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

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

#81
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which ASICs are for Ethereum? A quick search says GPUs are still popular?

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.

Huh? I saw several 1080s and 1080 TIs in stock at a local Microcenter in New York just two days ago. Which GPUs are specifically used for mining?

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

#82
post #78

Meh. Flash crashes happen with big namebrand stocks too. The nice thing about flash crashes due to dumping is that they are self-punishing: whoever was dumb enough to dump that much ETH in a few seconds cost themselves a ton of money. A fool and his money are soon parted.

It was actually a cascade - the market sell brought it down to 224, but then there was a crush of margin calls and market stop loss orders, which triggered all the way down to 10 cents. Wish I was there to scoop some!

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

#83
post #78

Meh. Flash crashes happen with big namebrand stocks too. The nice thing about flash crashes due to dumping is that they are self-punishing: whoever was dumb enough to dump that much ETH in a few seconds cost themselves a ton of money. A fool and his money are soon parted.

The margin calls are what pissed everyone off, and exacerbated the crash.

It's even possible that the multi-million dollar trade wasn't an accident, and they put a bunch of buy orders in to hunt the margin traders.

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

#84
post #78

Meh. Flash crashes happen with big namebrand stocks too. The nice thing about flash crashes due to dumping is that they are self-punishing: whoever was dumb enough to dump that much ETH in a few seconds cost themselves a ton of money. A fool and his money are soon parted.

On reddit someone commented that this whale must have know what he was doing... So, in theory could dumping large amount of ETH could affect pricing of even larger amount enabling the whale to profit from this procedure?

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

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It seems likely that this was sharks taking advantage of some naive speculators. It wasn't even a lot of money for the finance world, and I bet they will made a tidy profit selling off all of that Ethereum they just bought.

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

#86
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.

But he was promised 10x returns! Look at this graph!

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

#87
post #5

It takes two to tango. A lot of people lost a lof money because they got margin called at ~$2 for a commodity that is worth ~$300. https://twitter.com/elnygren/status/877660177406865408 On the other hand, a lot of people made a lot money since there are buy orders that wen through at less than 1% of the real price.

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…

Is there any risk or downside to this?

A number of people with USD on deposit at Mt. Gox, who correctly understood Bitcoin's price to be unsustainably high and were waiting for the correction, are now 3+ years into waiting for a Japanese bankruptcy court to pay out their claims. They are, in the Bitcoin economy, the lucky ones -- the more common thing which happens when exchanges fail (which happens in 20%+ of exchange-years) is for all money (and things of more dubious value) to be lost.

This is different than in more traditional markets, where custody of assets is distinct from being an exchange (you don't wire money to the NYSE to trade there), custodians/brokers are regulated, individual accountholders are insured, and you generally don't have to have $2000 cash on deposit and locked up to keep an order for 1000 of Google at $2 on the books.

I feel like I have to say that professionals very much do have orders far outside the usual trading ranges for various things in the expectation that a fill against that order usually represents a quickly profitable mistake by a counterparty. A major portion of the reason that this is something professionals do and amateurs largely don't is because there do exist cases where orders get filled far away from the market and one's counterparty praises all the spirits of capitalism that someone else was being inattentive to the fundamentals at a time where being inattentive to the fundamentals is a poor decision.

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

#88
post #81
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.

Huh? I saw several 1080s and 1080 TIs in stock at a local Microcenter in New York just two days ago. Which GPUs are specifically used for mining?

RX 480 and 580 are really popular AFAIK. In fact they can go over MSRP on secondary market

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

#89
post #80
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…

> They sold off my entire holdings for $0.01 - $0 after fees. Why did you have such an order? I can understand a stop loss order at some small percentage of the original purchase price, because you still get something, but one that says "if this currency suddenly becomes worthless, give it away for $0.01" doesn't make any sense.

[deleted]

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

#90
post #80
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…

> They sold off my entire holdings for $0.01 - $0 after fees. Why did you have such an order? I can understand a stop loss order at some small percentage of the original purchase price, because you still get something, but one that says "if this currency suddenly becomes worthless, give it away for $0.01" doesn't make any sense.

Sounds like a stop order without the limit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_(exchange)#Stop_order

>When the stop price is reached, a stop order becomes a market order.

Market value was extremely low due to low liquidity.

This is a risk with stop orders that many investors aren't familiar with.

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