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An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

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Re: An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

#231

Post by dheera »

foxhill wrote: post #195
benreesman wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll start the bidding at 1 USD to own all BTC. Anyone want to go higher?

hmm. it might be a bit more subtle than that - if you were to own all 21 million bitcoin (i.e, nothing can be mined or otherwise created), it’d pose an existential crisis for the currency. miners would have no reason to mine, transactions on the small scale couldn’t happen, etc. at the very least i expect other coins would pop up with a different genesis block. or maybe some form of hard fork (again, i might add). ow…

Well, no, it's actually pretty simple, you could sell half of it to jumpstart the ecosystem, and you still own half of it.

Re: An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

#232

Post by mbesto »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #96
SuoDuanDao wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's being manipulated in only one direction, does that count?

It does, I think, and you make a good point; there's big players who bet on it going down, there's big players that bet on it going up. In a perfect world, their intents would cancel each other out.

PS - I'm an investor in a fund that trades on it both going up and down (i.e. volatility).

Re: An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

#233

Post by wpietri »

freedomben wrote: post #216
wpietri wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two things can be true at the same time. Power systems do tend to work for the powerful. But that doesn't mean they can't also be valuable to everybody. Or even valuable to the average person much more than the powerful person. Look, for example, at food regulation. Anybody who has worked in a restaurant can tell you a) how important food safety is, and b) how much health department regulations contribute to keeping…

It seems pretty hard to me to look at charts of inflation, income inequality, and quantitative easing and compare them to stock market values and not see how the system is allowing the rich and powerful to use inflation to suck money away from everyone not heavily in the market (especially the poor as inflation is a highly regressive tax) and into their own pockets through increases in valuation. And then look at the…

> look at the barriers that regulation throws against the average person to keep them from the most lucrative investments (like required accreditation)

If anything, the accredited investor standard is proof that regulation doesn't favor the powerful. Taken as a whole, those aren't the most lucrative investments. They're the riskiest. The whole theory behind it is that if somebody is rich enough we won't try to protect them as much from scams; they're presumed to be sufficiently sophisticated and well resourced that it's their own problem.

I agree inflation is a problem, but you can't use that to prove much about the regulatory system, because a) inflation was low and stable for a long time, only increasing due to pandemic-driven disruptions, b) the wealthy are the ones yelling the loudest about pinching off inflation pronto, and c) the classic way to stop an inflationary surge is performative "austerity", which is much more disruptive to the poor than to the rich.

Re: An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

#234

Post by pierot »

Tenoke wrote: post #209
cillian64 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If I suddenly own 100% of Tesla the stock would crash. I'll extract some value but it would be a pittance.

Real estate, employee talent, brand value, business knowledge, .. You could do a whole lot with that.

Re: An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

#235

Post by dheera »

Tenoke wrote: post #224
jcranmer wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to ignore the fact that you would then have access to 100% of the revenue that Tesla makes by selling cars and other things. (This in turn sort of guarantees a price floor for stocks in public companies: the price of a stock shouldn't really go below the net asset value of the company.)

I really doubt Tesla would survive very long in that state. Stock will crash, public opinion will sour, employees will quit etc. very quickly.

Why would public opinion matter if your company wasn't public?

IMO it's a beautiful thing if your company can be aligned 100% with customers and not some random idiots that want participation in your company issues without even owning a Tesla let alone an EV. No earnings reports, no SEC wasting your time.

Only reason companies (unfortunately) need to go public is the need for upfront capital or early-stage capital that wants an exit.

Re: An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

#236

Post by huac »

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…

I agree with most of this and would add that the article could be organic and the subsequent trading opportunistic (rather than being tied together).

I am somewhat surprised that bots react to news within 5ms -- your execution delay on crypto exchanges is quite a bit longer than that, since the exchanges are generally hosted in public clouds and you are subject to network latency to get in there. Even within the same cloud and even within the same k8s cluster, you should expect 2-4ms for an inter-pod hop.

That being said, maybe there is a hedge fund literally in the same k8s cluster as FTX...

