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An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

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Re: An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

#131

Post by mwattsun »

wonderwonder wrote: post #99
mwattsun wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He knows more than I do, is surrounded by people smarter than I am and has a track record of success and overcoming failures. If I thought I shouldn't listen to Elon Musk because I thought I knew better, then I think my chances of understanding anything about this would be greatly diminished.

This is a terrible way to go through life. Just because someone is successful at X does not mean they are in any way knowledgeable in Y. Want to know about something, just read about it yourself or seek the opinion of someone that actually works in the field, don't blindly take the word of someone that is not even from the field in question. Doge is a joke crypto currency, and I don't mean that as an insult I mean it…

You are misunderstanding me

> don't blindly take the word

What makes you think I am? Elon's opinion is a data point

> he does not want to admit to being out of his league

You don't know this

> Don't get trapped in cults of personality

I've made many criticisms of Musk, especially his pronouncements about self-driving cars

I think you're mistaking me for a fanboi. I'm just gathering information. I do follow Vitalik Buterin, but there are plenty of criticisms of his tech too.

"The Ethereum virtual machine has the equivalent computational power of an Atari 2600 from the 1970s except it runs on casino chips that cost $500"

Steven Diehl - Web3 is Bullshit

Thanks for the links. I'll add them to my list. I just really got serious about this subject so I started compiling a list of skeptics and enthusiasts who write about it often so I can follow along. Here they are in case you can use them.

Skeptics

SwiftOnSecurity https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity

Nicholas Weaver https://twitter.com/ncweaver

Molly White https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF

Dare Obasanjo https://twitter.com/Carnage4Life

Stephen Diehl https://twitter.com/smdiehl

Enthusiasts

Ser Jeff Garzik https://twitter.com/jgarzik

Marc Andreessen https://twitter.com/pmarca

Bram Cohen https://twitter.com/bramcohen

jack(@jack) https://twitter.com/jack

suzuha https://twitter.com/dystopiabreaker

cdixon.eth https://twitter.com/cdixon

Re: An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

#132

Post by benreesman »

guiomie wrote: post #128
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.

Oh I’m not opining on this or that coin being tulips. A lot of it is by volume.

Re: An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

#133

Post by shawabawa3 »

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…

> but there is no revenue for a digital currency

Isn't there? Ethereum kind of has revenue in that transaction fees for smart contract execution are burned (effectively a stock buyback)

It has around ~$19B in revenue extrapolated at the current rate (although it's issuing more than $20B a year for now, planning to reduce issuance some time later this year)

Re: An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

#134

Post by dmw_ng »

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?

Looming rate hikes combined with ever increasing correlation of Bitcoin to equities suggests you may even get your day this year.

Re: An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

#135

Post by mwattsun »

jcranmer wrote: post #43
mcbishop wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon Musk in the exchange above: > I think I have a pretty deep understanding of what money actually is on a practical day-to-day basis, because of PayPal. His comments in the exchange seem insightful to me. I assume you didn't bother reading them.

I read them. "Insightful" is not the word I would use. For example, one of the points is that the current financial system is problematic because it runs on COBOL. There's no actual criticism as to why running on COBOL is bad, other than the indirect insinuation that COBOL is old , not modern, and therefore it sucks. Basically, it's futurism for the sake of futurism--new is inherently better than old, and anything th…

> problematic because it runs on COBOL

I assumed this was his way of saying the system is antiquated and encompasses your other criticisms, because the show is already long enough for him to spend more time on it

Re: An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

#136

Post by ckastner »

wpietri wrote: post #121
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.

> People who haven't worked in financial markets have a hard time appreciating how deep the muck can get.

That's the main reason why I find the battle cry of "decentralization" so comically ironic. No government can control crypto, how awesome and empowering!

When the truth is that the vast amount of control that we've seen develop in the past century (and especially in the past two decades) were just to protect people from said muck.

[Edit] Or, as a practical comparison, think of the act of raising money from investors.

Centralized: Please file a detailed report with the relevant authority in which you list, among other things, all possible risks and challenges that you foresee and how this could harm investors.

Decentralized: LOL YOU APES, DIAMOND HANDS TO THE MOON!

Re: An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

#137

Post by cillian64 »

dheera wrote: post #108
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…

> US equities have intrinsic value Really? My impression is that many US equities in 2022 are more like Reddit up/downvote scores than a reflection of intrinsic value. Which isn't a bad thing in my opinion, by the way.

I think of it like this. If you suddenly owned 100% of Bitcoin, then you wouldn’t actually have anything valuable - nobody would buy it off you. If you suddenly owned 100% of Tesla then you’d be able to extract a lot of value.

Re: An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

#138

Post by stepanhruda »

VHRanger wrote: post #125
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…

Market makers don’t print riskless money, they are affected by a very real risk of divergence loss.

Re: An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

#139

Post by 10x-dev »

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…

How is digital currency, in general, anonymous? Bitcoin records all of your transactions, publicly, essentially forever.

If at any point in time there is a way to tie your identity to _any_ of the transactions made in your lifetime, then all of your other transactions get deanonymized retroactively. Maybe you made a mistake, maybe a bug is introduced into the Bitcoin software, maybe the government passes a new law, etc.

Cash doesn't have this issue. The bills I'm paying with when buying coffee at Starbucks, don't give you visibility into all of the purchases I've made with cash for the past 20 years.

The only exception would be crypto like Monero, but it's not the rule. Bitcoin is the flagship coin which somehow got people to think it's anonymous.

All it takes is for the government to require you to use the same wallet that's tied to your identity and then every citizen's transaction, past or future, is traceable to a degree that is just not possible with cash. That's a dangerous capability and we, the people, should make sure not to slowly end up in such a situation.

Re: An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

#140

Post by notch656a »

dmw_ng wrote: post #134
SavantIdiot wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Looming rate hikes combined with ever increasing correlation of Bitcoin to equities suggests you may even get your day this year.

It's sad to see people genuinely wanting to watch others lose wealth so they can relish in it.
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