Ladies and gentlemen, proof that Mt. Gox works better than expected: statistically, the price traces an excellent typical example of a Geometric Brownian Motion:

According to Wisdom, there are some shenanigans going on at Gox. A few hours ago a dump was marked as a 200 BTC order in the order history but only showed up as a 155 BTC sell on the volume indicator. Also, are the orderbooks on Wisdom accurate? I might be seeing things but it seems to me that there are "phantom orders" that show up in the books but that don't get counted when a dump eats them.

Billy cashed out around 10k BTC during the last downtrend and doesn't seem to be out of coins.

There is something to be said about this however. The primary reason that Bitcoin caught on and didn't fizzle like all other virtual currencies or even other cryptocurrency proposals is the blockchain -- the center of trust for all similar cryptos. The older and larger the chain, the more trust there is. This means that all (most) the alt coins can quietly disappear into niche uses. This is the main reason I was excited about merged mining -- one chain to rule them all. [Namecoin, however, has its own problems]

Basically it's the same argument about Visa/MasterCard and the zillion other card companies.


I was sceptical too until actually using BTC to pay for minor stuff online. For example Fiverr was a nice surprise. I made two orders and paid each with a different system (PayPal and Coinbase). And I've realised, PayPal is mad fugly. It is immensely bloated for what it's supposed to do. You probably have more menus than Amazon has for all your settings and preferences. In comparison, Coinbase's plugin was simple and easy to understand and use. According to comments on Fiverr's announcement to take BTC, many sellers appear to ask to receive BTC directly (to wallet or Coinbase account), simply because PayPal charges immense fees.

It can also be argued this is not the "true" way to use BTC, but does it really matter? I can easily visualize a unified crypto payment plugin. Select currency; select wallet or wallet provider; pay.

I believe cryptos are here to stay. Can't say about BTC, but it's a working proof of concept / minimal viable product.

I wonder if the market on Gox can ally against Willy and wait for its predictable dumps, set up walls, get the price up, then remove orders, let Willy sell into negative numbers and start all over again. Like working in shifts

But look at the market. Everyone WANTS coins to go up but Willy won't let them. Assuming you were really cashing out because Gox has no coins, wouldn't you just, y'know, let the price rise from time to time to get more cash? I'm starting to believe Willy sells into (mostly) its own walls to give the impression of massive dump and keep the price suppressed for much profit (?).

The only other plausible explanation I can think of is Gox or some accomplice(s) shorting naked. But then again, wouldn't you let the price bounce back from time to time?

Buy back moar.






Also, welcome back Frozenbyte.

What If Willy Is Nakowa And He Got Bored Of Just-Dice?

I know how people on this fora feel about MP but he has some serious accusations about Gox:

http://trilema.com/2014/mtgox-and-ancient-bitcoin-history-the-straight-dope/

watching gox 1m on wisdom is like watching eurosport, but slowed down alot

I'm pretty sure most of that is Willy(?) selling into their own walls...

This is something we can speculate on freely.

1. Who would put buys at <10$ and just leave them there?
2. Who would put buys below 1M coins in the orderbook? Below 10M? Are there ("Should there be") 1M coins on Gox?

And while on the subject, is there any reason why Gox could not trade on itself with a virtual account? Any reason that account could not be unlimited? While Gox are separated from reality they could literally move the price anywhere with no cost. That conjecture is consistent with Willy's behaviour. Also traderCJ noted that bid book sometimes thins to 100-500 coins. That happened a few minutes ago and someone took a deep dump then put the bid walls there again.

BTCe needs some Xanax as usually

Or if you ran out of blow, guess the swings with 0.1 BTC each bet at 10x leverage. Same rush, but lasts for hours and hours.

The last 25-70 dumps could be Billy taking it easy for now. "Time between consecutive dumps" has almost the same distribution.

KeyserSoze, please don't get offended, but I think you're wrong about MP, and I think many on this forum let their linguistic sensibilities cloud their understanding.


I posted the link to his blog originally. I don't think he's a scam. I agree that he acts like he's retarded but so did Risto last year. He could be an act, or maybe he actually has some grand illusion of grandeur. I know this forum's opinion on him but I disagree. Let me tell you why, from your links:


Plenty of ad hominem is an understatement. I don't know about his lies, but I would not be surprised if they were trollings given his general attitude. But I'm pretty sure he didn't make his (first) money from Bitcoin.

