Anyone see for how much?
No exact figures have been released, but based on other bidder's input, the assumptions are that his bid was well over the market price.
What is the market price?
Venture Capitalist Tim Draper Wins Bitcoin Auction
31–40 of 98 posts
Re: Venture Capitalist Tim Draper Wins Bitcoin Auction
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
No exact figures have been released, but based on other bidder's input, the assumptions are that his bid was well over the market price.
What is the market price?
Right around $650 right now.
Re: Venture Capitalist Tim Draper Wins Bitcoin Auction
#33The Drapers are quite bullish on Bitcoin. Adam Draper's accelerator, Boost VC, is investing in 100 Bitcoin companies over the next 3 years: http://www.coindesk.com/boost-vc-accelerate-100-bitcoin-comp...
Rob from Gliph here. Gliph is a Bitcoin company from Boost VC Class 2. Tim Draper led our angel round (with Pantera) and is a mentor to Gliph.
Tim has been excited about Bitcoin and its potential for some time. Well in advance of other VCs, Tim was talking about its potential, particularly with regard to "competitive governance."
Have a look at this youtube video from his presentation at Stanford in February of last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZ0mrD0EnI0#t=28m05s
He starts describing solutions for competitive governance around 28:05. At 29:10 he brings up Bitcoin. I believe this was the first time he spoke about Bitcoin publicly but may be wrong. He states in the video:
"[bitcoin is] the most valuable currency now on the planet because it is under no one's control. It is out of people's control. It is no longer regulated by any government. They can't print Bitcoin."
Bitcoin was worth about $24.50 when he said that.
Re: Venture Capitalist Tim Draper Wins Bitcoin Auction
#34Wow, looking at the order book of bitstamp [1] through the eyes of someone who lives in the world of market microstructure is eye opening:) There are huge holes everywhere in the order book and the liquidity at each offering level seems to be completely without reason. I just spent 20 minutes applying the sort of algorithms that'd we'd normally run on each stock to make markets in it and it can't detect any real patt…
For more lols check out the trading API. There is no TIF for orders and there isn't any obvious way to get fills as they occur. I guess you just poll the api to check for fills but they also say they'll ban your IP if you poll too often. Nice. Also no mechanism for cancel on disconnect or whatever the HTTP equivalent of that would be. Maybe there is some money to be made there, but it's hard to imagine trading with t…
The btc-e API is far far worse. Some of the messages are in Russian and some are in English (randomly). Even worse (and a deal breaker for me) is that the order id can change underneath you if your transaction is split to fill the order, so there is no way to tell if your order completed or not. I've talked to people on Reddit who say they've made it work, but I'd never trust a bot spending money against an API like that. It's amateur hour when it comes to these exchanges and their API designs.
Re: Venture Capitalist Tim Draper Wins Bitcoin Auction
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
For more lols check out the trading API. There is no TIF for orders and there isn't any obvious way to get fills as they occur. I guess you just poll the api to check for fills but they also say they'll ban your IP if you poll too often. Nice. Also no mechanism for cancel on disconnect or whatever the HTTP equivalent of that would be. Maybe there is some money to be made there, but it's hard to imagine trading with t…
The btc-e API is far far worse. Some of the messages are in Russian and some are in English (randomly). Even worse (and a deal breaker for me) is that the order id can change underneath you if your transaction is split to fill the order, so there is no way to tell if your order completed or not. I've talked to people on Reddit who say they've made it work, but I'd never trust a bot spending money against an API like…
That's the same (almost) issue that Mt.Gox supposedly famously had with the actual blockchain, transaction malleability. I've read that Mt.Gox actually lost tens of Bitcoins in this way and it was a red herring for the whole actual giant scam that was perpetrated, but it was still a real vulnerability that needed patching or working around.
Re: Venture Capitalist Tim Draper Wins Bitcoin Auction
#36From the article:
“Bitcoin frees people from trying to operate in a modern market economy with weak currencies. With the help of Vaurum and this newly purchased bitcoin, we expect to be able to create new services that can provide liquidity and confidence to markets that have been hamstrung by weak currencies”
The issue that I take with this statement is that so far, bitcoin is far from a strong stable currency. I reserve judgment on whether it will ever get there, but I am not convinced that doing business in bitcoin is currently safer than doing it in Indonesian rupiah (for example).
Re: Venture Capitalist Tim Draper Wins Bitcoin Auction
#37The Drapers are quite bullish on Bitcoin. Adam Draper's accelerator, Boost VC, is investing in 100 Bitcoin companies over the next 3 years: http://www.coindesk.com/boost-vc-accelerate-100-bitcoin-comp...
I'm confused as to why anyone would invest in Bitcoin companies as opposed to Bitcoins directly. The impression I got was that investing in companies provided added risks (co-founder separation, business failure, legal risks), without providing a significant advantage (risk mitigation, upside multiplication) over just buying Bitcoins directly.
Re: Venture Capitalist Tim Draper Wins Bitcoin Auction
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because there is no losing bidder who claimed a near market price bid. All publicly claimed bids were far below market.
Until you have every losing bid, you can't make these claims. Can't reply, so I'll add it to this comment. As stated by others, the only way to purchase a large amount of bitcoins without jacking up the price is to do it in one large sum. By bidding over market price, he ensured that he would get this chunk of 30k coins without affecting the market.
I'm not claiming it was under market. I'm claiming that you can't claim it was over market.
Re: Venture Capitalist Tim Draper Wins Bitcoin Auction
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Until you have every losing bid, you can't make these claims. Can't reply, so I'll add it to this comment. As stated by others, the only way to purchase a large amount of bitcoins without jacking up the price is to do it in one large sum. By bidding over market price, he ensured that he would get this chunk of 30k coins without affecting the market.
> No exact figures have been released, but based on other bidder's input, the assumptions are that his bid was well over the market price. So how is this justified?
If this many bitcoins were purchased in a short time frame on the exchanges the price would shoot well over 1000 almost instantly.
Re: Venture Capitalist Tim Draper Wins Bitcoin Auction
#40The Drapers are quite bullish on Bitcoin. Adam Draper's accelerator, Boost VC, is investing in 100 Bitcoin companies over the next 3 years: http://www.coindesk.com/boost-vc-accelerate-100-bitcoin-comp...
Rob from Gliph here. Gliph is a Bitcoin company from Boost VC Class 2. Tim Draper led our angel round (with Pantera) and is a mentor to Gliph. Tim has been excited about Bitcoin and its potential for some time. Well in advance of other VCs, Tim was talking about its potential, particularly with regard to "competitive governance." Have a look at this youtube video from his presentation at Stanford in February of last…
The developers and miners are, in effect, the government of bitcoin. The developers act like the federal reserve, in that they can change the code to raise the max amount of bitcoin, increase the mining difficulty, etc. just as the Federal reserve would conduct open market operations or set interest rates to target inflation. So it's completely wrong to say that Bitcoin is "under no one's control". [0]
The key difference is that a majority of the miners have to accept the developer's changes and run the new client. The average US citizen cannot refuse interest rate hikes. So it's a transfer of power away from the few and corrupt (Fed + banks) to the few who are limited in their ability to be corrupt (developers + mining pools).
If the developers implement a terrible policy, the miners will refuse to update their clients to avoid devaluing the currency they are working hard to generate. So the power distribution and incentive structure are different. Whether thats a good or bad thing remains to be seen.
[0] http://www.weis2013.econinfosec.org/papers/KrollDaveyFeltenW...