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Researchers find that one person likely drove Bitcoin from $150 to $1,000

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Re: Researchers find that one person likely drove Bitcoin from $150 to $1,000

#111

Post by dragonwriter »

michaelchisari wrote: post #109
ouwen wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a bit nerve racking seeing the distribution of coins to such few addresses: https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses.... I wonder if there is any collusion among the top 2000 addresses. Mind you one person can even have multiple addresses.

What's interesting is the rhetoric around cryptos as a populist movement. There's so many people on reddit that claim that trading cryptos is how they're going to get out of the 9-5 working man grind. That it's a way to end the dominance of the wealthy banking elites. And yet, the wealth inequality in cryptos, especially bitcoin, makes our current economic situation seem like child's play. If bitcoin ever does go "to…

> . There's so many people on reddit that claim that trading cryptos is how they're going to get out of the 9-5 working man grind. That it's a way to end the dominance of the wealthy banking elites.

It's a common way of selling get rich quick scams; having a handful of people who have gotten rich quick provides a veneer of plausibility. (Including, but not limited to, Ponzi schemes.)

Re: Researchers find that one person likely drove Bitcoin from $150 to $1,000

#112

Post by losteric »

g09980 wrote: post #90
bduerst wrote: post #83

The number of seemingly throwaway accounts (created in the last few days) commenting on this thread is interesting too: - https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=astund - https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=simplemath__ - https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=zhjansbnas - https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=barbegal

Just people are very cautious online with signaling that they have any crypto.

That feels unlikely to me. Why would there be so many people who 1.) have enough crypto to be worried, and 2.) want to talk about crypto but didn't create a separate account prior to this negative article?

Re: Researchers find that one person likely drove Bitcoin from $150 to $1,000

#113

Post by FabHK »

Fnoord wrote: post #100
FabHK wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Err, are you asking whether the internet was useful during/prior (and despite) the dot.com bubble? The answer is, yes, it was hugely useful. Initially for information (e-mail, ftp, finger, usenet, gopher, WWW), later for commerce. It was far more useful, and far more frequently used, even years before the dot.com bubble, than cryptocurrencies are now. If you took away cryptocurrencies right now, impact on me and almo…

> Err, are you asking whether the internet was useful during/prior (and despite) the dot.com bubble? Look, I was there from the mid 90s. I'm curious about the various viewpoints, as well as a more objective, less biased summary which attempts to ignore the nostalgia factor. > Initially for information (e-mail, ftp, finger, usenet, gopher, WWW), later for commerce. Thanks, OK, those are examples I can work with. E-mai…

Ah, my understanding was that OP was comparing utility of the internet then (at the time of the bubble) with crypto currencies now (at the time of the bubble, arguably).

Re: Researchers find that one person likely drove Bitcoin from $150 to $1,000

#114

Post by hinkley »

hinkley wrote: post #108
qubex wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s comfortingly close to fractional reserve banking (which unfashionably I’m a big fan of).

Fractional reserve guarantees that the max multiplier between money in motion and money at rest is never more than 10x. If I’m supreme ruler of the world and I replace all currency with Hinkley Bucks, 100 of them in total, and I put them in the bank, they loan 90 to a guy who builds a house. The builder and all their suppliers and employees put that 90 in the bank, and the bank loans 81 to a guy starting a grocery st…

Continuing on:

If you have no reserve, then the only limits are how many people want 100 bucks (so upper bound $700B) and how fast can you file the paperwork to make it happen. What’s the friction in the system.

My fear is that their 1/1800 is that friction, and not a safety feature at all.

Re: Researchers find that one person likely drove Bitcoin from $150 to $1,000

#115

Post by fpgaminer »

arcticbull wrote: post #44
agumonkey wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any recent manipulations ? especially in 2017 end ?

Most recently, there's the tape-painting bot Picasso: https://medium.com/@bitfinexed/meet-picasso-the-painter-on-g... If you were paying attention in the week that followed this post, the spread between GDAX and the other major US exchanges narrowed from $1000+ per coin to just about $11 right now, and trade volumes on GDAX plummeted. Maybe theres's some other reason, though there's some crazy correlation there at le…

Looks like that article was written on the 23rd of December.

That's the same time period around which Coinbase abruptly released Bcash. That time period was a barrage of negative kerfuffles for them.

Historically Coinbase/GDAX has enjoyed "inflated" BTC/USD prices because of their trustworthiness. Contrast with Bitfinex which does not serve US customers, has been hacked in the past, and is (last I heard) in debt from said hack. Or contrast with any of the other exchanges which are either questionable or located outside the U.S. Gemini is the only other state-side trustworthy exchange besides them.