The second thread you linked is just funny. "You don't create anything, how can you be worth so much?" etc etc. Overvalued, sure. And leaving his snide apart, he does back finances up. Just read the whole thread, seriously. The most vocal voices against him are all derp derp derp. He's an asshole, but so far a legitimate one. http://trilema.com/2013/mpoe-march-2013-statement/ shows that he took a hit and didn't run away (like many others). I can't vouch for MP but I'd trust him more than many, many others in the crypto world.

And his own "Scam list" is strongly and irreverently worded, but...


... he elaborates. In the meanwhile, everyone asks how much money MPEx makes even if there. are. monthly. statements.

I'm not US-born myself. But boy if you're not smiling and pouring honey out of your mind some people just lose reading comprehension.

Just to be clear, I don't know him and don't try to put him in the spotlight. But I've seen no criticism of him which is not ad hominem, "I don't understand so you must be a scammer" or more ad hominem. He's a douchebag, his critics (that I've seen) are barely literate. That second thread has some people asking the same fucking question three times in a row because someone couldn't read the fucking answer and insisted on borderline semantics like "how one never enters naked options positions, while simultaneously never hedging options positions". Just like the answer came immediately (he has BTC to cover them, basically, so they're not naked), the poster asking the same question again writes a 500 word exhibition of not understanding full reserve finance.

I mean, really?

/rant

Unless it's the GoxBot. Then it has no fees, and an unlimited account. "All you can sell".

BTC is the best MMO ever. That will get us islands for microstates and change the world in the meanwhile.

Also fonzie if he really is LTCvictim, is a veteran of the BTCe trollbox, probably 15 and loaded with LTC and likely others. You're all really feeding him a la carte.

It's ok. I like him. I like the trollbox. That's my dirty secret.

Is finex down?

EDIT: Nope, just a fluke

Would you say we're getting closer to capitulation (on Gox at least)?

Reposted. Everybody needs to read this.

There's so much FUD about Ripple...

The idea itself (credit networks) is well known and actually likely to work. The problems with Ripple itself are that
a. the devs can't explain shit
b. the investors can't understand shit

Ripples themselves are only transaction fees IOUs. They are not going "to the moon" and that is precisely why the devs essentially premined most of them.

Golden.

FTFY. Bitcoin cultists are cultists.

Is it just my wishful thinking or is Huobi crafting a nice wide gap to drive a forced oscillation in?

I think I will start closing my longs soon. BFX swaps are worrisome.

aminorex, what's your opinion about Epsilon Theory? I'm asking because you mentioned De Mesquita earlier.

Cool story bro. All of the US-EU-China or pretty much any government now for that matter, they all report meaningless, irrelevant, hedonically adjusted numbers. It's lotto. Just like the jobs Thursday/Friday. It's surreal suspended disbelief. It's a group hallucination.

In the last four months I bet on a correction in the exponential depreciation of the USD and managed to almost double "my money", market value. Don't go all in. Don't go all out. It's easy.

You're not comparing inflation and theft either. You're comparing the theft of GBP versus the theft of BTC. Descriptively you could say Gox applied inflation locally to their customers. Like the FED or other central banks, it doesn't affect everyone (equally).

See this: https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/randomwalker/bitcoin-hacks-and-thefts-the-underlying-reason/

EDIT: this article suggests that Bitcoin security is much harder to do than "real-world" security, because the expected disutility of punishment is way lower. I expect software/communication security to evolve more or less uniformly. [Don't forget the first goxxing of Gox, when they were sending passwords with GET, unhashed. Announcement thread from 2010, second page or so. Unbelievable people still kept money in Gox with that first impression]

It was in the Weimar. I could draw the analogies much, much further if you wish. Don't forget you didn't hold BTC at the time, but Gox's own "national" IOU, the goxBTC, which was backed by the "full faith and credit" of Karppucinno. There was even an exchange for their fiat.

All bankruptcies look the same.