Re: An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

#237

Post by TrackerFF »

shawabawa3 wrote: post #225
TrackerFF wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's been painfully obvious from the start. It was the first thing I noticed, once looking into NFTs. I'd be surprised, AMAZED actually, if some of the big NFT collections aren't entrenched in wash trading, to pump up trade volume and price. In fact, I think that in order to successfully launch a NFT collection today, you need to have either: A) Substantial social capital. B) Capital to do the wash trading, or i…

I personally don't value nfts highly but I'm in a circle with lots of rich crypto early adopters - they absolutely would pay $100k for a bored ape and would consider it a bargain. It's a real status symbol, just in a niche you don't understand. I feel the same way about $100k Patel Phillipe watches but I don't hear everyone talking about how those are only wash trades The platforms where these nfts are sold usually c…

The main difference here is that those paying for a pointer to the bored ape, are paying just that. Nothing more. Anyone can copy that bored ape image, and use it as they want.

If you pay $100k for a Patek, that's your watch. It's a physical item - the only way someone's going to steal it, is by physically stealing it from you.

Of course, one can argue up and down whether or why a Patek is worth $100k. But IMO it's easier for the layman to argue its worth - it's an item which probably took 12 months to make, using the best materials, world-class craftmanship. The bored ape was generated in microseconds.

If I had $100k to spend on whatever, I wouldn't spend it on either of those. But if I was to guess what item will hold its value 5,10,15 years down the line...I'd go for the Patek, 100% of the time. The bored apes are digital beanie babies for rich people.

Re: An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

#238

Post by mwattsun »

keymone wrote: post #185
mwattsun wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In shudder to think of the stupid things I thought in 2008

guess what, satoshi made some prescient decisions designing bitcoin, with such level of complexity, that you in 2022 still don't understand them. to be fair, the (briefly) richest person in the world doesn't either.

I just started studying the topic. I also don't know how to do brain surgery, but I'm confident with enough schooling and study I could do it. With Bitcoin I don't need satoshi level understanding, I just need to know enough to either make a little money or avoid it altogether, kind of like I don't need to be a master chef to enjoy a great meal. I just need to know enough about cuisine and my likes to pick out a nice restaurant.

I don't know how much Elon understands it. That's what I am trying to determine. The feedback on HN is he doesn't. I'm checking that against other sources.

Re: An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

#239

Post by ptero »

mbesto wrote: post #177
ptero wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With this definition my guess is there is likely to be some manipulation. But as BTC is not regulated by the SEC I personally do not see a major problem with it, either. My guess is that most people that I know that buy BTC, either directly or via some holding schema, do it for the speculation and in this environment they should expect other players to use any method available to them which is not explicitly prohibit…

> My guess is that most people that I know that buy BTC, either directly or via some holding schema, do it for the speculation I think you're right. But then isn't it essentially just a digital form a gold bar with less utility?

I think the vast majority of the people buying gold bars (or their digital equivalents, like shares of physical gold holding funds) do this to hedge a variety of life risks and value a relatively low volatility.

Gold prices do fluctuate, but over the long term (decades and centuries) an ounce of gold generally held its inflation-adjusted value. I suspect buyers of gold would see a lot of problems with BTC price swings and risks that it would be outlawed or restricted in some unknown ways.

Re: An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

#240

Post by sorry_outta_gas »

freedomben wrote: post #216
wpietri wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two things can be true at the same time. Power systems do tend to work for the powerful. But that doesn't mean they can't also be valuable to everybody. Or even valuable to the average person much more than the powerful person. Look, for example, at food regulation. Anybody who has worked in a restaurant can tell you a) how important food safety is, and b) how much health department regulations contribute to keeping…

It seems pretty hard to me to look at charts of inflation, income inequality, and quantitative easing and compare them to stock market values and not see how the system is allowing the rich and powerful to use inflation to suck money away from everyone not heavily in the market (especially the poor as inflation is a highly regressive tax) and into their own pockets through increases in valuation. And then look at the…

> It seems pretty hard to me to look at charts of inflation, income inequality, and quantitative easing and compare them to stock market values

You should have seen what the altanartive charts looked like.

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