Bitcoin Surges Above $3000 As Asian Premium Collapses

Interesting article I just seen on zerohedge.

Bitcoin prices (in dollars) have surged above $3000 for the first time in history this morning as CoinTelegraph reports that South Korea and Japan, the third and fourth largest Bitcoin exchange markets, are no longer showing Bitcoin price premiums.
Source: Korbit

It seems the gains in dollar-Bitcoin-exchanges vs non-dollar-Bitcoin-exchanges have helped the former in lieu of the latter (as arbs appears), and as CoinTelegraph notes the factors behind the extreme premium rates are starting to fade.

South Korea and Japan’s extreme premium rates did not dematerialize overnight. It began with the stabilization of the Chinese market and the resumption of withdrawals led by the big three Bitcoin exchanges in China - Huobi, OKCoin and BTCC.

As the global market stabilized and the Chinese Bitcoin exchange market recovered, premiums started to decrease. Chinese exchanges, which used to process Bitcoin trades around 25 percent lower than the global average price, began to process trades at a value higher than the global average Bitcoin price.

During that time, liquidity in the Japanese and South Korean markets also increased drastically. Some of the largest companies in Japan, including the multi-billion dollar internet conglomerate GMO, opened a Bitcoin exchange to address the rapidly increasing demand for Bitcoin and South Korean exchanges also began to focus on providing higher liquidity toward traders.

Ultimately, the recovery of the Chinese market acted as a catalyst for global Bitcoin exchange market stabilization and standardization.
While much has been written on the 'bubble' in virtual currencies, Acting-Man's Pater Tenebrarum provides some good color on how we got here and what happens next...

The Crypto-Bubble – A Speculator’s Dream in Cyberspace
When writing an article about the recent move in bitcoin, one should probably not begin by preparing the chart images. Chances are one will have to do it all over again. It is a bit like ordering a cup of coffee in Weimar Germany in early November 1923. One had to pay for it right away, as a cup costing one wheelbarrow of Reichsmark may well end up costing two wheelbarrows of Reichsmark half an hour later. These days the question is how many wheelbarrows of US dollars one may need to pay for a bitcoin.

Is it real? (As our readers know, the nature of reality poses certain problems). When we started writing this, bitcoin had just moved up by more than $600 in one week to its then level of $2,400 – within a little more than a day it reached an interim peak of $2,760, then plunged to an interim low of around $1850 in just two trading days, only to rally to a new high of $2,930 over the next two weeks. Currently it trades at $2,750 (don’t hold it against us if these figures are no longer true by the time this post is published).

Naturally, the increasingly parabolic look of the bitcoin chart raises the question whether it represents a bubble, and if so, how large it will become. A good answer to the second part of the question is usually “larger than anyone thinks possible”. As to the first part, it may be fair to say that it has been in a bubble since shortly after its birth. At one point in 2009 the currency could be bought for 1/100 of 1 US cent (USD 0,0001). It rallied to 5 cents by 2010, which is quite a big move. We dimly remember a story about a pizza restaurant selling Margheritas for BTC 20,000 apiece at the time. In 2011 it reached a peak of $18.50 – and so on, and so forth.

In recent weeks we occasionally watched in mute fascination as bitcoin fluctuated in ranges of several hundred dollars in the space of a few hours. On May 22 it had a little dip just below the $2,000 mark to give everyone a good entry point. But would it really be worth it? What if the bubble was about to collapse? Three days later the courageous dip buyers were up by almost 40%. Given how overbought bitcoin looks, one would have thought it a good idea to take the money and run, but of course we have no idea how crazy things will still get before everybody really starts dialing 1-800-GETMEOUT.

A competing crypto-currency by the name of Ethereum (what a name!) has gained more than 2,400% this year, rising from $10 in January to $258 in early June. The move from $80 to $258 took just three weeks. So yes, it is a bubble of sorts, with an almost Tulipomania-like air about it. It is a speculator’s dream in many ways – BTC and ETH are undoubtedly great trading sardines. What interests us though is why this is happening. What is driving it?

Fractal Patterns
One interesting thing about the chart of bitcoin is that it has a text-book Elliott wave shape (we have not labeled the chart, but it seems obvious to us that it lends itself to such labeling). This applies to the weekly chart shown further below as well and also to other time frames. Regardless of what one thinks of Elliott wave theory, price trends in financial markets definitely have fractal characteristics.

Empirically they consist of sequences of patterns that are recurring over and over again in every conceivable time frame, i.e., the same patterns (or rather, very similar patterns, such as for instance triangles) that form on daily, weekly or monthly charts, also form on one minute, ten minute and hourly charts. These patterns appear to reflect various stages in the evolution of market psychology within the time frames captured by these charts.

R.N. Elliott cataloged such recurring patterns in the stock market and tried to find out if they followed rules that could be defined and used for forecasts. Obviously such an endeavor is fraught with many difficulties. Particularly the validity of the theoretical framework that was created after the empirical identification of said patterns and the promulgation of the technical rules governing the Elliott wave principle seems questionable.

But that is not really what we want to discuss here. One doesn’t necessarily have to believe that the Elliott wave principle is valid or useful for making accurate market forecasts in order to recognize that its leading practitioners have gathered a number of useful empirical insights.

In this particular case we mention it mainly because typically, “textbook” Elliott wave patterns only emerge in markets with broad participation. Since these patterns reflect the predominant mood of market participants, or if you will, the “market mind”, recognizable shapes only tend to form in liquid markets with a large number of participants. While we cannot say what precisely the threshold is, i.e., at what point pure randomness is replaced with something that resembles a more orderly arrangement, the price chart itself conveys the information that the threshold has been crossed.

The bid/ask spread of bitcoin is usually quite tight as well, although it has tended to widen amid the recent increase in volatility. We observed trading activity at one of the larger exchanges while it traded around $2,400 and a the time the bid/ask spread fluctuated from as little as 30 cents to short term wides of up to $7 when short term volatility spiked. Even at its widest the spread was therefore just ~0.2%, which also shows that this is market with broad participation. Keep in mind that we just observed the spread over a limited time window, it is therefore possible that it will occasionally be wider, but probably not by much.