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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

#281

Post by shadowgovt »

marcosdumay wrote: post #269
shadowgovt wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The social benefit to storing value is de-risking against the future (2). I keep some money in my bank account so that if I need to buy food for a month with no source of income I can(1). If the money in my bank account buys a third as much food tomorrow because it lacks stable value as a store, that's bad for society, because if I'm going to starve to death, I might as well use the remaining energy I have to burn so…

> I keep some money in my bank account so that if I need to buy food for a month with no source of income I can. Well, that thing in your bank account is not money, but a complex derivative of it, with different risk and depreciation profiles. Anyway, some money that you can easily receive from the other side of the world, immediate convert into local currency, and move away without seeing any of it again would be ve…

The thing in my bank account is enumerated in US dollars and backed by FDIC insurance against theft, fraud, and collapse of the institution storing and tracking it causing the quantity of such enumerated dollars I have changing. I agree that it has different risk profiles than "A sack of greenbacks under my bed," but not different in a way that makes it practically not-money.

It satisfies the three basic functions for all practical purposes. In fact, it does so better than BTC (in the sense that there is no FDIC-equivalent to protect me if theft, fraud, or collapse of some holding institution tracking my BTC wallets for me divorces me from my BTC).

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

#282

Post by lostmsu »

Nursie wrote: post #228
lostmsu wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rather than demand from cash investors Can't find how did they determine, that Tether was not bought with cash, so this statement is basically baseless.

The pattern of issuances to market make it highly unlikely.

Can you elaborate?

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

#283

Post by heelhook »

nostrademons wrote: post #260
Animats wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tether is starting to look like a Madoff-scale Ponzi scam. What maintains the $1 price of Tether is a continual net inflow of cash. Tether is known not to be backed with sufficient real assets.[1] If there's a period of net outflow from Tether, the whole house of cards comes crashing down. [1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/tether-reverses-claim-of-1...

It's looked like a Madoff-scale Ponzi scam for a long time. Even in 2017, when the world was gaga over cryptocurrencies, people were saying that the Tether stuff is super sketchy. There was a near-run on Tether this May, though, and ironically that's what pumped Bitcoin from $5300 to $8000. When folks want to dump Tether, they generally cannot dump it directly into dollars. They have to dump to Bitcoin, move it off-e…

> When folks want to dump Tether, they generally cannot dump it directly into dollars. They have to dump to Bitcoin, move it off-exchange, and then sell the dollars on an exchange with fiat currency.

Not sure where you got that from, but that's not true whatsoever; USDT/USD is a thing in a bunch of exchanges with really healthy volume. Other than a few months ago (perhaps the run you mentioned in May) there's normally no premium and the peg is down or up by perhaps 0.5% or so.

Maybe you are saying that because Binance, the largest exchange doesn't have a USDT/USD pair (they don't have any USD pair afaik), but you can easily withdraw USDT and sell them for USD directly in other exchanges.

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

#284

Post by arcticbull »

lawn wrote: post #277
arcticbull wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a real problem that Bitcoin solves. A single transaction costs multiple weeks wages in one of these less-functional countries (and wastes as much power as it takes to run an average American home for 20 days). They have social problems that need social solutions, not magic beans that live in their computers.

Maybe not Bitcoin, but there are other cryptocurrencies that actually prioritize low transaction fees. For example the next block fees on Bitcoin Cash is currently $0.0014.[0] [0]: https://bitcoinfees.cash/

Ah yes classic crypto enthusiast banter: my coin de jour is better than the others for some reason even though it’s basically identical.

It’s down 93% in value in the last two years so it has held its value worse than the Turkish lira and only slightly better than the bolivar and the egg salad sandwich I left on the windowsill back in the summer of 2017. Its transaction fees are only low because nobody’s using it. Supply constraints in transaction count were just kicked down the road, there’s no way on earth it would ever be able to match visas current transaction throughput of 50,000tx/sec.

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

#285

Post by nostrademons »

heelhook wrote: post #283
nostrademons wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's looked like a Madoff-scale Ponzi scam for a long time. Even in 2017, when the world was gaga over cryptocurrencies, people were saying that the Tether stuff is super sketchy. There was a near-run on Tether this May, though, and ironically that's what pumped Bitcoin from $5300 to $8000. When folks want to dump Tether, they generally cannot dump it directly into dollars. They have to dump to Bitcoin, move it off-e…

> When folks want to dump Tether, they generally cannot dump it directly into dollars. They have to dump to Bitcoin, move it off-exchange, and then sell the dollars on an exchange with fiat currency. Not sure where you got that from, but that's not true whatsoever; USDT/USD is a thing in a bunch of exchanges with really healthy volume. Other than a few months ago (perhaps the run you mentioned in May) there's normall…

It's a thing on Kraken and Bittrex, with about $2M in daily volume on Kraken and $290K on Bittrex. That's a lot of trading days to absorb the $4.1B market cap of Tether or even the $800M that are reportedly unbacked.