Double spending is not at all a problem with fiat. Neither cash nor credit. Counterfeinting and (succesful) attacks on cards, POS'es, ATMs yes, but not double spending. You cannot clone Benjamin. At least not a fictive but definitely produceable quantum Benjamin that cannot be cloned.

We're debating semantics here, starting with my post admittedly. We all know what we mean to say.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bank_robbers_and_robberies

Admittedly not exactly "hackers stealing 300M USD from a company" but look at the orders of magnitude.

Besides, if Gox really got into full blown fractional reserve in 2011, then the heist was not 300M USD, but more like 3M?

I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm saying you're very self-servingly selective in your examples.

Once you see goatse you cannot unsee goatse...

Makes you think PBoC might be loading up low.

Given the Chinese whispers we all hear, it could be that they are running out of overclocking room on those others markets. I didn't say "trade" i said "load up".

Let's be abstract and agnostic.

I find it interesting that gaming behaviour is so obvious in BTC. Analizing this as a zero-sum game is misleading and dangerous.

First, one BTC has no obvious way to be priced (or just bounded) independent of market (unlike in game theoretical example problems, no one really knows their utility function). Aminorex's excellent wampum model is a lower bound but it also includes an arbitrary multiplicative constant. The constant can be lower bounded however.

Second, there is no "common knowledge" about the valuation, unlike stocks where everyone has learned the same ways to price fundamentals. Even if this methodology is wrong, everyone knows everyone knows it and so its output is an attractor for the system.

Therefore, all players game other players and not the system. Everyone looks at everyone and practically the independence of any k-player clique is very low in expectation.

Third, in any protocol made for strategic players ("mechanism design") that seeks consensus, colluding players will have superior strategies available (caveats, might be undecidable, untractable, or not simply not yet known). In the BTC price example, private common knowledge is whale/miner social-clubs/guilds that share strategies and public common knowledge is TA/EW rules and news/fora. There can be multiple attractors and some players can attempt to game trend changes (bifurcation paths).

Finally, if a TDM/death attractor dominates it becomes self fulfilling (barring catastrophic communication failure). I believe right now that is far from the case and we have many weak attractors all over the place. The more uncertainty there is about the strengths of the attractors in play, the easier it is to trigger a cascade from one attractor's to another's basins.

Thoughts?

Edit: It seems like the main common knowledge attractor at the moment is that China sets the price, and China will keep setting it lower. It doesn't matter if this is actually happening, it's what everyone knows that everyone knows. If this attractor is indeed orchestrated, then the news can simply be communication intended to gather momentum from those who understand the language, while creating as much confusion as possible otherwise.

I agree that Bitcoin might not offer enough advantages to most people. For the majority of people everywhere, Science and Maths have the same epistemic values as Religion. It is something they do not understand but accept by virtue of social authority. I suspect most people have more trust in their Governments (and even Churches!) than they do in Maths, especially a heavy topic like Cryptography. It would take a catastrophic collapse in trust in Governments to push the balance between Average Joe will never understand number theory.

Not all chaotic systems are antifragile. Actually, almost all are not. Since most people do not understand 99% of the Maths and Science behind Bitcoin, they cannot verify whether that is the case and will have to trust authorities in those fields.

Edit: these is also a common knowledge for Average Joe that intuitively most systems slapped together chaotically do not work. I'm not implying that Bitcoin is slapped together chaotically, although some design decisions and constants were chosen somewhat arbitrarily.

I scrolled up but couldn't see where your second candle ends. Try to log your graph? Or do you need to log-star it?

I see what you did there. Now prove the hydra game in Peano arithmetic

If you're only looking to accumulate, buy 450$ worth of BTC in max 3 weeks from now, and the rest (500$) max 3 weeks after that. Once you buy, do not sell for any reason (say, below 1000-2000 [EDIT: or use rpietila's SSS]). Then plan again. Be prepared psychologically to see the BTC price go to 100$ and not sell. Many if not most on this thread attempt to trade up and down but study for at least 6 months before you attempt to do so with more than play money (maybe, 5% of your stash?). If you want to start trading, read read and read some more, backtest any strategy you form and don't attempt to "be first" on movements unless you are an insider.

Other than that, the regular advice about advice from strangers on the internet.

Yes, i agree. A small incentive goes a long way, both ways.

