Bitcoin Forum

and there it was, boom!

what happened?

2nd part of the wordpress rally. The bulk waited for the right trigger to buy after they wired their cash to mtgox.
Sheeple, herding and such.  That was well expected.

What triggered it, at this point in time? Probably what Mister M. had last breakfast. :)

we are nearing the reward halving, expect high volatility; spikes and crashes

good.

boom. Just boom ..  :-\

People were getting hungry for thanksgiving! Happy thanksgiving everyone!  :D

Someone bought ~36K BTC. In one big bite. (More than 420000 USD worth.)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/5e/Cisforcookie.jpg

That's unprecedented, one person? squeezing whatever bears we had, wassup mr. m. up we go.

 :D

It tends to happen when a lot of funds hit Mt.Gox all at once. (Waiting bids get filled in.)

It's either that... or... a big blue bitcoin monster... :)

He may have made the best investment of his life.

For people on a cost averaging purchase plan like myself, it's psychologically very difficult to buy on spike days like today.  I hate paying up.

And yet, I look at the trend in news during the past few days: Wordpress, Spain banning cash transactions over €2500, etc.

And I press the buy button.  With urgency.

$12.15, still a bargain.

Yuuuuuuup and don,t forget Paypal is digging there own grave to.....

wrong - no more than 15K... check the data

i think it's just the latest pump and dump.

i think he took 2 days and 12 hours time period.

so youre both right.

For someone to buy 36k BTC, then that means some other people sold 36k BTC. The reason for price to rise is buyers out number sellers. A trade for 36k BTC doesn't mean anything, could happen in a crash too.

THIS!

http://i47.tinypic.com/vg4v7t.png

just small illustration of the events discussed.

Weird. Clark Moody did indicate 30K volume from ~11.7 to 12.00.
And 5-6K more up from ~12.00 up to 12.10 some minutes later.

Anyhow. It looks like I was quite wrong. I humbly submit to the data and offer my apology.


What sorcery is this? I don't think I've seen this tool before.

It's my service bitcoin-analytics.com (http://bitcoin-analytics.com).
and yes I had reprted those volume descripancies to clark before.

We on bitcoin-analytics.com get trading data from bitcoincharts.com and clark uses mtgox streamAPI so this possibly is the cause of differences. In general the difference is that clark's service shows double volume than ours at spikes. And at spikes it is clearly visible. But I guess it is not big deal cause it seams nobody really cares... Althought I think this is very important.

Dem rockets  ;D

Who is right then?

http://i46.tinypic.com/xcneit.png


Although we are working on implementing mtgox streamAPI interface, we currently plan to release only orderbook volume based on full orderbook state.

From this experience I must admit that it is not as easy as one could think. To make it stable and robust. And in case of trade stream this task needs to be made much more carefull because of tricky filtering of only those trades which are relevant to the chart as the same trade can appear twice in cases when trade involves automatic currency conversions (based on mtgox stream api docs).
And we yet did not feel like touching this area yet, thus relying on bitcoincharts  trade stream which is universal for all exchanges. And support for multiple exchanges is our priority.

Nevertheless we really apriciate Clark's work which is an excelent example of design and usability for us.

how do you guys figure it was just one buyer? That makes no sense whatsoever.

few guess..

- second wave from cash transfert after WP news
- BitInstant article that Challenge Wiki
- a big intelligent investor
- start of a more volatile market due to the halving (I would not bet on it, neighter on a significant increase in volatility or price swing due to halving)

imo, halving may have an effect on the long term, due to less pressure downward from miner having less coin to sell..

Actually there is no way to tell it except when big trade is performed in 15 seconds interval or in several consequtive intervals. In latter case it is also a guess... Also there are very often trades rounded by 0,5K or 1K BTC. When this happens and you see big trade of 3.5K for example, you can be sure that is was one person order than several which coincided into 3.5K

did you say....420?

I envy you who aren't dealing with 3 strike laws. In the mean time more moonshine and designers. Which if you haven't figured out yet is why some of, well most of my post are garbage junky slur.
Legalize soon for humanity!

Thanks. I had no idea. That does sound pretty bad.  

If true, it seems very likely that this behavior has, and will continue to,
wrongly influence people's investment decisions in the aftermath of major movements.

(And perhaps lead to bigger swings when swings first happen.)

I mean, imagine if the kitco (http://www.kitco.com/charts/livegoldnewyork.html) had an intermittent and erroneous 2x volatility multiplier. Scandal.

Questions:

(1) How do you know it is not the other way around? (I have to ask.)
(2) Is bitcoin.clarkmoody.com the only service affected? In particular: Is btccharts.com reliable?

Bug report (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=43514.msg1353562#msg1353562) posted to clark.

Hi, as I showed in clark's thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=43514.msg1354178#msg1354178)

and as also acknowledged one post after (http://one post after) the error definitly is not on our side.

as for the btccharts I do not have any data yet.
Maybe someone who has can say something?

