An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation • Hacker News Board

Re: An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

#301

Post by choppaface » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 9:27 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…

> US equities have intrinsic value unlike this BTC garbage!

One major difference is the US Gov & public (e.g. pension funds) have much more leverage for holding US equities liable vs holding crypto liable in a Financial-Crisis-type leverage implosion. While I agree with the suggested notion of "common stocks have no real intrinsic value," when it boils down to opportunity cost, the retail shareholder has probably one to two orders of magnitude less downside in common stocks versus crypto. Unless the U.S. ends up bailing out crypto ... (in exchange for catching tax evasion?)

Re: An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

#302

Post by errantmind » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 9:31 PM UTC

somewhereoutth wrote: post #297

errantmind wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that logic, any marketplace is a pyramid scheme because later entrants always pay earlier entrants. A pyramid scheme has a very particular definition, please look it up.

Sorry, I meant ponzai scheme. Marketplaces are where things with inherent value are exchanged. Crypto has zero inherent value - it serves only as a record of previous players in the scheme.

Gatekeeping 'value' yields no insights. Value is whatever people think it is and doesn't require any physical connection to reality, nor any rational mechanism.

Re: An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

#303

Post by kkjjkgjjgg » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 9:36 PM UTC

ckastner wrote: post #155

benreesman wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a lot more faith in the IPO underwriting process than I do. They don’t call it a “pop” for nothing.

Not at all. I'm just saying that the other process is much, much worse than that.

It's a fundamental question wether people should be allowed to take on risks or not.

If you are leaning towards the "no they should not" side, then consider that doing a startup is also very risky. So maybe that should be illegal, too? Or at least, there should be government startup specialists that evaluate ideas and decide wether people should be allowed to create such startups?

Or should there be an elite of people who would be allowed to create startups, and the poor people (can't afford the risk) should be restricted to union jobs?

Re: An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

#304

Post by preseinger » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 9:37 PM UTC

notch656a wrote: post #266

preseinger wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Fed has a mandate to act in the broad interest of society. It doesn't manipulate currency by any non-conspiratorial definition of manipulate, no.

Ah I see, it's not manipulation because you perceive the fed as acting virtuously. That's actually not the mandate of the fed. The mandate is: The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Federal Open Market Committee shall maintain long run growth of the monetary and credit aggregates commensurate with the economy's long run potential to increase production, so as to promote effectively the goals of…

I, an anonymous actor beholden to no authority nor regulation, can manipulate Bitcoin _directly_ with sufficient capital and a sufficiently intelligent bit of code. It's fun and intellectually pointed to say this is just a _version_ of the kind of "manipulation" performed by the Fed against the dollar but it's transparently and categorically a different thing. It's an obviously specious argument and it diminishes whomever makes it.

Re: An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

#305

Post by Daishiman » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 9:38 PM UTC

felipeko wrote: post #288

squeaky-clean wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want a currency with a bull case. That means it discourages spending it in favor of holding it. I want a currency with an extremely slow bear case. Also my value of USD hasn't dropped 30% in the last month.

It is a good thing to be encouraged to saving instead of spending. No one needs incentive to spend. You will spend if you have plenty to spend. Having a currency which gains in value will take you there.

There is no modern economic argument to favor saving over spending. What you're saying runs counter to pretty much all economic theory from any ideological camp you could think of.

Re: An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

#306

Post by Sanzig » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 9:39 PM UTC

iso1631 wrote: post #127

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?

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

And if he'd bought last March he'd be down 30%. Bitcoin didn't have a stellar 2021.

Re: An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

#307

Post by stickfigure » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 9:40 PM UTC

10x-dev wrote: post #139

alecst wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, e…

The relationship between Bitcoin and Monero is symbiotic. Bitcoin brings legitimacy and (for crypto) security. Hedge funds, corporations, and other big money can hold bitcoin. Yet it's easy enough to convert between BTC and XMR, so they are effectively fungible.

Re: An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

#308

Post by beloch » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 9:42 PM UTC

ckastner wrote: post #136

wpietri wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 peop…

When half of the people responsible for regulating markets are, instead, using insider knowledge to make a killing at day-trading, it's hard to trust the system.

So, the natural response is to build a new system that can be made to dance on strings by people you don't even know the identities of.

It doesn't exactly seem like progress, does it?

Re: An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

#309

Post by majormajor » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 9:42 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…

> What’s a share of SNAP entitle you to exactly? Ah right, you think someone will buy it for more.

Ultimately you think someone will pay more for a future share of SNAP than of [OTHER THING] because you think SNAP's growth story is better, business model is promising, blah blah blah.

We may be trading on the derivatives of the fundamentals, or even the hope of future fundamentals, but even that's turning back some as it's been harder to get a big huge IPO purely on hope than it was in the recent history. Throw WeWork in against Snap there, even. Gambling but against numbers that will eventually be reconciled with performance with customers, not just other gamblers. Though personally I'm certainly hoping that some of that "eventually" starts to turn back into a backlash against dual-class stocks.

The equities market is still ultimately betting that at some point, the business results will keep the stock comparatively more attractive.

There's vague talk about "the backbone of future banking systems" or such for crypto as having similar fundamental value, but I haven't been convinced. Particularly, I'm not convinced today's big chains would be what the future would be built on - why pay the huge transaction costs and help the current crypto-rich get richer, instead of making purpose-built chains for your future applications?

Re: An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

#310

Post by hoffs » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 9:45 PM UTC

paulgb wrote: post #300

Animats wrote: post #220

There's a hype cycle right now with the claim that Walmart is going to issue NFTs, or get into cryptocurrencies, or something.[1] Walmart is not saying that. They filed for a trademark for "WALMART" for the trademark class that includes cryptocurrencies. Which means only that WalMart, Inc. spent $400 to protect their brand name from someone creating "WalMartCoin". WalMart, asked for a statement, said they had no imme…

Reminds me of the whole market-moving news cycle about Amazon accepting cryptocurrency “by the end of the year” last year. Tons of coverage, like this[1]. It never passed the smell test, all traced back to one anonymous City A.M. source, and of course it didn't happen. [1] https://gizmodo.com/amazon-to-accept-bitcoin-by-end-of-2021-...

The article that this post is about talks literally about Amazon event...