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

#287

Post by ur-whale »

Animats wrote: post #193
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…

Tether is starting to look like a Madoff-scale Ponzi scam. What maintains the $1 price of Tether is a continual net inflow of cash. Tether is known not to be backed with sufficient real assets.[1] If there's a period of net outflow from Tether, the whole house of cards comes crashing down. [1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/tether-reverses-claim-of-1...

> Tether is known not to be backed with sufficient real assets.

You just gave a definition of fractional reserve banking.

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

#288

Post by lawn »

arcticbull wrote: post #284
lawn wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe not Bitcoin, but there are other cryptocurrencies that actually prioritize low transaction fees. For example the next block fees on Bitcoin Cash is currently $0.0014.[0] [0]: https://bitcoinfees.cash/

Ah yes classic crypto enthusiast banter: my coin de jour is better than the others for some reason even though it’s basically identical. It’s down 93% in value in the last two years so it has held its value worse than the Turkish lira and only slightly better than the bolivar and the egg salad sandwich I left on the windowsill back in the summer of 2017. Its transaction fees are only low because nobody’s using it. Su…

Ah yes classic anti-crypto argument: pure dismissal.

It could easily process 20-30x more transactions than Bitcoin do, with the exact same fees. So the "only cheaper because it's not used" is just wrong.

So a cryptocurrency can only be useful if it matches the throughout of VISA? Sounds like a lazy way to dismiss it. I would for example consider it great if we could match PayPal for example.

Which in numbers would be blocks of around 100MB for PayPal's average volume last time I checked. And Bitcoin Cash is around that with 32MB.

Of course there's still ways to go, with the main bottleneck being block propagation (so blocks don't split the network or cause too much centralization due to orphan rates). Of which there are improvements being worked on.

Funny how you cherry-pick the value drop from the top. There's no denying they're too volatile, but you should try to be more objective.

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

#289

Post by cdiddy2 »

tobltobs wrote: post #33
deweller wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makerdao DAI is decentralized and not backed by a company.

Again the question is "How tied?" I tried to get some info on their page and about the fifth sentence is: > In the unlikely case of a black swan event, the system will employ Emergency Shutdown, a last resort to guarantee the stable price. Hmm, I didn't wasted my time reading any further.

the MakerDAO system has two parts, the DAI token and the MKR token. The MKR token is the governance token the is used to vote on things like interest rates debt ceilings, and other decisions. As people take loans out by over supplying ETH and getting DAI, the interest paid on these loans is used to burn MKR, this provides the incentive to keep DAI stable so that MKR keeps getting burned. If the system collapses then MKR is printed to make up the difference and restore DAI to a dollar. This would be bad for the governance tokens since their stake of MKR would get diluted and the price would go down.

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

#290

Post by arcticbull »

lawn wrote: post #288
arcticbull wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes classic crypto enthusiast banter: my coin de jour is better than the others for some reason even though it’s basically identical. It’s down 93% in value in the last two years so it has held its value worse than the Turkish lira and only slightly better than the bolivar and the egg salad sandwich I left on the windowsill back in the summer of 2017. Its transaction fees are only low because nobody’s using it. Su…

Ah yes classic anti-crypto argument: pure dismissal. It could easily process 20-30x more transactions than Bitcoin do, with the exact same fees. So the "only cheaper because it's not used" is just wrong. So a cryptocurrency can only be useful if it matches the throughout of VISA? Sounds like a lazy way to dismiss it. I would for example consider it great if we could match PayPal for example. Which in numbers would be…

That’s one of a litany of arguments. From sheer waste to limited capacity to funding international terrorism to missing all the basic features of the modern financial system to being slow, anti-efficient and rife with manipulation. It’s beanie babies for nerds. It’s a nifty theoretical solution to a hard CS problem, that’s found zero real world use in the last 10 years that isn’t crime. It’s great for crime.

I’m not necessarily cherry picking it for the top to make it look dramatic but that’s when volume peaked so more people bought in at that point than any other in the history of the currency. It’s the number that’s relevant to the largest group of people.

I’m picking this because these things can’t be true for it to be a solution to the stated problem: helping the Venezuelans.

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