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An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

singlelunch.com

331–340 of 454 posts

Re: An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

#331

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One thing fiat currencies have that is underrated: a legal system to handle special cases. Recently, an apparently Bitcoin-rich man named Mircea Propescu died without sharing his private key(s). Now that fortune is gone with no recourse for next of kin. Maybe this is OK and everyone is happy to lose the safety net. But what about fraud? Do you want to have to take up arms to get your money back from someone who stole…

For a starters, its not Bitcoin fault that someone did not have last will, or did not include the keys or their crypto in the last will. Second, when some large heist in the past happened on the chain, the largest exchanges announced they won't exchange proceeds from these addresses. It may still not be impossible to withdraw into fiat, but certainly it was harder. Eventually, there will be more regulation from US an…

Since we cannot have an ever growing amount of BTC, you mean that in time more and more coins will be tainted? Assuming that frauds and heists and all that are constant but BTC generation is less than linear an ever growing percentage of coins will be tainted.

Another thing: if someone steals money from me and I can prove it, and law can find him, and trial him, etc. I want the possibility to have my money back not some “coins on red notice”.

Re: An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

#332
post #227

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This is a terrible way to go through life. Just because someone is successful at X does not mean they are in any way knowledgeable in Y. Want to know about something, just read about it yourself or seek the opinion of someone that actually works in the field, don't blindly take the word of someone that is not even from the field in question. Doge is a joke crypto currency, and I don't mean that as an insult I mean it…

Someone that understands crypto second to none but acts like he does not while delivering incredible content: https://twitter.com/cobie This guy is a bull market genius who is also a master shitposter. Much, if not all of his content is moronic, but this sort of content is posted ironically but then becomes part of the in-jokes people mistake for talent. Toxic.

Guy also co-founded lido finance which has over 10 billion staked. I find him to be one of the more pleasant crypto personalities who occasionally dramatically changes peoples lives for the better. Your mileage may vary.

https://lido.fi/

Re: An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

#333
post #235
post #224

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I really doubt Tesla would survive very long in that state. Stock will crash, public opinion will sour, employees will quit etc. very quickly.

Why would public opinion matter if your company wasn't public? IMO it's a beautiful thing if your company can be aligned 100% with customers and not some random idiots that want participation in your company issues without even owning a Tesla let alone an EV. No earnings reports, no SEC wasting your time. Only reason companies (unfortunately) need to go public is the need for upfront capital or early-stage capital th…

The second part is very significant. Many people want to diversify their risk, and public companies allow that. Rather own 10% each of 10 companies than 100% of one risk-wise.

Re: An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

#334

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> Well unless they pay no dividend, have dual-class share structure, and IPO without a profitable quarter. What’s a share of SNAP entitle you to exactly? Ah right, you think someone will buy it for more. I think the idea would be like what happened to Apple: they eventually grew so much, became so successful, accumulated huge piles of cash bigger than they could possibly spend, that they had to start paying a dividen…

> they eventually grew so much, became so successful, accumulated huge piles of cash bigger than they could possibly spend, that they had to start paying a dividend. What mechanism forces this?

Billionaire activist investors.

Re: An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

#335

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It's sad to see people genuinely wanting to watch others lose wealth so they can relish in it.

It's always jealousy. People see someone they view as "undeserving" doing better than themselves and react with hatred.

I just want this environmental disaster to end.

If they'd just outlaw proof-of-work cryptocurrencies, I'd shut up and you can continue gambling your proof-of-stake digital chuck-e-cheese tokens to your heart's content.

But you're wasting more power than Argentina to do it. So yes, I hate this garbage and want it to fail.

Re: An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

#336
post #310
post #300

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Reminds me of the whole market-moving news cycle about Amazon accepting cryptocurrency “by the end of the year” last year. Tons of coverage, like this[1]. It never passed the smell test, all traced back to one anonymous City A.M. source, and of course it didn't happen. [1] https://gizmodo.com/amazon-to-accept-bitcoin-by-end-of-2021-...

The article that this post is about talks literally about Amazon event...