On-topic, are the books on huobi really that thin or are there only very many orders and wisdom gets lazy?

Nobody bothered by the 200 coins in bids total on huobi? Earlier today both books were a few hundred coins thin but in the last hour or so asks appeared all the way up, to some 2-3k total which is more or less typical. Is this some limitation of bitcoinwisdom on many orders?

Look up coinffeine for an example. There is no counterparty risk as far as i understand the system, but it is unclear to me how viable the fiat transfers are (you do many small chunks) due to fragmentation+fees and also might be inconvenient at times because the buyer needs to post btc collateral.

I agree with your words on Epsilon. He either has the system but keeps it private (makes sense) or is just good ideas in good PR prose (more likely IMO).

I'm new to this too. I found good information in the BTCe trollbox and "diffusion Fourier" convolutions for the price in minutes range, but they are all weak learners and need way more independence than i have now to be able to boost them.

I am looking for a way to implement time dilation/contraction depending on volume based on a wild shot but did not find meaningful patterns yet and autoregressors do not work at all (somewhat surprising based on my understanding there should be at least some residual effect; i can see it with my eyes but maybe it's an illusion and i'm barking at the wrong tree).

But hey, i shorted carefully at 1060 because the "china ban" seemed to shockwave in the microstructure and the primitive system seemed to get that one right. Daytrading is still impossible though. I need to look into scale-invariant invariants.

I think digesting is the best use of our time. Bitcoin is definitely not easy, and this is from a CS theory/game theory background.

I think NMC is not going to cut it and will end up just an alpha test. I think there are details to be fleshed out in how to implement name registration.

In the meanwhile, masterluc suggests red candles in the 'analysis never ends' thread ...

Bitcoinwisdom is completely fubar on Huobi.

Do they have a 90-minute engine "optimization"?
Why is the orderbook shifted by 60 CNY?
Sawtooth price soon?
Free replays on "greatest hits"?
Should we trade with confidence already?
De-escalate?

Don't bother, Jorge is or pretends to be thicker every day. Suitcases of cash and/or gold have worked for even more ambitious goals (see Loaded), and you can just fucking send a letter with a private key if you really really don't understand what Blockchain taint means.

You are very deluded if you believe bribe money passes through the personal bank accounts of those involved. The US officials you gave as example are simply retarded and/or set up and/or part of a PR campaign. You are also deluded if you believe fraud and loopholes are kept under control in China. They're not even kept under control in the "civilized world".

Finally, if someone were to use BTC for bribe money, be certain the transfer would be thoroughly sterilized through a bunch of exchanges and other BTC hygiene services worldwide. Do you seriously believe there is any way to stop or detect this? For all I know there already exists a BTC laundromat for oligarchs.

How exactly would that work? I have accidentally sent BTC to the wrong address a few times when withdrawing from the exchanges and it is no longer in my control.

As for the macro picture, Bitcoin is hazelnuts for China. They are desperately trying to pop their bubbles everywhere. Bitcoin was only one of the things that got more attention because of the price reaction. CNY is another. The grand credit contraption is trying to no avail to rev down.

Maybe you should refresh your prescription. Seems you suffer from an acute episode of 0 = 1.

Seems like... it's actually Stamp and BFX that are pushing..?  

EDIT: looks like BFX is retiring some shorts, but nothing really happens.
http://charts-bfxdata.rhcloud.com/bitfinexLiquidityPriceCombinedBTC.php

If that's what "under the radar" means... maybe they assume everybody has a 19th century radar...

So much delusion here. Look at 1h charts for Stamp and Huobi. Do you notice anything odd in the last two days?

http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/controlled-chaos-european-cities-do-away-with-traffic-signs-a-448747.html

Everyone who bashed this GIF with no second thought or research proved they are completely clueless in life.

Removing all traffic laws and signs (except a few like 50 km/h speed limit in towns) made traffic more fluent, safer and faster on average.
The Autobahns have significantly fewer accidents NORMALIZED for traffic volume than many other highways.
This movement will most likely become more widespread.

