Do yourself a favour and look at a log chart to compare geometrically. If you'd like to compare June 2011 to 2013, you'd have to look at exponentials (doubling). A nominal rise of $5 per day is a yawn in 2013, while $5 per day in 2011 made several people liquidate their homes and sell their grandmothers.

What was fascinating in 2011 were gains of roughly 50x in two months. Whereas it has taken well over 15 months to gain 50x since 2012. Bitcoin has only appreciated 5x in the past two months. Very different: 50x versus 5x. Use a log chart and this is immediately and visibly obvious.

$49 was an exuberant surprise, but the rapid collapse was not. Indeed, I'm hoping for a little more deflation ('hope' in this context is reserved for threads titled "Bear post o'dae"). I don't suppose the Untiring Sceptic cares to see astrological charts that indicated the peak in the 40's, that expects further decline, followed by a huge long term up trend?

We do not _agree_ to be bound by mathematics. It is only because many have tried and failed that we have confidence in our understanding of the mathematics.

@johnyj as I cross posted, is a fork serious chatter or purely hypothetical?

I'm throwing a party. It'll be great. We'll get drunk and sign keys. When are you guys passing through Greenland?

Is this purely hypothetical or are there hints from the core developer kitchen that a fork is on the table?

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Hardfork_Wishlist

Hi ElectricMucus, long time no chat.


According to my tea leaves, there is a good chance the price will peak soon around $40 and drop to the August price range, perhaps in the teens. After climbing above $20 again, I think you are right, it will never drop below $20 again. Or so says the good oolong.

Bear disclosure: as of $27:90 o'clock today I own no bitcoins.

FYI, you probably mean 'masala chai'. Some variation of 'chai' just means 'tea' is nearly every language.

Silver needles are brilliant, but don't keep well.

I advocate learning as many as one can. Neither German nor French should be particularly difficult starting points. Theymos is not likely to get very far with Chinese in a year while remaining on American soil. However, Chinese will help if he intends to learn Japanese later but not much. Except for a handful of characters and old cultural ties, the two languages are quite different (perhaps Japanese is grammatically and lexicographically closer to English than Chinese).

I personally think Germanic languages (which includes English) are ugly. For me the opportunities to speak and the pleasure of the spoken word are most motivating. I speak French and a few Germanic languages, and while not fluent, I enjoy forming words in Spanish more than any other language on Theymos' short list (others being Romanian, Pali/sanskrit, Hausa, any tonal language, and I imagine Khoisan languages).

Given the short timespan and indecision, it might be worth considering the British Foreign Office's categorization from easiest to hardest for native English speakers (diplomats) to learn:

Level 1
Spanish, French, German, Dutch, Swedish, Italian, Portuguese

Level 2
Swahili, Icelandic, Malay, Indonesian, Romanian

Level 3
Finnish, Croatian, Serbian, Latvian, Czech, Hungarian

Level 4
Arabic, Russian, Persian

Level 5
Thai, Japanese, Chinese, Korean

The hottest women, even the lowest common denominator, are found in Copenhagen. Unfortunately the Danish language, like German and Dutch, is verbal diarrhea but less smooth. I'd have to give a vote up to the ladies of Montreal and Quebec and the always charming français québécois...

...which sounds a bit like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hJQsvoY6VU

Italian, the closest to Latin of modern romance languages, is directly based on 13th century aristocratic Florentine. Dante Alighieri gathered the various dialects of Tuscany to produce what he thought was the most beautiful language for his poetry, La divina commedia in particular.

Rishi has consistently high quality loose tea. Though I try to buy from source. I prefer SE Chinese and Taiwanese high altitude, heavily oxidized oolongs. Dong Fang Mei Ren to be precise. Pu-erh is not my cup of tea.

Gabriel García Márquez' "El amor en los tiempos del cólera" is the most beautifully written book I've ever read. It's a pleasure in English, but...

A few lines of Pablo Neruda's poems will make most latin women wet and gringo chicks will wonder what power you wield.


And it is consistently structured, unlike say, English.


What does this mean?

Spanish is one of the easiest languages to learn. There are few difficult sounds to pronounce, it's widely spoken, beautiful, with much exposure and many resources (TV, books, net). If you can write Spanish you can speak it, if you can hear it you can read it. Few languages share that bijective property. Spanish has one of the easiest learning curves and does not get difficult until you learn very advanced (beyond conversational) grammar.

Learning any romance language (French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Italian, Catalan, etc) will help when learning any other romance. Learning any language at all will give you the mental tools to learn others.

