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How the Winklevoss Twins Found Vindication in a Bitcoin Fortune

nytimes.com

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Re: How the Winklevoss Twins Found Vindication in a Bitcoin Fortune

#61

Post by dahdum »

hyprCoin wrote: post #53
dahdum wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"So I'd agree that the sum of all e-coins will surpass gold, but I see no reason for Bitcoin to do it alone." We could pick any number of gold-like commmodities, but like Bitcoin, gold has had a history of large expenditures to acquire it. Both are buoyed by that past. So many tokens and blockchains are coming out with incremental improvements or niche capabilities, but in the end I think consolidation of market cap…

I respectfully disagree with your conclusion. There isn't one company for internet searches and there isn't one provider for online video content. Why should there be just a handful of currencies? The natural state of a healthy ecosystem includes competition and variety.

75% of all searches are Google, 10% Baidu, and 8% Bing. Youtube represents the vast majority of online video content. Netflix the vast majority of on demand television.

I only mean to say a handful will capture the vast majority of market share/cap.

Re: How the Winklevoss Twins Found Vindication in a Bitcoin Fortune

#62

Post by Lon7 »

aplummer wrote: post #21

Does anyone know the actual value of the money put into bitcoin so far vs this market cap of recent sale price x count? I'm keen to know actually how many people could withdraw at similar sale prices to now before it evaporated. Because it's so exponential, I would imagine a rapid sale of 5% would remove 90% of the value, but I'd love to know the specifics.

Bank of America and Bitcoin both have market caps of ~$290 billion. Bank of America usually sees huge trading volume for a stock and it traded about $1.8 billion of volume today. BTC/USD alone has done $3 billion today.

I realize it's not a perfect comparison, but I think it highlights the fact that large sales aren't going to just decimate bitcoin's value.

Re: How the Winklevoss Twins Found Vindication in a Bitcoin Fortune

#63

Post by pitaj »

mlevental wrote: post #49

can someone tell me something i've been wondering for a couple days now (considering taking the plunge and toying around with bitcoin): how fast can you execute trades on coinbase/gdax? obviously i'm asking if i could experiment with hft-esque strategies. is that possible or the clearing time too long? note: on a very small scale (like ~100$ total "aum")

You're gonna get killed by transaction fees.

Re: How the Winklevoss Twins Found Vindication in a Bitcoin Fortune

#64

Post by meritt »

dahdum wrote: post #46
meritt wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> trade volume is not the same thing as liquidity

They are linked very closely, especially with a volatile market like crypto. Besides, the volume is 10x what it was when Novogratz unloaded $250M on a smaller market cap. A billion would certainly move the price, but it doesn't appear it would crash it.

I was playing around with automated trading algorithms this summer on GDAX. With a bankroll of only $2.5k USD I was routinely contributing $500k+ worth of trading volume each day (that's only 100 r/t trades with $2.5k).

Surely there's a lot more sophisticated high-volume trading algorithms taking place than what I did.

Take a look at GDAX's full book [1] -- Even going all the way down to a BTC price of $8600 (-50% current prices), there's only outstanding buy orders to consume 5169 BTC if someone entered a market sell order. Obviously that would trigger a lot of automated trades that don't live on the book but I think the assumption that "trading volume" == "liquidity" is very dangerous.

[1] https://api.gdax.com/products/BTC-USD/book?level=3

Re: How the Winklevoss Twins Found Vindication in a Bitcoin Fortune

#66

Post by dahdum »

ufo wrote: post #51
dahdum wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$550M on just the Coinbase BTC-USD book in the past 24 hours. $1B on Bitfinex. Liquidity is currently very strong.

That is trading volume, not liquidity. And we should be wary of the trading volume on bitcoin exchanges, a lot of it is manipulated. (In particular, I would never trust any numbers coming from Bitfinex)

Coinbase is not a sketchy exchange by any means, and while I'm cautious about Bitfinex their volume is quite believable given they are the default choice for non US persons.

That's also why I quoted USD, if you include crypto-crypto volume and some of the zero fee exchanges it definitely becomes nonsense.

Re: How the Winklevoss Twins Found Vindication in a Bitcoin Fortune

#67

Post by saalweachter »

21 wrote: post #44
saalweachter wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money isn't "put into" Bitcoin. Every USD "put into" an exchange in exchange for Bitcoin was simultaneously taken out by the person on the other side of the trade. The future value of Bitcoin in USD is entirely dependent on people in the future wanting to buy Bitcoin for USD; if no one wants to, it is not worth any USD.

You can say the same about many (most?) things. Every USD "put into" AAPL is simultaneously taken out by the person on the other side of the trade. Very few things truly destroy money, and I'm pretty sure all of them are done by banks or treasuries.

AAPL has associated assets, including cash assets, and owning shares of AAPL is a direct encumbrance on those assets.

Re: How the Winklevoss Twins Found Vindication in a Bitcoin Fortune

#68

Post by felipeko »

lsadam0 wrote: post #55
felipeko wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a difference about Gold's rarity and Bitcoin's. Gold is rare on its kind and rare on its abundance. It may be hard to mine more gold, but it's way harder to find another gold-like commodity. Bitcoin is only rare in the abundance sense. It is hard to mine more bitcoin, but it's pretty easy to find a (arguably better) substitute for what it does. I can agree with it being better (having more utility) than gold,…

We live in a world where the near-ish future could bring us asteroid mining. Something that could devastate the rarity of abundance of gold.

That is true, and this should really factor in the decline of gold in the future, but this does not help Bitcoin against it's e-coins rivals.

And isn't Bitcoin hackable in a near-ish future with quantum computing?

Re: How the Winklevoss Twins Found Vindication in a Bitcoin Fortune

#69

Post by pests »

pitaj wrote: post #63
mlevental wrote: post #49

can someone tell me something i've been wondering for a couple days now (considering taking the plunge and toying around with bitcoin): how fast can you execute trades on coinbase/gdax? obviously i'm asking if i could experiment with hft-esque strategies. is that possible or the clearing time too long? note: on a very small scale (like ~100$ total "aum")

You're gonna get killed by transaction fees.

What? Fees are 0.1%. that's nothing compared to fees for regular stocks exchanges.

I'm perfectly fine paying 10 cents for every $100 I trade.

Re: How the Winklevoss Twins Found Vindication in a Bitcoin Fortune

#70

Post by flunhat »

pitaj wrote: post #63
mlevental wrote: post #49

can someone tell me something i've been wondering for a couple days now (considering taking the plunge and toying around with bitcoin): how fast can you execute trades on coinbase/gdax? obviously i'm asking if i could experiment with hft-esque strategies. is that possible or the clearing time too long? note: on a very small scale (like ~100$ total "aum")

You're gonna get killed by transaction fees.

I think on gdax there's no fees for maker trades, only takers.
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