It goes with the Clarkson quote with spikes in the steering wheel and a few other ideas from behavioural economics:
1. People ignore >70% of traffic signs, and much more in the US where the sign spam is completely out of control.
2. People read recommendations as mandatory
    a. Lacking speed limits, most people drive at their comfort speed. Speed LIMITS are by definition above the comfort zone of most people; otherwise they are inefficiently low. With speed limits, people drive at speed limits or above (usually) even if that is no longer comfortable for them (i.e. how tired they are).
    b. When banks recommend a MAXIMUM of ~34% monthly income to go to house mortgage, the vast majority of people take that as default and end up over-extending.

In short, if you take the signs away, people drive more carefully and organically, minding their surroundings. This is completely foreign to US drivers due to feelings of entitlement and "being in the right" no matter what the local traffic conditions are. That's also one of the main causes for how many accidents there are on the US highways (mostly, in merging and lane changing).

In my home city, in my mostly lawless-driving EU country, people routinely drive at 100+ km/h during the night in cities, even if the speed limit is the classic 50. Almost all accidents happen when drivers were DUI, racing or irresponsible local-mafia brats.

Y'all really need to get your head out of the "we need to control you or you would kill eachother" arsehole. I though "antifragile" was trending?

Prisoners' dilemma is not realistic because that logic only works in one-time games. Society is a repeated game, and someone who defects most of the time is going to lose. If the majority defects most of the time, collusion will appear in which the cooperating minority cooperates inside the group and becomes better. Tit-for-tat (cooperate first) is a surprisingly excellent strategy. Very few non-colluding strategies can do better. The only collusion strategy that does way better is master-slaves. Trust me, 99% of the cases people invoke prisoners' dilemma they use it wrong. If anything, it proves how "unenlightened self-interest" (economic rationality) is dumb and suboptimal compared to "enlightened self-interest" (economic super-rationality).

It is similar to the implications of Godel's theorems. A Turing machine cannot transcend its condition, but mathematicians are not Turing machine. Guess what, neither machine learning is Turing-limited because it is computation in the limit. Don't be the Turing machine in society.

Regarding 2, yes, that is a problem. I do not believe it is a fatal problem, because there exist Pareto superior options almost always. Just like (artifical example) VCG auctions make everybody be truthful (barring collusion).

Wisdom: 100% from concentrate

Incentives are EVERYTHING; people need to understand that they cannot assume everyone (most others) to be truthful and that if they align incentives in a game-theoretical setting everyone (each and all) is better off, with the exception of the parasites and the myopic, who are better off in a system that is so easy to game

So many people do not understand freedom. You're not free when you can do something. You're free when you can do whatever you want, no questions asked, unless you break someone else's freedom. Since there are always petty conflicts of interests (smokers vs non-smokers), apply tolerance. If you don't like something, it's generally you who should adapt/avoid.

Let me say I didn't manage to actually RUN the simulation. Chrome does not know Java is installed, tried installing it from Chrome's install link and nothing. Opera, Firefox and IE(!) know it's installed but is apparently blocked by some security setting SOMEWHERE because the code isn't signed. (IE didn't even know that, only reported SecurityException's). Found the option in Java settings (Control Panel, i know i know) and set it to "lowest" which apparently means only a allow/block prompt for unsigned code. Now none of the browsers is able to put the goddam parameters in the applet so I get some "height = 0" exception. What the fuck, man? Is Java completely dead like ActiveX already?

To each their own, that's 10 seconds (more in practice) for every intersection you ever drive through. It adds up. Also, I'm much more annoyed by traffic lights waiting than, say, crowded and slowish traffic.

EDIT: to continue the circle jerk with an actual example of real and not simulated traffic light masturbation

http://www.ziarmm.ro/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/semafor-stupid-gold-plaza-baia-mare.jpg

Relax, I'm running a usable Windows 7 in a vBox on unusable Debian. That's the spirit. If you respect real security practices, you only browse with Lynx on handmade hardware

Troll harder. Even grandpa can see the functional traffic lights in there. If anything, you prove people do dumb shit when presented with traffic lights.

So given how this thread is always on-topic, I would like to hear a few reasons for and against NXT, if you ladies and gentlemen have an opinion on the matter.

This comment is retarded. If companies are considered economic entities on their own, independent of the humans who run them, why wouldn't your fridge be an economic entity on its own, independent of the humans it runs for? Why wouldn't people's t-shirts make them money by displaying ads? Each t-shirt would likely have its own wallet. Bitcoin injects steroids into ubiquitous computing.