Ease is not the only criteria for learning a language, but if you do plan to learn several languages, starting with an easy language can be a good strategy. I do not think that learning the tones of east Asian languages is a huge barrier. I learned a great deal of Thai (five tones) just listening to audio on repeat while I slept. The Thai people are extraordinarily encouraging and if you can handle being laughed at with, anyone on the street is an enthusiastic teacher. After some Thai, picking up conversational Lao (six tones) was cake. The tonal ear will help with others like Vietnamese (6) and maybe even Cantonese (with nine tones!).

Chinese characters are incredibly difficult will be time consuming to pick up, but learning them can be a fascinating endeavor. Perhaps more rewarding and motivated if you are actually in China (simplified) or Taiwan (traditional). Considering you intend to learn Japanese, you could start with the ~2000 tōyō and jōyō kanji which are shared between Chinese and Japanese (and are essentially the only Chinese characters used in Japan). Japanese has a few distinct sounds and predictable vowels. Mandarin Chinese has a few more phonemes and the added beauty of four tones.

In my opinion, the most fascinating languages are polysynthetic found primarily in the Arctic (Greenlandic) and in native American languages (Navajo, Mayan). But I don't imagine they'll be among your first picks if you're already undecided.

It does not mean much. The fourth is only a suggestion. Similarly, three wave zig-zag corrections are common, but not guaranteed.

The jump from $4.8 to $7.2 is something else entirely. I'm without internet and am missing all of this fun. My quick assessment however, is that we may see a small upward motion again, before a major downward correction. Bitcoin broke the channel yesterday and seems to be entering again. I'd expect it to soon cross below the channel over the midterm week(s).



Maybe, but Elliott already tries to model market exuberance and despair. So trying to explain unexpected Elliott motion using the same terms is circular.



The channel I've 'drawn' using the edge of paper on chart since November cuts through the spike on 20 December (wave 3) and again 6 January (wave 5).



Do it. Very often an alternate count looks much better after drawing or describing another idea.

It's best to have a number of alternate counts in mind along with what new information would confirm or deny any one of them. If all counts predict the same result, then you can have more confidence in the prediction even if each count is vague.

Thanks for the subcount. Perhaps you could alternate 1,2,3,4,5 and i,ii,iii,iv,v for the color blind but anyway...



That's up to you. Neither count gives me warm fuzzies (none of mine either). But the sharp blue 4 looks like a motive three-waves, hits your previous fourth wave perfectly (3.iv), and the following blue wave 5 has a valid subcount.



First of all, the previous fourth wave is a suggestion, not a requirement. Secondly, it's anywhere in the entire fourth wave $3.5-$4.5, though you are correct, it tends to hit closer to the extreme.

Given your count, I'd be inclined to call the (2 Jan, $4.8 ) drop your 'a'. It fits nicely in the previous magenta fourth wave. If the correction is a zig-zag, 'c' would likely and symmetrically end within the blue fourth as well. 'a' and 'c' of a zig-zag should be roughly equal and both express five subwaves (b is three waves). Since you shouldn't ignore that $4.8 drop, I think either your 'a' is much bigger or the drop is your 'a'.



Also, I suggest you find parallel green channel lines. They can intersect the price action a bit, but an expanding impulse is not particularly informative.

Zhou, I've done a number of experiments on this. It seems trailing stops are no longer working correctly. Sell-Stops continue to rise even if prices have not reached new peaks, somewhat like parabolic SAR, which is indeed interesting, but not as expected.

After getting bounced out of (liquidating) three trades already, I've just set a trailing stop at $4, it is now at $4.4 and I can see from charts.bitcoinica that the BUY price has only bounced around between $5.01 and $5.07 (04:20 UTC)....

The BUY price just (05:00 UTC) jumped .1 to $5.11, yet my trailing stop is .8 higher, all the way up to $4.83 (The SELL price has not moved more than .05 this entire time). I've just canceled the order to prevent losing another $50.

Flappy, the count you've drawn is valid on the scale you've labeled. However, I think you'd have trouble labeling the subwaves... but so it is. If I understand what you mean by 5.i ( $5.5 ), 5.ii ( $4.8 ), then yes, you should expect much higher prices. According to your count, waves 1 and 3 are about equal, which tends to imply an extended 5.

All counts continue to look ugly to me. For example, in your wave 5, there was a peak ($4.99, 31 Dec), a double top around ($5.5, 2 Jan), before a drop to ($4.8, 2 Jan). How do you reconcile that? Either your 5.i is only three subwaves, or the fourth wave was invalid.

There's nothing wrong with your count, considering bitcoin's light trade volume. Indeed it's as good as any. It's just that you can't have huge confidence in any count unless it is also confirmed on higher and lower scales. I invite you to include sub-counts for discussion.

...

Suppose you considered ($3.5, 22 Dec) as the beginning of wave 5 rather than the middle of a wave 4 triangle. Then you'd have a valid five counts up to the new year high before a major reversal. I'm not claiming it's better than your count. My intension is only to provide healthy doubt.