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Bitcoin Futures Start with a Bang as Rally Trips Circuit Breaker

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Re: Bitcoin Futures Start with a Bang as Rally Trips Circuit Breaker

#111
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bitcoin exchanges have plenty of liquidity, and executions happen in less than one second. The real risk for arbitrage is with the crypto exchange itself: these can go bust, or disappear overnight. You wanna keep $1M sitting on one of these exchanges?

Mmmh, why do you need your coins sitting on one exchange? Can't you just take them out once your transaction is done?

Sure, but you still need to put funds into the exchange to buy the coin in the first place. And likely you would leave the coins there in case the trade goes the otherway. Managing that many coins in your own wallet is a whole other headache. But I guess your point is to not leave much on the exchange at any one time.

Re: Bitcoin Futures Start with a Bang as Rally Trips Circuit Breaker

#112

I am trying to understand risks with arbitrage for professional traders with BTC spot (at Coinbase gdax) and CBOE Futures contract. Let us say, some professional trader "Short sell CBOE Future contract & Buy BTC Spot at Coinbase simultaneously" At the time of this writing, Futures contract short sell @ $18700 and BTC Spot buy @ $16700 simultaneously. http://cfe.cboe.com/cfe-products/xbt-cboe-bitcoin-futures you wait…

CBOE settles to Gemini's spot price, not GDAX. The prices between exchanges differ dramatically currently.

Re: Bitcoin Futures Start with a Bang as Rally Trips Circuit Breaker

#113
post #41

Buy Ethereum

The Ethereum network is imploding under its own weight. Running an ethereum node has become quite expensive and requires very state of the art hardware just to keep up. There’s a reason bitcoin chose the constants it did.

Re: Bitcoin Futures Start with a Bang as Rally Trips Circuit Breaker

#114
post #67
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This cannot happen. Bitcoin difficulty adjusts to match current mining power so it can't get out of control like that.

So why does it take so long to make a transaction these days? Is the difficulty scaling outpacing the actual network?

Purely because there are more people wanting to make transactions. The speed of the network is always ~10 minutes per block.

Re: Bitcoin Futures Start with a Bang as Rally Trips Circuit Breaker

#115
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which are the most interesting ones?

There is no such thing as "most interesting", it depends on what you look for (technical quality, investment, compatibility, etc), what you need (bleeding edge, stability, doc, popularity...). Plus it's hard to assess innovation, some coins may very well be genius and we are not visionary enough to know. Some characteristics to look for: - ASIC resistance. Some currencies make sure you can't just throw money at GPU a…

> ASIC resistance ... make sure you can't just throw money at GPU and become the king of the hill; CPU friendly

first of all, asics are specially designed hardware, not gpus

second, switching to actual gpu- or cpu- friendly algorithm comes with it's own drawbacks - anybody controlling large enough botnet can perpetrate 51% attack against you

Re: Bitcoin Futures Start with a Bang as Rally Trips Circuit Breaker

#116
post #80

I am trying to understand risks with arbitrage for professional traders with BTC spot (at Coinbase gdax) and CBOE Futures contract. Let us say, some professional trader "Short sell CBOE Future contract & Buy BTC Spot at Coinbase simultaneously" At the time of this writing, Futures contract short sell @ $18700 and BTC Spot buy @ $16700 simultaneously. http://cfe.cboe.com/cfe-products/xbt-cboe-bitcoin-futures you wait…

As others pointed out, when you buy/sell futures, you risk counterparty risk. But it's not that bad because that exchange is really good and people entering the market pay margin calls every day. There is also a financing cost (ie. the cash you use to pay for your margins, transaction costs, and to buy the bitcoins will not pay you any interests over the time of the position). But again, the effect is not very large.…

CBOE BTC futures are cash-settled

Re: Bitcoin Futures Start with a Bang as Rally Trips Circuit Breaker

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I understand it the transaction throughput is limited by the block size. The difficulty adjusts so the rate at which blocks can be mined remains roughly constant, but each block is size limited so it can only contain so many transactions.

The purpose of this restriction is to protect the decentralization of bitcoin nodes. It is this decentralization of nodes that separates bitcoin from every other crypto competitor, and by some margin.

I'm not really sure how a small block size prevents centralisation?

Re: Bitcoin Futures Start with a Bang as Rally Trips Circuit Breaker

#118
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bitcoin exchanges have plenty of liquidity, and executions happen in less than one second. The real risk for arbitrage is with the crypto exchange itself: these can go bust, or disappear overnight. You wanna keep $1M sitting on one of these exchanges?

Mmmh, why do you need your coins sitting on one exchange? Can't you just take them out once your transaction is done?

From my experience, the way you find out there's an issue with the exchange is when you see people posting on /r/bitcoin about having waited weeks for their withdrawal to be processed. Meanwhile the exchange continues to accept deposits.

Re: Bitcoin Futures Start with a Bang as Rally Trips Circuit Breaker

#120
post #87

The concept of layering futures on top of BTC is equal parts crazy and promising on the entertainment front. All we need now is someone adding leverage and hilarity shall most certainly ensue

You can already trade cryptocurrencies with leverage on many major crypto exchanges.
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