The non-statist version: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=590970.0

Looks like the plan IS to get the police in.

Police is an institution, like State or Law or Church. From the Gendarmery to the SS or Three-Letter-Acronym-Agencies. They are state mandated violence (not debating right or wrong here).

I don't think there's anything remarkable about Cyprus. It's just the perfect place to run a hit-and-run money operation and that's why EVERYONE uses Cyprus.

I think many did. But then other things happened out of Cyprus as well, not least the Neo/Bee failwagen.

I've started to believe Cyprus was mostly bail-in beta and moving some oil-igarch money to London/Berlin. I don't think any meaningful regulation changed.

Indeed.

Poland http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-09-06/poland-confiscates-half-private-pension-funds-cut-sovereign-debt-load
Apparently soon to come to a bank near you in the US/UK/EU

I understand that mah87 is on everyone's ignore list but...

...Ven Currency founder Stan Stalnaker informed delegates that at a recent meeting with US watchdogs he was told that FinCen and Treasury experts expect bitcoin to be one of the world's top 20 currencies within 20 years.

In a later panel, investor Udayan Goyal made the boldest prediction of the day: that crypto-currencies will kill Swift within three years. To back up his claim, Goyal used the example of Fidor Bank, which now uses Ripple to move money between three countries without even touching Swift...

That is the Quadrillion Dollar question. There are many arguments for and against, and this is just a lazy hash of my thought on the matter.

It can be argued FOR, that Bitcoin effectively acts as an inflation hedge and so a war in Europe would be solid fuel boosters to take us out of the atmosphere. The counter-argument is that gold and silver are going down even with QE4ever in full throttle and that the same causes  can depress Bitcoin similarly.

It can also be argued AGAINST, that Bitcoin is still mostly considered a very high risk speculative asset (one vote per fiat unit invested) and so, if the whole worldwide Ponzi collapses then it will be one of the first to see investors selling to cover other failing investments, with the usual speculator/momentum component for some spectacular Bitcoin-style oomph. This is supported by the observation that metals fell when the crash in 2008 really hit the markets. The counter-argument is that Bitcoin is not really metal but a new asset class because... well, google "internet"..., and as such, when money rushes to the exits, more money rushes into Bitcoin than rushes out, with some hysteresis of course.

If you asked me, without pretending to really understand the forces at play, I believe we will go down, then (possibly all the way) up, so it is viable to keep buying on the way down as long as you are not leveraged and you can afford to lose all in a black swan Bitcoin failure. I also believe that in the Bitcoin economy, most bears are bulls incognito.



But completely hijacking the conversation, I posted earlier a link to another thread about Sunlot and you-cannot-make-this-shit-up shenanigans. I got a few rightfully concerned replies, but no real discussion. Does nobody care? I think it's a serious indirect risk to the Bitcoin economy...

Mixed the pills again grandpa?

This is not true. It is not strictly true that you need new money to revisit ATHs. If nobody sells, the price goes up forever. The trick is how to convince everybody that nobody else will panic. This is exactly what the West CBs attempt now.

Grandpa has some serious lag. They must still be seeing The Gox at 1000$/BTC in order to feel so... pumped.

I believe you are naive in your dismissal. Most if not all fresh mined coins are bought over the counter through long-term contracts. Merchants don't depress the market because hodlers are not suddenly buying all they can buy with Bitcoin. The YEN is inflating fast too, but it's not going down relative to the USD. The higher BTC goes the fewer BTC the hodlers need to sell. And so on. Actually, why would any hodler sell now unless he was squeezed somewhere else?

Markets have two regimes, depending on whether the majority is investors or speculators. In a 100% speculator market where a few large players collude, the price can move up while the cartel is unloading or otherwise ("manipulation"). The cartel can offer a global implicit put ("bailout"). A bubble only breaks when the common knowledge that the price goes up forever starts to falter. When enough players doubt, the market reverses suddenly into the same behaviour, but down.

