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Bitcoin Exchange Had Too Many Bitcoins

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Re: Bitcoin Exchange Had Too Many Bitcoins

#151

Post by icebraining »

slg wrote: post #132
goodplay wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>they're very valuable if and only if you cannot use the protection [..] I don't think that's entirely fair. They're also valuable to those who want to transfer money without ridiculous fees, excessive bureaucratic friction, and many mandatory middlemen. What other system would allow you to instantly be able to accept payments without giving an exorbitant portion of your revenue?

But the "ridiculous fees, excessive bureaucratic friction, and many mandatory middlemen" are what buy you the protection. The fees from necessary middleman seem ridiculous when nothing goes wrong, but that is how Visa pays for a chargebacks or fraud protection. The governments bureaucratic friction might seem excessive, but that is how they ensure people are paying their taxes which goes to fund the court systems tha…

Only a small part of those fees and frictions actually pay for that protection, and in the CC system, a good chunk of that protection is only needed because the system is almost designed to be abused.

But more importantly, that protection money becomes actual protection money, since you can't opt-out. I've bought a lot of used stuff over the years to strangers using cash, deliberately abdicating that protection. Yet if I want to do that online, I can't.

Re: Bitcoin Exchange Had Too Many Bitcoins

#152

Post by elif »

mhluongo wrote: post #18
thefalcon wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that there is no driver for the price to crash. There will not suddenly be a surprise supply of BCH found that will flood the market. Everyone knows that there is 1 BCH for every BTC out there, and that almost none of that is currently able to be exchanged on a market. That includes every single person who is driving up the price of BCH by purchasing it in the limited markets where it is available.

Multiple large holders have publicly said they'll dump their BCH. Grayscale, plenty of others have made their trading preference public. Of course that's not the same as hearing the market and putting your money where you mouth is- but right now the market is being restricted due to deposit issues.

Grayscale also seems to have chosen Ethereum Classic. Interesting tastes.

Re: Bitcoin Exchange Had Too Many Bitcoins

#153

Post by icebraining »

spectrum1234 wrote: post #90
matt_wulfeck wrote: post #88

> But BTC hasn't really lost any value since the spinoff, still trading at about $2,700. So just before the spinoff, if you had a bitcoin, you had a bitcoin worth about $2,700. Now, you have a BTC worth about $2,700, and also a BCH worth as much as $700. It's weird free money, if you owned bitcoins yesterday. Doesn't this throw up any red-flags to the btc/crypto apologist? This type of behavior is not how healthy mar…

The market expected BTC to fall by about as much as BCH increased. It did not. The market was wrong by about ~25%. At least in that moment.

The market expected BTC to fall by about as much as BCH increased.

How can that be measured?

Re: Bitcoin Exchange Had Too Many Bitcoins

#154

Post by jeeceebees »

zodiac wrote: post #102
numbsafari wrote: post #54

This would have been so much more fun if the contracts were all smart contracts using Ethereum.

How would you set up a btc lending (for shorts) contact with eth?

If you created a 2-way pegged bitcoin ERC20 token, you could use something like EthLend.

Re: Bitcoin Exchange Had Too Many Bitcoins

#155

Post by perfunctory »

> The way short selling works is that X borrows a share from Y and sells it to Z. So Y owns one share, and Z owns one share, and X owes one share, and everything balances out and there's only one share outstanding.

Is that really true? That would mean that both Y and Z should get dividend payment, which doesn't make sense. I always assumed that when X borrows one share from Y, the Y does not own that share any more.

Re: Bitcoin Exchange Had Too Many Bitcoins

#156

Post by matt_wulfeck »

Twisell wrote: post #96
NelsonMinar wrote: post #40

It is hilarious watching people try to reinvent financial institutions without any knowledge of or respect for history.

Maybe I'm too "left wing", but if you ask me short selling, complex products and high frequency trading are among technological "improvements" that have led actual stock exchange to an ugly mess where biggest profits are made by "scamming" efficiently other users. Should regulators forbid (or tax more) some (or all) of this mechanisms markets will quickly resume to what they should be, places for people to invest mon…

These types of valuations are exactly where we need short selling. There's no logical way to put downward pressure on these cryptos because the liquidity is impossibly thin and there's no real way to short them.

Re: Bitcoin Exchange Had Too Many Bitcoins

#157

Post by tnone »

gnaritas wrote: post #104
Twisell wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm too "left wing", but if you ask me short selling, complex products and high frequency trading are among technological "improvements" that have led actual stock exchange to an ugly mess where biggest profits are made by "scamming" efficiently other users. Should regulators forbid (or tax more) some (or all) of this mechanisms markets will quickly resume to what they should be, places for people to invest mon…

I'd say you don't really understand what you're critiquing; you think those things are bad because you heard they were, from someone else who likely doesn't understand it either. There's absolutely nothing wrong with short selling or high frequency trading. Short sellers help keep prices fair and companies honest, HFT makes trading cheaper for everyone. The markets are worse without them, the market was worse before…

Healthy competition optimizes for value, HFT is just optimizing for profit. These are not the same. It's paperclip maximizing, using an economic Maxwell's demon.

Re: Bitcoin Exchange Had Too Many Bitcoins

#158

Post by elif »

tpallarino wrote: post #45
pishpash wrote: post #24

So what's the explanation for the combined coins shooting up in value (if only for a little bit)?

BCH has no liquidity. It's price is largely irrelevant now. You can't just look at market caps.

That is only true if the market is unable to recognize it and price coins accordingly. Maybe the market is purely irrational, but it's certainly not a given.

I won't claim to know any more than you, mostly because ~80% of bitcoin use is in Asia and i know little about it. All of China and Japan and 2/3 of korean exchanges offer withdrawals or trading of BCH.

Re: Bitcoin Exchange Had Too Many Bitcoins

#159

Post by Cthulhu_ »

alanfalcon wrote: post #25
cwkoss wrote: post #16

Bit tangential, but I read an interesting theory this morning: Because there is greatly reduced liquidity of BCH (most exchanges don't support, hard/slow to deposit into exchanges that do), supply of BCH is artificially limited at the moment. Proponents of BCH can trade their BTC for BCH at a rate greater than they believe it is worth to easily pump the value and 'market cap' (most market cap stats have no measure of…

In the end, we're all pawns in the game of making the super-rich even more wealthy, aren't we? insert defeated sigh of resignation here

And yet, with things like bitcoin and ethereum and the like, some of "us" became rich very quickly. A common trope, and I'll just repeat it, is "I wish I had bought / mined bitcoin / eth in ". For ETH that would've been last year.

Re: Bitcoin Exchange Had Too Many Bitcoins

#160

Post by prostoalex »

tnone wrote: post #157
gnaritas wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say you don't really understand what you're critiquing; you think those things are bad because you heard they were, from someone else who likely doesn't understand it either. There's absolutely nothing wrong with short selling or high frequency trading. Short sellers help keep prices fair and companies honest, HFT makes trading cheaper for everyone. The markets are worse without them, the market was worse before…

Healthy competition optimizes for value, HFT is just optimizing for profit. These are not the same. It's paperclip maximizing, using an economic Maxwell's demon.

> HFT is just optimizing for profit

And low-frequency trading isn't?

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