(I say inflated, but it's probably more appropriate to say that the price is a discount on all other exchanges; a discount which accounts for the counterparty risk and difficulty moving USD in/out of them.)

The late December fiascos that Coinbase suffered has likely shaken that sense of trust, at least in the short-term, resulting in both reduced trading volume and reduced prices relative to other exchanges.

So the question is, which theory is more likely? That a single trading bot has complete control over Bitcoin's price and its discovery has resulted in the dismantlement of the program? Or that traders are reacting to the news of "insider trading" by Coinbase employee's? Or maybe it's as simple as being the end of December. The winter holidays slow down markets.

Re: Researchers find that one person likely drove Bitcoin from $150 to $1,000

#116

Post by runeks »

sklut wrote: post #36
gtcode wrote: post #4

Bitcoin topped out as soon as the futures went live. Massive contango on a regulated futures market may have been a factor in "reeling in" price. The spot market is so thin that it didn't seem to take much open interest in the futs to whip the underlying. It's conceivable that some spot exchanges are or were still from 2017 to now, either malicious and/or incompetent, which would facilitate the continuation of such b…

On contango: I would not call what the futures market is experiencing "massive" contango. There is a very slight premium to further dated futures ($35/btc Feb over Jan, and $5 Mar over Feb contracts on CME), but this is very normal for a commodity and logically in place for exchange/spot holding risk. I would call the average settlements over the past month of futures being listed very normal contango. And I don't th…

> You can get off what appears to be very large amounts of BTC with minimal slippage most times of the day.

I wrote a script[1] that pulls down the public order books for Bitstamp, GDAX and Bitfinex, because I was interested in seeing the depth of the BTCUSD market, and right now you can offload:

258, 301 and 325 BTC on GDAX, Bitfinex and Bitstamp, respectively (total: 884 BTC), at 1% slippage for 3,544,921, 4,152,783 and 4,452,134 USD, respectively (total: $12.1m).

[1] https://github.com/runeksvendsen/orderbook

Re: Researchers find that one person likely drove Bitcoin from $150 to $1,000

#117

Post by [deleted] »

hinkley wrote: post #114
hinkley wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fractional reserve guarantees that the max multiplier between money in motion and money at rest is never more than 10x. If I’m supreme ruler of the world and I replace all currency with Hinkley Bucks, 100 of them in total, and I put them in the bank, they loan 90 to a guy who builds a house. The builder and all their suppliers and employees put that 90 in the bank, and the bank loans 81 to a guy starting a grocery st…

Continuing on: If you have no reserve, then the only limits are how many people want 100 bucks (so upper bound $700B) and how fast can you file the paperwork to make it happen. What’s the friction in the system. My fear is that their 1/1800 is that friction, and not a safety feature at all.

[deleted]

Re: Researchers find that one person likely drove Bitcoin from $150 to $1,000

#118

Post by JumpCrisscross »

module0000 wrote: post #63
astund wrote: post #57

I suspect this is going on today. Cryptocurrency traders place a lot of faith in the exchanges. A bad actor at an exchange could manipulate a price upwards: - Create a ton of volume and potentially and upward trend (two bots trading with one another, increasing the price each time) - Generate hype around a coin - Let FOMO take over If things start to go south, disable withdrawals, deposits, or freeze the market until…

>> I doubt any of this manipulation is even illegal? That was my first thought also... in stock/futures trading world, this is 100% normal business as usual. The idea of buying all the available XYZ to run up prices is a valid move for a hedge fund with sufficient capital to do so.

> in stock/futures trading world, this is 100% normal business as usual

This is securities fraud. Some variant or combination of wash trading, pump and dump, order spoofing and wire fraud. It is not normal.

Re: Researchers find that one person likely drove Bitcoin from $150 to $1,000

#119

Post by [deleted] »

bduerst wrote: post #83

The number of seemingly throwaway accounts (created in the last few days) commenting on this thread is interesting too: - https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=astund - https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=simplemath__ - https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=zhjansbnas - https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=barbegal

[deleted]

Re: Researchers find that one person likely drove Bitcoin from $150 to $1,000

#120

Post by sluggg »

cantrip wrote: post #106
CameronBanga wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, if bludgeon you with a hammer is part of your threat model, I think there's still some concern that people will bludgeon until you agree to make a bank transfer.

Banks have transfer limits, so no you can't generally make a million dollar bank transfer.

sounds like crypto needs a bank lol
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