The point is that, again, if nobody sells then the price goes up forever. It is not even necessary that nobody sells. The unstable equilibrium between the attractors requires that volume goes down as 1/x if you have a fixed amount of cash in the system. Exchange fees simply move the equilibrium to a narrower function, like 1/x^2.

You sound like an excellent player of the game, but you do not, or pretend not to understand how to play the players. In a speculator market like BTC, alts, stocks and everything now, stocks in the 20's, there is no fair value. There is no correct price. It is all a coordination game. I seriously doubt you actually ignore that the other players are strategic too. There are times when that assumption works, but that is not the case now.

I believe you know exactly what I'm talking about and that you're talking your books with no pretense for objectivity (which was established to be the correct behaviour earlier).

I find it more worrisome that they all seem to have a massive fetish with the interpol and DoJ and whatever satanic imagery. The identity blur between various parties makes it worse in this respect. If I had my tinfoil had within reach I would suggest some Police wants to turn Gox into a honey pot? I though they might be interested in personal data of users but seriously, that shit was leaked for 200 BTC or something like that. Surely TPTB have a backup to that, in case of multiple unrelated catastrophic storage failure, certainly.

You're missing the point. This is not about Bitcoin, this is about any speculative bubble. It could be Ponzi tulips or housing or anything. If nobody sold, the price would go up forever. I've clarified in the next post that some selling can occur at the same time.

You're also in another place semantically than I am. I am talking strictly about BTCUSD. People could use BTC to buy food, as long as BTC selling for USD is controlled and the BTFATH narrative does not stop. BTCUSD would still go up forever.

Arbitrage you say? Arbitrage is not realized in that case, only a massive, massive carry trade. From another point of view: say there's 1000 paper pUSD printed, and about 100k dUSD in zero maturity debt. Supposedly 1 pUSD = 1 dUSD because they're (mostly) fungible. If nobody lost faith in the credit system there would be no run on paper and thus they would stay fungible (even with the gross difference in total money). It is only when liquidity disappears (i.e. when players do not trust the "all algos buy mode" narrative) that the fungibility is lost.

The moral is, one exponential growth completely trumps any lesser exponential growth. Just like Bitcoin blocks have a consistent average of 6-7 minutes instead of 10 for a while now because hashrate grows exponentially, difficulty grows exponentially with the same rate, but delayed a bit. You could extract money from the market as arbitrage constantly, without changing the price ratios in the process. Like a free lunch, if it went up forever. Just like in a hotel with countable rooms, even if the hotel is full you can free a room for a new guest. Or for a thousand. Or for countably many. There's always room in that hotel. There's always juice to extract with arbitrage. In practice, both strategies (hotel, arbitrage) fail when your support ceases to be unbounded so it doesn't feel infinite anymore. That's when people panic.

The real problem is the communication in this untrustful cooperation game. The feedback cycles are powerful enough to be able to move the price anywhere, except in a catastrophic collapse of communication (i.e. Gox megalag, China "banning" Bitcoin, etc). The narrative weakens as the run is extending and some conservative investors pull out etc, then there is a brief moment of silence and there is a phase shift similar to a supercritical crystal collapse. Now it's all vibrating at resonance, in a fragile state of low entropy, then sudden quiet. One second/minute/week later, everybody realises that confusion has set in and pull the lever. The crystal is now shattered at a micro level, in a high entropy state. Work needs to be spent for nucleation to happen again.

Earlier than I expected.

EDIT: Ah, they're only studying it. Good, good.

Some longs were closed on BFX http://charts-bfxdata.rhcloud.com/bitfinexLiquidityPriceCombinedBTC.php

pwnd

You might have gotten your PR.

More longs closing on BFX
http://charts-bfxdata.rhcloud.com/bitfinexLiquidityPriceCombinedBTC.php

Smells almost like the US is preparing to abandon the HMS Petrodollar.

Best MMO ever!

BFX longs closing. Below 15M USD in swaps http://charts-bfxdata.rhcloud.com/bitfinexLiquidityPriceCombinedBTC.php

You accumulate better if you short from time to time

All BTC bears are actually BTC bulls. Otherwise they would be buying the SP500.

http://charts-bfxdata.rhcloud.com/bitfinexLiquidityPriceCombinedBTC.php
Look at all-time data on the second chart. It looks alright to me.
I suppose many baghodl instead of taking the loss. BFX has always been bullish.
And the rates are not that bad, you can definitely hold a position for a week or two.

