Is there a place one can play with HFT (or just automated trading) in the bitcoin market?
I'm the guy who bought 259684 Bitcoins for under $3000 yesterday
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Re: I'm the guy who bought 259684 Bitcoins for under $3000 yesterday
#12Re: I'm the guy who bought 259684 Bitcoins for under $3000 yesterday
#13Although I can completely understand why this guy (the sumbitter?) disagrees with MtGox's solution, I thought it seemed perfectly reasonable.
Even though MtGox never stated they'd interfere, being hacked is unexpected enough to allow some leeway with follow-up. If the flashcrash happened organically, I doubt MtGox would revert the trades.
Re: I'm the guy who bought 259684 Bitcoins for under $3000 yesterday
#14So, There's something like 21 million bitcoin possible, and 6 million 'in circulation' now. A sell order comes in for 1/12 of total amount of outstanding bitcoin. And the system processes it, flashcrashes, and. 3) Profit, I guess. or 4) rollback. That's something like what would happen if someone dumped 1 trillion USD onto a bond exchange. There are only a couple entities who could do this. So how did 1/12 of the val…
Almost feels like it's one of the MtGox accounts itself. Transaction-wise, it has been making easily 200-300 BTC a day. Perhaps also doing some personal buying and selling...
Re: I'm the guy who bought 259684 Bitcoins for under $3000 yesterday
#15[deleted]
And then Authority came and forced him to give it all back...
Re: I'm the guy who bought 259684 Bitcoins for under $3000 yesterday
#16This reminds me of a conversation I was having with a friend a couple of days ago about network affects. Once a system gets too big, the nice people that started it start getting screwed by the people who don't understand (or care about) the founding ideals.
The problem with a trading house like Mt. Gox is that some people assume that all of the players are altruistic (these "some people" being "me", somebody with a technical, non-financial interest in bitcoin).
What happened here is just natural selfishness: the person that executed this buy order knew that the market was crashing, and that something was going wrong, but decided to exploit it regardless.
Then trying to withdraw $5 million USD from Mt. Gox?
I guess it's just crowd psychology. "If I don't exploit this market, somebody else will!"
It's sad, and it's just my naivety showing here, but bitcoin looks like a nerdy sandbox from the outside (casually reading about it on HN); it's a place for crypto/economics geeks to play around with finance.
Of course it isn't, and the actions of this [very greedy] person demonstrate that.
So why do I want to use bitcoin? What advantages does it offer me over USD right now? Before seeing this crash for the last couple of days, it felt like the advantage was that bitcoin users were mostly geeks, and mostly trustworthy. The regulation that bitcoin is avoiding is starting to look pretty darn appealing.
How stupid/childish of me is it to daydream about a world where somebody saw this crash happening, did exactly what he did (or maybe put in the buy order at exactly $0.02), held the bitcoins until the crash ended, then just gave them back to the sellers at cost?
Re: I'm the guy who bought 259684 Bitcoins for under $3000 yesterday
#17Re: I'm the guy who bought 259684 Bitcoins for under $3000 yesterday
#18"If I had to store that much there, even temporarily, I would use a password so long it would make War and Peace look like a Twitter message." - Brilliant
So brilliant, I tweeted it :)
Re: I'm the guy who bought 259684 Bitcoins for under $3000 yesterday
#19"If I had to store that much there, even temporarily, I would use a password so long it would make War and Peace look like a Twitter message." - Brilliant
Wouldn't it likely have a hash collision with a much shorter password though?
Re: I'm the guy who bought 259684 Bitcoins for under $3000 yesterday
#20Didn't MtGox say they'll rollback all transactions from that time period, including the legit ones?
Yes. He's complaining about that decision.