Not to sound pedantic, but the singular verb finds in the title needs an edit please :)
Researchers find that one person likely drove Bitcoin from $150 to $1,000
131–140 of 199 posts
Re: Researchers find that one person likely drove Bitcoin from $150 to $1,000
#132The number of seemingly throwaway accounts (created in the last few days) commenting on this thread is interesting too: - https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=astund - https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=simplemath__ - https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=zhjansbnas - https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=barbegal
Thanks for the info. To me, just about any HN post about XYZcoin is a minefield these days. The sentiments seem to all be unrealistically positive and the derision of the glaringly insane XYZcoins are just swamped in whataboutism and thread-derailing. I know it's a hot market and there is a lot of stuff going on, so these threads themselves are warranted, yet the comments in them are just clownshoes.
Re: Researchers find that one person likely drove Bitcoin from $150 to $1,000
#133Wow, this paper's conclusion is delayed by 3 years. Willy and Markus bots are old news for anyone who has been following bitcoin closely. The source of all these allegations was this blog appearing in 2014: https://willyreport.wordpress.com/2014/05/25/the-willy-repor...
This is how research in economics works. It can take even 5 years to get a paper published, although these guys seem to have written the paper quite recently. Turnaround was quick for them...
Pre-publication version of the article is available at SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2977479
Re: Researchers find that one person likely drove Bitcoin from $150 to $1,000
#134Is this serious scientific research? Looks like a joke to me, or very bad journalism:
>During both periods, the USD-BTC exchange rate rose by an average of four percent on days when suspicious trades took place, compared to a slight decline on days without suspicious activity.
So price action happens based on trading activity, wow what a shocking conclusion. Here I was thinking prices went up and down randomly for no reason!
>The team found that many instances of price manipulation happened simply because the market was very thin for various cryptocurrencies including early Bitcoin.
Hmmm this seems to imply supply and demand also have some sort of effect on price movement. Another shocking discovery!
>As mainstream finance invests in cryptocurrency assets and as countries take steps toward legalizing bitcoin as a payment system (as Japan did in April 2017), it is important to understand how susceptible cryptocurrency markets are to manipulation.
And they came to this final fantastic conclusion about the present (2017/2018) based on alleged manipulation that happened 4 years ago on an exchange that no longer exists. Fascinating research indeed. /s
Re: Researchers find that one person likely drove Bitcoin from $150 to $1,000
#135Interesting. I am curious to know who drove up the Bitcoin price to $18K.
You can see on a regular basis that South Korean exchanges are always paying 25-50% more than Western exchanges. The Bitcoin pump to 20k, the entire history of Bitcoin Cash, and recently the Ripple pump to $3 were all pumped by Bithumb, Upbit, etc. Hence the controversy with Coinmarketcap removing Korean exchanges for a second resulting in the marketcap dropping 50 billion. Even right now, almost 50% of XRP volume is…
That's interesting. Why would they buy it for more than $2? Is it because the exchange is selling for more or just problems with international currency.
Re: Researchers find that one person likely drove Bitcoin from $150 to $1,000
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 10x thing is a common misconception generated by the fact that 10 is a nice round number that works well for this type of just-so story. The Wikipedia article on reserve requirements has a handy table by country, from which you can see that the required ratio is actually less than 10 in most of the developed world. In fact, several countries have no reserve requirements at all! Following your logic, those countri…
10% isn't a fact, it's an example that is close enough to illustrate the thought experiment but allow you to do the math in your head (I originally learned about this years ago in a personal finance podcast). And of course the fact that I have $65 in my wallet right now instead of in the bank takes $650 out of the cycle. If you're in a country where people don't trust the banks that much, or people have almost no mon…
If you really meant for the 10x to only be an example, you should have clearly stated that.
Re: Researchers find that one person likely drove Bitcoin from $150 to $1,000
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looks like that article was written on the 23rd of December. That's the same time period around which Coinbase abruptly released Bcash. That time period was a barrage of negative kerfuffles for them. Historically Coinbase/GDAX has enjoyed "inflated" BTC/USD prices because of their trustworthiness. Contrast with Bitfinex which does not serve US customers, has been hacked in the past, and is (last I heard) in debt from…
Serious question: Why does hackernews seem to be biased towards BTC over BCH? In my opinion, any honest examination of the tradeoffs between block size, orphan block rate, cost to run a non-mining node (which do not contribute to network security except indirectly via serving SPV wallets), and mining fees, will show that a 1-1.7MB block size limit is just too low for current tx volumes. The current BTC network is unu…
Increasing block size is not a sustainable solution for scaling transactions. Transaction fees are too high and BTC should move to 2MB as a short-term fix but the long-term fix is off-chain solutions like Lightning.
Re: Researchers find that one person likely drove Bitcoin from $150 to $1,000
#138Winklevoss?
Re: Researchers find that one person likely drove Bitcoin from $150 to $1,000
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
10% isn't a fact, it's an example that is close enough to illustrate the thought experiment but allow you to do the math in your head (I originally learned about this years ago in a personal finance podcast). And of course the fact that I have $65 in my wallet right now instead of in the bank takes $650 out of the cycle. If you're in a country where people don't trust the banks that much, or people have almost no mon…
If you really meant for the 10x to only be an example, you should have clearly stated that.
You're being exceedingly rude and we're done here.
Re: Researchers find that one person likely drove Bitcoin from $150 to $1,000
#140If you haven't read the recent NYTimes article on the topic of cryptocurrencies, you should check it out: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/13/style/bitcoin-millionaire...
At the end of an article is an anecdote about an older (for Silicon Valley) woman who states "And maybe I’m going to lose [my investment of $12k].. Maybe I’m going to keep cleaning houses. But something is telling me I can trust this generation."
My worry is that (1) people like this woman who don't understand markets, let alone cryptocurrencies, will get burned by this, and (2) some small set of people who do understand markets will take advantage of those who don't.
This could result in a situation in which techies are blamed, like Wall Street, for causing lots of people to lose money (and -- let's face it -- lots of people will lose money, if not now then at some point).