Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ethereum crashed from $319 to 10c on GDAX after ‘multimillion dollar’ trade

cnbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 129 posts

Re: Ethereum crashed from $319 to 10c on GDAX after ‘multimillion dollar’ trade

#61

Post by iak8god »

yebyen wrote: post #53
iak8god wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are no ASICs for Ethereum. It's currently impossible to get latest gen GPUs from any retailer, or for anything close to retail price on eBay, because there's a mad rush to get into Ether mining.

That's incredible, I remember when it was impossible to get ASIC miners from ButterflyLabs and we were all up in arms because of their inappropriate behavior. That was a niche vendor producing items that had basically no other uses. GPU makers didn't sign up to build machines that print money. But it turns out when you do make machines that can print money, people tend to buy them at a rate faster than you can make t…

Hah, I remember the BFL fiasco. When my Jalapeno arrived five months after ordering, I looked at the hashrate, etc, and turned right around and sold it for twice what I'd paid.

Re: Ethereum crashed from $319 to 10c on GDAX after ‘multimillion dollar’ trade

#62

Post by raisedbyninjas »

bluejekyll wrote: post #50
curiousgal wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://stocktwits.com/jdemasie/message/86641301 Edit: fuck that, check this out! 7200 ETH at 0.1 USD!! https://api.gdax.com/products/eth-usd/trades?after=6326580&l...

So the current "value" is around $300, but something fishy is going on, and the exchange is trading at $.10? This does not build confidence.

One exchange had a big market sell order large enough to trigger enough margin calls and stop loss orders to create a cascade effect. It flashed to 10 cents for a few seconds. So the combination of volatility and careless traders created this situation as far as we know.

Re: Ethereum crashed from $319 to 10c on GDAX after ‘multimillion dollar’ trade

#63

Post by shawabawa3 »

bluejekyll wrote: post #50
curiousgal wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://stocktwits.com/jdemasie/message/86641301 Edit: fuck that, check this out! 7200 ETH at 0.1 USD!! https://api.gdax.com/products/eth-usd/trades?after=6326580&l...

So the current "value" is around $300, but something fishy is going on, and the exchange is trading at $.10? This does not build confidence.

Somebody placed a huge sell-order which crashed the price. This caused stop-loss and margin calls to be triggered, adding a huge amount of market order sells, which crashed the price to effectively zero (more sell orders than buy orders on the exchange).

Some lucky people (or the people who orchestrated the crash) snuck in some super low buy orders that got matched.

The price had recovered within a few minutes (once all the margin calls had executed). It just goes to show the risk of trading on margin

Re: Ethereum crashed from $319 to 10c on GDAX after ‘multimillion dollar’ trade

#64

Post by unknown_apostle »

headcanon wrote: post #51
captainmuon wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, so basically I could create a buy order for $2, leave it sitting there, and wait until there is another crash [1]? If there is no crash, then nothing happens. For good measure, do it for every currency on the exchange. Is there any risk or downside to this? Seems like buying a lottery ticket for free. ---- [1] ... or someboy fat-fingers an order - although I think in that case I think still the higher bidders w…

The downside is that when you put in a limit buy the exchange puts your money into escrow until the order is cancelled or filled. Since a crash like that is unlikely to happen (first time on that exchange I believe) it just means you have money tied up when it could be put to better use

"unlikely"

Complexity fattens the tail. Ethereum must be one of the most complex things out there.

It's been live for 1 year on GDAX and then it went for a 3000x round trip. What does that tell you about odds?

Re: Ethereum crashed from $319 to 10c on GDAX after ‘multimillion dollar’ trade

#65

Post by JumpCrisscross »

shawabawa3 wrote: post #36
beberlei wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

market cap is worthless when we talk about fiat currency.

but ethereum/bitcoin aren't fiat currencies? market cap is useful in that it shows the total value of the coin. Comparing the price of 1BTC to 1ETH doesn't make sense, but comparing their market cap does

> ethereum/bitcoin aren't fiat currencies

The alternatives to fiat money are commodity money, e.g. gold, or representative money, e.g. pieces of paper exchangeable for gold at a fixed rate. Cryptocurrencies are more similar to fiat money in terms of their value being a function of social agreement versus utility.

Re: Ethereum crashed from $319 to 10c on GDAX after ‘multimillion dollar’ trade

#66

Post by jdmichal »

relix wrote: post #19
Analemma_ wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even market orders on highly liquid, perfectly well-understood things like forex can bite you in the ass; see all the levered people who got wiped out when Switzerland dropped their peg to the Euro. Stop orders on cryptocurrency are just pure idiocy.

How is the Swiss franc gap up related to market orders?

A post-gap market sell on a gap up can end up filling pre-gap buy orders. And pre-gap market buys can end up being filled by post-gap sells. So people end up selling for much less or buying for much more than expected.

Re: Ethereum crashed from $319 to 10c on GDAX after ‘multimillion dollar’ trade

#67

Post by yebyen »

iak8god wrote: post #61
yebyen wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's incredible, I remember when it was impossible to get ASIC miners from ButterflyLabs and we were all up in arms because of their inappropriate behavior. That was a niche vendor producing items that had basically no other uses. GPU makers didn't sign up to build machines that print money. But it turns out when you do make machines that can print money, people tend to buy them at a rate faster than you can make t…

Hah, I remember the BFL fiasco. When my Jalapeno arrived five months after ordering, I looked at the hashrate, etc, and turned right around and sold it for twice what I'd paid.

That's about what I made mining with it overall before the limit approached zero. Maybe twice what I paid *if you count cash dollar values only (keeping the BTC I spent would have obviously been a much better deal, if I held them til today!)

This worked better than it would have otherwise, because my employer had electricity priced into the rent at a flat rate, and told me he wouldn't mind if I threw these things into the server room.

(I got two early batch and four 10GHash later on for a total of about 50GHash. I don't remember exactly how long, but I am sure I waited a lot longer than 5 months.)

Re: Ethereum crashed from $319 to 10c on GDAX after ‘multimillion dollar’ trade

#68

Post by lkbm »

shawabawa3 wrote: post #36
beberlei wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

market cap is worthless when we talk about fiat currency.

but ethereum/bitcoin aren't fiat currencies? market cap is useful in that it shows the total value of the coin. Comparing the price of 1BTC to 1ETH doesn't make sense, but comparing their market cap does

gcb0 isn't proposing that value should be measured in ETH per BTC. Sounds like they think the value of currency is in people using it for a medium of exchange--e.g., Oversatock.com accepting bitcoin makes bitcoin valuable.

"Useful" might be a better term, but it makes some sense to equate those two.

Re: Ethereum crashed from $319 to 10c on GDAX after ‘multimillion dollar’ trade

#70

Post by if_by_whisky »

blater wrote: post #42

exactly the same thing happened to me with Litecoin on GDAX. They sold off my entire holdings for $0.01 - $0 after fees. At the time LTC was trading for something like $25/LTC. It took about 3 weeks to get anything but an automated response from their support team. This was the response: "After further review, this sell was due to a margin call of your margin position on the LTC/BTC order book. A series of large sell…

It sounds like you lost a bet.
Post reply on HN