Tech always wins. Some haves will adapt, some not. Some have nots will adapt, some not. Many people will die or be in a state of social suspension until they die. There are too many people on Earth, but there will be even more. We're burning debt with inflation and more struggle. The net effect is that society accelerates exponentially (and has done so for a while now). Tech loves this. Tech loves everyone. Not everyone loves tech. They will be swept away.

Hey Jorge, I heard you named Earth Mover Distance in like... last century. Came up in my research. My respect for you grows.

So TL;DR is something like this: warn public, no marketing, no cash in after 10.05 or ... no fractional reserve? or ... no more leverage for the traders?, then HFT tax = volume disappears, and finally "we will do what you want just please please"?

Did I get this right?

Do not try and bend the trendline. That's impossible. Instead only try to realize the truth.
What truth?
There is no trendline.

Huh, interesting. Truth be told by that distinction I was using the Wasserstein metric. I always assumed they are the same thing, just like all laws of large numbers are the same thing even if some some weird names.

Completely unrelated, I had the luck to take an introductory class to probability theory with Sinai (student of Kolmogorov) and that guy is simply a presence... Apparently he won some "lifetime" 6M NOK prize. I bet he's spent it on vodka imports already.

I bet they have their shorts open from 500+ and have no plan to close.

+1

I'm sure the tweet is just manipulation though </sarc>

Depending on the market, i expect to be fully 400% in BTC by mid june. I am still high-risk accumulating. I also have deep-out puts for hedging. It would take a lot of error from my prediction to change that default. But for now i am short.

When did you start trading and, if you bought 1 BTC when you started trading, how much would you have now?

Normalize your holding by your initial investment. What's your ROI? Did you buy once at the beginning or did you accumulate?

Impressive. You must be 10 years older than in March. And 20 wiser at least.

The only thing I'm worried about is that the CB's freak out when stocks try to correct and put the printers on overdrive again. Nobody affords deflation right now. The tower of debt is too high compared to the tower of currency.

Why are you doing this? It refreshes on its own for me :/

They traded the first derivatives too if I'm not mistaken?

I use bitlisten minimized. I actually like the tunes, and big transactions sound dramatic.

Last year they had the same difference and at the time that was because it is much harder to get USD in BTCe. This was reflected in USDEUR too for example.

I don't know if that is still the case.

Add one more https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=594826

Given that the Foundation is no longer trustworthy IMO this looks like just the next step in the long con. It's even worse if the PTB are behind Sunlot - don't forget how much private data Gox had. Witch hunting anyone?

Sounds like Huobi is in full zero-reserve-mode.

A very lucid argument for playing devil's advocate. I believe Jorge is a troll of much underestimated skill. My respect for you grows again, sir.

Man, relax. All the negativity is shortening your life and all this energy is better spent elsewhere.

Allow me to correct you on a matter of semantics. A troll, by definition, is entirely conscious of the facade they play. It is the name of the game to make it as outrageous as possible but realistic enough that it is not dismissed out of hand. So everyone should know the troll is full of shit, but everyone should believe others might fall for it. This is when you get an echo chamber of warnings about the troll, of other trolls recognising the act of trollery and joining the act. The ultimate troll is a Chaos Master. I strongly believe now that Jorge is an expert troll. Look at how smoothly he argued that he's playing the devil's advocate. Then he admitted he knows the audience is not the target of his obligation.

And all we do now is sit in the middle of the echo chamber and keep feeding the troll. Jorge is likely on cloud nine.

That article is way too relaxed given the true magnitude of the problem. There was an article on zerohedge a few weeks ago. Apparently more than half of all that debt is not used for school at all. There are people who do the third useless undergrad degree because you don't need to pay the student loans when you study. So you just get degree after degree on student debt. Some people apparently understand the black hole they're falling into any say there's nothing else they can do. They just hope the government will forgive them, because federal student debt is not bankrupt-able. And you know what, the government will, going itself further into the black hole. Indirectly, like, allow people to take undergraduate degrees forever. I'm sure they can just add the death-defaults to freddy and fannie.

I feel like you just got trollrolled.