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Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

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Re: Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

#201

Post by neiman »

DennisP wrote: post #192
neiman wrote: post #157

It's impossible to have a discussion based on news reports, so here's a link for the original paper. I copied the title and abstract below. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3195066 I browsed through the paper. Their main result, if I understood correctly, is that they found "considerable evidence that Tether is used to purchase Bitcoin following Tether authorization and a drop in Bitcoin price, and…

And it seems unlikely that Ethereum's 100X rise in 2017 had nothing to do with the ICO boom.

I also find it hard to believe that the whole cryptoboom of 2017 can be narrowed down to one dimensional Tether-Bitcoin analysis.

Re: Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

#202

Post by [deleted] »

papreclip wrote: post #184
auiya wrote: post #51

Cryptocurrency is just penny stocks (before regulation). Same pump-and-dump manipulation occurs. Why is this surprising?

Unlike penny stocks, bitcoin won't perform a 100:1 reverse-split and print new coins. Many penny stock gamblers have been burned this way, which is why they're moving into crypto

[deleted]

Re: Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

#203

Post by eccodown »

this_user wrote: post #145
clarkmoody wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All money has value because people demand to hold it. In a hyperinflation scenario, people are dumping the currency for goods as fast as they can. They are using the money as a transactional medium only: get paid -> rush to buy goods to capture the value of your labor in something that won't be worthless tomorrow. Dumping worthless paper currency is a form of speculation that the value won't unexpectedly rise before…

> The "store of value" proposition of Bitcoin is that it can't be printed by a central bank, so you can be sure that your holdings relative to the size of the money supply cannot be diluted. Except that's not true. The block reward consists of newly created coins of which there are 1800 per day. Currently, that is a 3.7% annual inflation rate in supply, which is far more than the 2% target most central banks from dev…

The supply is currently being bootstrapped, the rate of new creation is falling as the supply get closer to the maximum. Some months from now new coins from block rewards should halve (3.7% inflation dropping to 1.85%), and the process repeats as maximum supply is reached in the distant future, at which point the mining reward would primarily be the transaction fees.

Re: Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

#204

Post by Glosster »

I don't like Bitcoin because of its energy use, I definitely prefer future Ethereum w/ staking and current Nano, but the last "research" of these guys was just them not understanding basics of trading. For this reason, I'm definitely not wasting time again looking over what they wrote. I'm even amazed that they got so many upvotes; they should have had a negative reputation by now.

Re: Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

#206

Post by SI_Rob »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #58
ceejayoz wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That attention was generated by the skyrocketing price, though. No one in the general public or news media really cared until it had already shot up substantially.

It was a self-reinforcing snowball effect, because news coverage of BTC was pretty constant for a good while. Feedback loop kinda thing. I for one am sure people are being paid to hype up or report on BTC so that the people paying for those "news" reports can profit from the increased price.

It's even more insidious than that. An astonishingly high fraction of people in both the news media (and particularly in the financial news media) as well as in variously leveraged positions of power in government and quasi-governmental bodies, were primed to talk up Bitcoin wherever possible due to having taken some position in it (or in one of its boutique gateway drugs alts) "just to see how it works."

This position being facilitated either by direct action or, more frequently, by enthusiastic prompting from a "blockchain consultant" acquaintance who offered to walk them through setting up a wallet (or even a miner / mining contract) and show them how to use it. You know, "just to see how it works."

Now that their curiosity has been elevated to, as Bitcoiners love to quip, actual "skin in the game" (both in terms of time/material investment and reputational commitment), they are biased to repeat the pro-bitcoin messaging points they've been spoonfed by what they believe to be a helpful, fashionably libertarian insider geek contact, but is in effect merely this generation's reboot of the garden variety penny stock shill.

Re: Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

#207

Post by wruza »

For tech’s sake in this cryptoeconomy PhD thread, working with Bitfinex API was a pleasure. A simple websocket protocol with concise deterministic event packets and clear documentation. The only limitation is $1k barrier even for testing purposes, but no big deal. These guys know their ropes.

Opposed to say Bitmex, which rolled out a braintrashing overengineered differential update protocol, so hard to scratch that we just opted out of its implementation. I believe that was inspired by bare fix/fast, with all strings attached (pun intended).

Re: Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

#208

Post by roywiggins »

_8j50 wrote: post #118
shadowgovt wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using one-off wallets increases the complexity of a financial forensics problem, but doesn't make it unsolvable. For one thing, you can't force everyone you do business with in the network to follow the same practice.

As a businessperson,yes. As a consumer it works quite well. When you offer services you become tracable. But alas XMR is not so traceable,one can always launder btc through XMR (and maybe profit?) Or zcash.

any transaction that includes the word "launder" is not, I would suggest, something a consumer should touch with a ten foot pole

Re: Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

#209

Post by marcosdumay »

shadowgovt wrote: post #114
marcosdumay wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> none of them for storing value That one is a plus. Money is a transactional tool, speculation and storing value do not add to its main value. As an aside, everybody that I know that ever brought some crypto coin did it for speculation. The more likely explanation is that I'm looking at the wrong country, but if speculation suddenly stoped being a main use of BTC, I would start to seriously look at it.

Storing value is considered to be one of the three functions of money [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money#Functions ]. And the fact that BTC's value fluctuates so wildly (in an era where fiat currencies like the dollar tend to remain a lot more stable) is one of the obstacles to mass adoption. It turns out that making a currency behave "gold-like" carried with it the disadvantages to the gold standard that induced…

I'm not saying that money isn't useful as a storage of value. What I am saying is that there is very little social benefit from that usage.

To decide whether a currency is successful, one should look exclusively at its use as a means of exchange, ignoring any use as a storage of value or speculation target.

Re: Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

#210

Post by fierarul »

biolurker1 wrote: post #13

"research". As with all things crypto, by no means there is an expert or authority that you can actually trust.

Presumably it comes from academia, they have things such as peer review, the paper is presumably public and they will have to defend it, including with some data. How does one determine which experts and authority are actually trustworthy?
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