Yesterday CoinDesk asked for my take on the current downtrend in market prices.  Incidentally, nearly a month ago, this same question was sent to me (here was my response then).  I sent them a statement and they published a couple of the comments in a new article, “Downward Pressures Persist as Bitcoin’s Price Declines to Near $400.”

Readers may be interested in a few of the other comments I mentioned to CD below:

Charlie Shrem made some interesting comments about OTC liquidity earlier today.  However, the fact that merchants and some miners are not dealing with exchanges directly, does not mean they cannot move the price.  That is what we are seeing now — it may not matter how many people are “buying off-chain” or “off-market” because no one wants to lose money.

And in other cases, an OTC buyer can affect exchange via “buy pressure.”  If he begins buying directly from an OTC provider, avoiding an exchange, the exchange loses its buy wall thus affecting price.  The sell pressure forces the price down and once a large buyer goes “off-market,” he is weakening the buy pressure.  If all the buyers and sellers are “off-market,” we can say that exchange price and price discovery is distorted.  As my friend Raffael Danielli recently said, “Information is never off-chain and ultimately information makes the price.”  Consequently today information spreads very quickly and if a broker can make money because he facilitates “off-chain” transaction and knows “better” what the real price is then game theory dictates he should take advantage off this (investment banks do the same with OTC).

So in addition to partnership agreements, they probably also sell somewhere else to mitigate exposure to this volatility.  In addition, many miners have to finance their operations and at current prices of $410, roughly $1.6 million is created every day via block rewards and it has to go somewhere.  Fewer people buying?  Down we go.

People are always rationalizing things in a down turn.  Maybe an early adopter bought a house or car and cashed out a couple of million worth the past couple of days.  Or maybe some of the dev teams that recently raised funds via crowdsales need to sell in order to fund development.  Just because the ticker price says $410 doesn’t mean every bitcoin in the world is worth $410.  It is temporal and the public market is still very illiquid, so start cashing out and see what happens to market prices.  Again, it is only as valuable as another party is willing to pay for it.  And in theory, it will only stop once the marginal cost of creating new coins equals the current price (MV=MC), which Robert Sams wrote about earlier this week..  Though in practice, some miners can operate at loss to recover at least some funds — however it would be in their best interest to simply turn off their equipment instead and buy bitcoins with the expectation of price appreciation.  It also depends on how much they’re leveraged at places like Paymium, BTCJam and Bitfinex.