An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation • Hacker News Board

Re: An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

#121

Post by wpietri » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 4:36 PM UTC

benreesman wrote: post #94

Eh 20-ish years ago the shit happening on Island and Archipelago would blow most people’s minds. Undocumented, conditional, non-displayed order types. Routine wash trading. Shear-but-don’t skin multi-venue arbitrage. The ECNs were the Wild West. Smoke-filled dark pools. Island and Arca are NASDAQ and NYSE now. But Ben, US equities have intrinsic value unlike this BTC garbage! Well unless they pay no dividend, have du…

I truly appreciate your experience and cynicism here. People who haven't worked in financial markets have a hard time appreciating how deep the muck can get. Which makes them especially valuable suckers for the unregulated markets.

Re: An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

#122

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 4:39 PM UTC

alecst wrote: post #113

benreesman wrote: post #94

Eh 20-ish years ago the shit happening on Island and Archipelago would blow most people’s minds. Undocumented, conditional, non-displayed order types. Routine wash trading. Shear-but-don’t skin multi-venue arbitrage. The ECNs were the Wild West. Smoke-filled dark pools. Island and Arca are NASDAQ and NYSE now. But Ben, US equities have intrinsic value unlike this BTC garbage! Well unless they pay no dividend, have du…

A counterpoint would be that what some call the intrinsic value is the expected future share price based on expected future revenues. There might or might not be future revenue for SNAP, but there is no revenue for a digital currency. But I do think digital currency has intrinsic value, in that for now, it affords you anonymity to commit crimes in a way that ordinary currency does not. I’m not happy about it, but thi…

[deleted]

Re: An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

#123

Post by SavantIdiot » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 4:45 PM UTC

benreesman wrote: post #94

Eh 20-ish years ago the shit happening on Island and Archipelago would blow most people’s minds. Undocumented, conditional, non-displayed order types. Routine wash trading. Shear-but-don’t skin multi-venue arbitrage. The ECNs were the Wild West. Smoke-filled dark pools. Island and Arca are NASDAQ and NYSE now. But Ben, US equities have intrinsic value unlike this BTC garbage! Well unless they pay no dividend, have du…

All I want to know is: will the annoying guy at my gym who put brags about putting all of his retirement into Bitcoin this summer provide me with some decent schadenfreude at some point?

Re: An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

#124

Post by giansegato » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 4:45 PM UTC

VHRanger wrote: post #35

giansegato wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they're based in Hong Kong so i'm not sure why US / EU regulation should apply

Actually, Alameda is based in the Cayman Islands as a legal entity

so it's a branch, uh. i'll never wrap my head around the complex corp structure of these crypto juggernauts

Re: An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

#125

Post by VHRanger » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 4:45 PM UTC

evrydayhustling wrote: post #101

This is some interesting analysis, but all of the causal language is unsupported -- and I think mostly inverted from the reality. Here is an equally supported description: - Retail and futures traders create instability by placing leveraged trades and stop orders that amplify swings. - Market makers are aware of instability and design their bots to turn off so that they don't end up on the wrong side of a liquidity c…

Author here.

I considered this, but rejected most of those hypotheses.

> Retail and futures traders create instability by placing leveraged trades and stop orders that amplify swings.

True

> Market makers are aware of instability and design their bots to turn off so that they don't end up on the wrong side of a liquidity cascade.

Algorithmic traders, yes. Market makers absolutely not. MMs want to be there as much as possible in liquidation cascades, because bid/ask spreads are huge. MMs effectly print riskless money in these situations (which is why you see Alameda and DRW issue so much USDT in these events).

> People with large orders often cancel them in order to improve their orders when chasing the price.

It's absurd to think this is the case when the order cancellation pattern is precise to ~3ms and repeated >5 times in a 30 second span. What you see on 26/7/2021 0:59:20-1:00:45 is intentionally done by bots designed to do this.

> But even that can be explained by desire for clicks as much as short term market shifts.

Agreed, there's a footnote that posits other actors than the momentum ignition traders could have planted the fake news because they saw the same opportunity

Re: An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

#126

Post by root_axis » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 4:49 PM UTC

mwattsun wrote: post #98

root_axis wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He has some amazing successes, but also has a terrible track record in terms of what he says vs what he actually delivers, he is more often way off the mark than he is accurate. https://www.elonmusk.today/

This is funny. He's a promoter and a salesman. I disagree with the tag line "Like Donald Trump, But For Nerds". Musk actually hires and surrounds himself with brilliant people, Trump not so much

Agreed on the Trump characterization.

Re: An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

#127

Post by iso1631 » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 4:51 PM UTC

SavantIdiot wrote: post #123

benreesman wrote: post #94

Eh 20-ish years ago the shit happening on Island and Archipelago would blow most people’s minds. Undocumented, conditional, non-displayed order types. Routine wash trading. Shear-but-don’t skin multi-venue arbitrage. The ECNs were the Wild West. Smoke-filled dark pools. Island and Arca are NASDAQ and NYSE now. But Ben, US equities have intrinsic value unlike this BTC garbage! Well unless they pay no dividend, have du…

All I want to know is: will the annoying guy at my gym who put brags about putting all of his retirement into Bitcoin this summer provide me with some decent schadenfreude at some point?

If he put it in in June when it was 31k, he'd have increased it 30% now, double if he sold in November. Not too bad

Re: An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

#128

Post by guiomie » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 4:53 PM UTC

benreesman wrote: post #94

Eh 20-ish years ago the shit happening on Island and Archipelago would blow most people’s minds. Undocumented, conditional, non-displayed order types. Routine wash trading. Shear-but-don’t skin multi-venue arbitrage. The ECNs were the Wild West. Smoke-filled dark pools. Island and Arca are NASDAQ and NYSE now. But Ben, US equities have intrinsic value unlike this BTC garbage! Well unless they pay no dividend, have du…

Tulip garbage? Tulip Mania lasted like 6 months, Bitcoin has been running for over 13 years. Don’t get me wrong tho, I do agree anything not being Bitcoin is garbage.

Re: An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

#129

Post by noneeeed » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 4:54 PM UTC

iechoz6H wrote: post #86

masona wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fine art market has been doing this for decades by using auction records to set prices.

I guess the main difference between the two markets is that with fine art the object is genuinely rare/unique.

While that's true, in many ways huge chunks of the fine art market exist purely as objects in warehouses, normally in freeports such as those in Switzerland, that are simply traded back and forth, often never seeing the light of day.

The art market is really weird in many ways. Both the Freakonomics podcast and Malcome Gladwell's Revisionist Histories have done episodes in the last year or so on the market.

Re: An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

#130

Post by benreesman » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 4:54 PM UTC

SavantIdiot wrote: post #123

benreesman wrote: post #94

Eh 20-ish years ago the shit happening on Island and Archipelago would blow most people’s minds. Undocumented, conditional, non-displayed order types. Routine wash trading. Shear-but-don’t skin multi-venue arbitrage. The ECNs were the Wild West. Smoke-filled dark pools. Island and Arca are NASDAQ and NYSE now. But Ben, US equities have intrinsic value unlike this BTC garbage! Well unless they pay no dividend, have du…

All I want to know is: will the annoying guy at my gym who put brags about putting all of his retirement into Bitcoin this summer provide me with some decent schadenfreude at some point?

If I knew that I’d be trading it :)

But there’s a fairly active BTC derivatives market (depending on what passport you carry), so you could hedge against him getting/staying rich by getting a little creative with long-dated DOOM stuff.

Depends on how annoying he is I guess ;)