Someone supposedly sold $10+ million worth of bitcoins.
http://blockchain.info/address/1HQ3Go3ggs8pFnXuHVHRytPCq5fGG...
Bitcoin falls from $266
121–130 of 505 posts
Re: Bitcoin falls from $266
#122Before crying wolf, understand that bitcoin exchanges are unfortunately not battle hardened internet businesses. Two of the largest exchanges MtGox and bitstamp are both under DDOS. This may be an attempt by someone to make a large buy at a cheaper price. Due to lack of trading, prices are going downward. However, BTC China is still trading at above $275! That's the beauty of bitcoin, it isn't restricted to just one…
Is it possible to buy from MtGox at $200 and sell in BTC China shortly thereafter at $275? I know nothing about BTC.
Keep in mind you're playing 'musical chairs' here. If you do this with money you need and the music stops you might possibly be in deep trouble. Only do this with money that you don't actually need, and only do it if you understand all the risks that come with playing arbitrage over exchanges with flaky connectivity. If your initial trade goes through but your offload does not you have a problem.
Re: Bitcoin falls from $266
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is someone in Cyprus going to buy bitcoins? If the exchange is out of the country, then it doesn't help, because you already have to move the money out of the country to get it to the exchange. If the exchange is within the country, then the rate offered is likely to be far less favorable than elsewhere in the world, because demand is higher.
If the exchange allows international traders then the price will equalise with the rest of the world due to arbitrage.
Arbitrage here implies the ability to move money in or out of the country using ways other than bitcoin.
Re: Bitcoin falls from $266
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like this prettier and easier to read interface: http://realtimebitcoin.info/ I've been watching it drop from $200 to $157 over the last hour or so.
What do the numbers in the background mean? I've seen everything from $0.01 to $8000+ in about 30 seconds. EDIT: Realtime transactions? Impressive range if they are.
Yeah the biggest I've seen so far was $94,000.00 It doesn't specify whether that was a sell or a buy though. Either way someone made or lost a lot of money.
Re: Bitcoin falls from $266
#125Not that I'd wish monetary loss on anyone, but if the first Bitcoin crash is any indication, these things tend to have a positive side-benefit of driving out most of the speculators flooding in after all the news reports that fuel these cycles, and the people actually interested in the currency itself stay behind, with an influx of new folk.
After all the noise dies down, new businesses and services get built backed by the wider audience, and the ecosystem develops further.
It's not yet clear if this is a crash similar to the previous one, but if it comes, I don't think much will change in terms of Bitcoin's future for the next few years.
(Posted this in the other thread just before it got ethered)
Re: Bitcoin falls from $266
#126Don't worry! It won't ever fall below its intrinsic value!
In some ways the price is tied to the cost of electricity needed to mine a coin. Granted, the mining "price" is usually about two weeks behind the actual price, and the electricity required is variable based on the current sum of computational power being used by all the miners, so there's certainly some disconnect.
Re: Bitcoin falls from $266
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
That still does not verify beyond a reasonable doubt that there was a widespread DDoS on "pretty much anything bitcoin related". Can you please explain why such attackers would bother spreading their DDoS volume across such a wide range of sites instead of focusing it on the one site that handles 80% of btc usd conversions?
What exactly causes reasonable doubt here ? If 80% of bitcoin sites unrelated to each other are down at once, there's obviously some sort of attack going on. Several unrelated sites (but sharing a common theme) don't normally go down ... unless there's an Amazon outage :P (which there wasn't..). The question was, whether the DDOS was caused by a large volume of trades. The answer is, no, because there wasn't a larger…
There's actually a huge volume of trades during the dips, at least according to bitcoinity.
I still don't understand why they would bother spreading their attack volume across multiple sites. Hitting Mt.Gox with everything they've got offers two potential strategies:
- trigger a crash, buy low, stop the attack and watch it go back up
- trigger a price drop and profit massively from arbitrage with other exchanges still trading higher(BTC China for example)
Re: Bitcoin falls from $266
#128Before crying wolf, understand that bitcoin exchanges are unfortunately not battle hardened internet businesses. Two of the largest exchanges MtGox and bitstamp are both under DDOS. This may be an attempt by someone to make a large buy at a cheaper price. Due to lack of trading, prices are going downward. However, BTC China is still trading at above $275! That's the beauty of bitcoin, it isn't restricted to just one…
> However, BTC China is still trading at above $275
Spreads for fungible commodities are generally not good. They mean that either a) somebody is getting massively screwed by paying a price that's way off the mark, or b) nobody's actually trading, which means the asset is illiquid. That is, unless there is some real reason why a BTC should be worth double in China what it is in the US.
Re: Bitcoin falls from $266
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Serious question: Is that really a fair criticism of BTC? Because afterall, our beloved US currency is fiat based, and often subject to whims of geopolitical games.
US currency isn't backed by gold- it is in a sense backed by the US government. BTC is wholly unbacked.
US currency is backed by the land the US is built on and the means to defend that land, as well as the ability of US citizens to expend their time in a productive way.
And to some extent it is currently based on the ability of the United States to protect its interests overseas, the trading of oil in the US dollar and significant trade partners accepting the US dollar as a means of exchange for goods shipped to the US.
And that works as long as significant portion of the world continues to believe in all of the above, if that should ever stop I hope I won't be there to watch the carnage. That's the kind of 'interesting times' that one would hope to avoid.
Re: Bitcoin falls from $266
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. I'm going to start flagging them. Due to their volume they've become spam.
Don't forget that people upvote them. There are many people who find them interesting and don't think that they're spam, including me.
A friend of mine told me "dude, the price is falling". So where do I go to check what's up? HN, of course!