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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

#311

Post by pdovy »

Nrsolis wrote: post #298
pdovy wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure where you're coming from with #2. Most exchanges use price-time priority to determine execution order. From the description the best bid was $0.01, so obviously he would get filled first at $0.0101. The real problem is that the market was able to descend to that level to begin with. There should have been some sort of circuit breaker limits in the Mt. Gox system that would have halted such a massive decl…

What I meant in #2 was that there are market structure rules about things like minimum price improvement levels and how widely a buy or sell order is circulated before finding a cross. The HFT guys are masters at exploiting the market microstructure to extract alpha. Google SOES bandit if you need further examples. As for #3, naked access is a relatively new invention and the rules are sufficiently constructed to vir…

An order with 1/100th penny precision isn't usual for currencies, but I see your point. Either way, this was a very unusual situation. Why were there so many people sitting at $0.01? If you're going to play that game, why not jump on at $0.011 or $0.02? Hell, pretty much anything < $1.00 you could probably safely assume would give you a profit as long as you were willing to bet you weren't watching the demise of the BTC.

Re: I'm the guy who bought 259684 Bitcoins for under $3000 yesterday

#312

Post by wladimir »

joe_the_user wrote: post #309
vl wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no rule for rolling back transaction in real world too: once other party is gone with whatever was traded you have almost no way of "rolling back" this transaction. Real world brokers though have settlement period for releasing funds for exactly this reason - so the transaction could be rolled back if necessary.

There is no rule for rolling back transaction in real world too If you're real world is drug sales in a shady corner somewhere, that might be true. Elsewhere, we have this thing called the "legal system" which actually exists primarily to enforce something called a "contract", which is essentially a transaction.

And why would this "legal system" not apply to BTC transactions? It is the same as paying someone in cash. The kind of currency used for payments has nothing to do with whether to punish fraudsters and cheats or not.

Re: I'm the guy who bought 259684 Bitcoins for under $3000 yesterday

#313

Post by wladimir »

haakon wrote: post #221
romland wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or it could, again, be stupidity by MtGox: This was a "test account" that had no real user attached to it. After all, if the trade is internal on MtGox, it's just a double in a database. If that is the case, then hell yes, I can see why MtGox would want this rollback.

> After all, if the trade is internal on MtGox, it's just a double in a database. Dude, don't use double to represent money.

+1 -- I keep warning people about this, but them don't seem to get it through their thick skull :)

The bitcoin client and protocol itself doesn't use doubles internally, but fixed-point numbers. I don't know about MTGox, though.

Re: I'm the guy who bought 259684 Bitcoins for under $3000 yesterday

#314

Post by rmc »

dedward wrote: post #296
rmc wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MtGox has about 90% of the bitcoin change market.

I'm probably thinking of something different - but wasn't it clear in the bitcoin protocol itself that if a single actor controlled a majority percentage of the bitcoins out there, the model falls apart and is at risk?

Sorry, we have our wires crossed. You can still transfer bitcoins from one person to the other. An exchange is a website that allows you convert bitcoins in USD. MtGox controlled about 90% of the BTC↔USD conversions.

Re: I'm the guy who bought 259684 Bitcoins for under $3000 yesterday

#315

Post by tedunangst »

JeffL wrote: post #299
tedunangst wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doubles are capable of accurately and precisely representing 16 digit decimal numbers.

Not 10^100 + 0.0000000000000001

A 116 digit number is not a 16 digit number.

Re: I'm the guy who bought 259684 Bitcoins for under $3000 yesterday

#316

Post by joe_the_user »

wladimir wrote: post #312
joe_the_user wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no rule for rolling back transaction in real world too If you're real world is drug sales in a shady corner somewhere, that might be true. Elsewhere, we have this thing called the "legal system" which actually exists primarily to enforce something called a "contract", which is essentially a transaction.

And why would this "legal system" not apply to BTC transactions? It is the same as paying someone in cash. The kind of currency used for payments has nothing to do with whether to punish fraudsters and cheats or not.

You have a point ... except that if government was engaged in enforcing a roll-back on a bitcoin transactions, it would make the ordinary "enforcement" system which bitcoin uses rather obsolete.

... and getting everyone to agree to the rollback might be difficult.

... and considering you would be using the state's court system, the state feel like refusing to use their money wasn't very generous. IE, if the Feds could sink bitcoin transactions just by saying they wouldn't engage in any Fraud protection on them.

Re: I'm the guy who bought 259684 Bitcoins for under $3000 yesterday

#317

Post by wnight »

blhack wrote: post #302
wnight wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It sounded like he [...] contemplated hitting that $1000 limit a bunch of times. That's the thought, and you treat it like a crime. Hence, thought-crime.

How am I treating this like a crime? I'm saying that all of the players in bitcoin aren't altruistic. In case you missed the context here, my original argument was that my naivety caused me to assume that people playing with bitcoin were mostly just cryto geeks.

> Honestly, this whole forum post reeks of "I know I did something wrong, hopefully posting here will make the pit in my stomach go away."

This is what you said about him contemplating transferring more money out of mtgox. You're acting like he did something abhorrent, or should think he did.

> my naivety caused me to assume that people playing with bitcoin were mostly just cryto geeks.

They are. But you're trying to say "... and I'm surprised one of them would be thiefly, like this guy."

Really, all this shows is that he should have transferred all the bitcoins out immediately. Then mtgox would have to deal with him instead of just slandering him. Now that he's pointed everything out to them he's just a scapegoat.

Re: I'm the guy who bought 259684 Bitcoins for under $3000 yesterday

#318

Post by jimrandomh »

wiredfool wrote: post #3

So, 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…

> So how did 1/12 of the value in this ecosystem wind up in one account at Mt Gox?

The two leading theories are that it was the account that trading fees go into, or it was an account that didn't really have that many bitcoins, but had its balance altered by SQL injection.

Re: I'm the guy who bought 259684 Bitcoins for under $3000 yesterday

#319

Post by olefoo »

anamax wrote: post #191
olefoo wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There appears to be a real market demand for a currency that is not controlled by a national government, especially one that has the features of cash-like transactions. That bitcoin is lacking as an implementation is immaterial, people want it for whatever reason.

> There appears to be a real market demand for a currency that is not controlled by a national government, especially one that has the features of cash-like transactions. That bitcoin is lacking as an implementation is immaterial, people want it for whatever reason. "We must do something, {random} is something, therefore we must do {random}" is generally regarded as a fallacy.

I was noting the phenomenon, not advocating for or against.
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