That wasted time impacted the time needed to propagate a block from node to node.  He tweaked and hacked the code until he got that part of the code to run a lot faster, saving some memory too.  That improvement reduced the estimated 1MB-block propagation time, in that easy case, from 600 ms to 10 ms.

That is good news for people running nodes, but it will not be noticed by ordinary clients. The target block rate will still be 1 block every 10 minutes.