Ah, you're right. I'd saved it to read later, should have kept my mouth shut until I did.

Re: An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

#337

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> I just need to know enough to either make a little money or avoid it altogether fundamental value doesn't matter for short term speculative trading. if you're coming at it from this angle - chance that you'll learn anything about fundamental value of bitcoin is quite low.

> fundamental value doesn't matter for short term speculative trading Agreed, but gambling is not my gig. I don't live that far from Las Vegas if I so prefer. I think smart contracts are interesting because I'm a programmer. Someone once wrote that Bitcoin also has executable code so that's on my list to investigate. It's something to do in retirement. I wish Elon Musk well, but he's only human, so I don't expect him…

> I just need to know enough to either make a little money or avoid it altogether

> gambling is not my gig

i find it hard to reconcile the two?

> Someone once wrote that Bitcoin also has executable code so that's on my list to investigate.

yes, bitcoin doesn't even have a way to do payment without going through bitcoin script.

it's all in active development. there are more convenient languages that compile into bitcoin script, like miniscript and sapio. and finally there's rootstock project that allows running ethereum contracts directly on double-pegged bitcoin sidechain.

> I wish Elon Musk well, but he's only human

s/only/the richest (briefly)/

a wise man one said - with great power comes great responsibility. elon seems to enjoy shittalking and flip-flopping on topic of various cryptocurrencies that it's crossed (for me) the threshold of market manipulation for personal gain.

Re: An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

#338
post #287
post #149

Dumb question, but is price manipulation wrong when it's for something that doesn't have a "true" price? Like I get why it should be illegal for stocks. If you pump it and the price reverts back to some true price (calculated from expected future earnings or whatever), then people who bought it expecting it to be at an efficient price will lose money. In the case of crypto where everything is driven by supply and dem…

Stocks also don’t have a “true” value. Their price is driven entirely by supply and demand, which in turn is weakly anchored by investors doing fundamental valuations on the stock (there is more demand for an underpriced stock). The issue is that market manipulation is outright theft, usually from retail investors. Think of it like playing blackjack. When I hit, I make a bet and I know roughly what the odds are that…

> I know roughly what the odds are that the bet will pay out

> natural price

In low-volume situations (almost all cryptoassets) you don't have these properties. The price is "fake"/random to begin with.

Re: An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

#339
post #236

This is some interesting analysis, but all of the causal language is unsupported -- and I think mostly inverted from the reality. Here is an equally supported description: - Retail and futures traders create instability by placing leveraged trades and stop orders that amplify swings. - Market makers are aware of instability and design their bots to turn off so that they don't end up on the wrong side of a liquidity c…

I agree with most of this and would add that the article could be organic and the subsequent trading opportunistic (rather than being tied together). I am somewhat surprised that bots react to news within 5ms -- your execution delay on crypto exchanges is quite a bit longer than that, since the exchanges are generally hosted in public clouds and you are subject to network latency to get in there. Even within the same…

Well, Alameda and FTX were founded by the same person. Up until very recently Sam was CEO of both companies at once.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Bankman-Fried

Edit: I suspect Alameda uses data from FTX but might not trade there: as per the article, the manipulation needs thin order books to work.

Re: An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation

#340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well unless they pay no dividend, have dual-class share structure, and IPO without a profitable quarter. What’s a share of SNAP entitle you to exactly? Ah right, you think someone will buy it for more. I think the idea would be like what happened to Apple: they eventually grew so much, became so successful, accumulated huge piles of cash bigger than they could possibly spend, that they had to start paying a dividen…

>I think the idea would be like what happened to Apple: they eventually grew so much, became so successful, accumulated huge piles of cash bigger than they could possibly spend, that they had to start paying a dividend. Not a great example, Apple paid out a quarterly dividend from 1987 to 1995. They paid out a dividend in those years because they were cashflow positive and that was just the thing you did because the…

Not to mention they were GAAP profitable pre IPO, same as Google, Facebook and Microsoft. Pull up the old S-1s if you don't believe me.
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