TRIGGER: Bitcoin Viagra!  :D

ROFL!

http://img.reversegif.com/11263.gif
 ;D ;D ;D ;D

what a waste of scroll

Not necessarily.

...and that just now is how you do your classic MtG pump and dump for dollars, which we have seen on MtG from the earliest days.  :D

The B exchanges are a joke, because they all still follow MtG and its pumpNdump teams up and down. Pathetic!  :D

Any price difference leads to arbitrage, which traders will quickly take advantage of and close the price gap.

:) Depends on what "quickly" means to you. We've been waiting for arbitrage since other exchanges started to appear, which is what - more than a year now? Instead, they all simply follow MtG rates worldwide like a bunch of zombies.  ::)

To me, simply confirms and reconfirms that the B xchange rate to any currency has little to no foundation in real supply and demand. Rather, it is still set by MtG pump & dump artists, and perhaps even MtG trading against itself. When all the other xchanges worldwide simply follow that, there is no way to tell what's really happening...

I think it's one of the main reasons B is still considered a ponzi scam in the mainstream, and something not to take seriously.  :D

Quickly usually means as soon as the bots notice, which is what makes the exchanges follow MtGox. If you're trying to do it manually you'll usually be too slow and the trades will be too small to make it worthwhile.

so how do these bots run? custom software?

The problem with timely arbitrage is moving the FIAT from exchange to exchange.

Yes.

To do arbitrage you need to have sufficient funds on account at each exchange to allow for the time to move funds and rebalance accounts.

The following of exchanges is precisely why you know arbitrage is happening. That's what it does - it makes exchanges follow each other. The reason they follow MtGox is because it has the order depth. If another exchange moved away from MtGox and also had sufficient depth available then MtGox would follow it.

ie. If I sold a large amount of Bitcoin on exchange X, once I used up it's available buyers, arbitrage would bring more buyers who would then sell on MtGox and cause it's price to follow downwards. It's faster and cheaper to move the Bitcoins than the fiat currency so the response is asymmetrical.

yes. and there is also cost associated with moving the moneys.


arbitrage happening is not the only reason for the other exchanges following gox. Another one is everybody using gox as leading price.

+1 The arbitrage is a neat theory of the future, or the way things should be, which i also hoped would be true back when MtG was the only xchange...

I think it's not true, because we regularly see small 20-30 cent discounts at #2-3 exchanges, from which "the traders" don't "quickly take advantage of and close the price gap."
                                                   
So, we see tall mountains of discounted B there, which would be easy to move, and know from that "the traders" don't actually have even small fiat funds at those xchanges to move B for arbitrage...

When there is a juicy pump and dump going on at MtG, they simply follow that pump & dump's general price levels...  ::)

So, it will be interesting to see which hypothesis is true, when Bitcoin is big enough for the regulators to move into the xchanges.  8)

(We'll then at least have some certainty that the xchanges are not adding a few zeros to their databases to trade with themselves in order to fleece their new-money "customers" in the consequent pump & dump waterfalls. And we might finally see the pump & dumpers bring us a p2p dark xchange, where they can continue their games... ) :D

I doubt you'll see that very often if you compare the order book and not the last traded price, unless the volume is very small. Remember that you have to buy at the sell price on one exchange and sell at the bid price on the other. This spread will usually be too large or the order book too thin for there to be an actual arbitrage opportunity.

Not just that spread but also add the cost of moving fiat between exchanges. An arbitrageur is going to include all costs of doing any trade so there is no doubt a few percent for moving fiat to balance, and so anything within a few percent won't be jumped on, even if beyond the spread. I looked at doing this last year, and wrote some code to monitor a few exchanges using their apis, and then decided there was little opportunity even when seemingly reasonable variations happened between exchanges.

Spread + 2x trade fees + fiat transfer fees + opportunity cost on balances + risk of exchange hacking. I haven't followed anything recently so I don't know what's going on with the prices except a casual glance each day.

Here (http://bitcoin-analytics.com/#arbitrage) at bitcoin-analytics.com we provide exactly this tool which helps to see most (not all yet) arbitrage opportunities.

The key feature is that percentage and absolute value of potential profit depends not only on the best price but also on volume of funds you consider.

The arbitrage tool allows you to analyze a set of existing arbitrage opportunites depending on volume.

http://i45.tinypic.com/15nug0h.png
here is a small explanation

Thanks! Looks like a nice tool for the traders!

So, assuming you guys are right, seems that the MtG pump & dumps - whether they are generated by MtG  trading with itself or not - will continue in the foreseeable future, because among other reasons at steadier rates "the arbitrage" is not profitable enough...

The non-"traders" and the merchants will just have to put up with the rate instability, and constantly pay exchanges and processors (aka "the traders"?) to convert back to fiat on both ends to avoid bigger losses...

And some of our members here will continue to wonder why they "can't give Bitcoin away" to their friends these days, or donate it to Wikipedia, or why widespread adoption hasn't happened yet...  ???

I guess, that's just life in the "truly free market".  :D