Bitcoin Forum

$10 straight clean arbitrage to be had going from Stamp to BTC-E....

.....if you reckon you could sneak any meaningful volume past the bots holding up the price on BTC-e.

I for one shall not be taking my chances.

That's 1.2%. Wouldn't even be worth the fees and slippage.

2* 0.2% = 0.8%

Not bad for doing jack....except no way would anyone get any meaningful volume sold on BTC-e at the 'advertised' spot price. Most likely you would have to sell at a loss to get liquid again, before a bot 0.0034593456 BTC transaction sent the spot price to $10 over what you just sold at.

2 * .2% = .4%

You forgot about slippage.

1.2% - (2* .2% ) = 0.8%.

And actually it is a bit better than that.....

.....furthermore, any higher than decimal figures volume of BTC on Stamp is going for $3-5 less than the micro-transaction determined spot price on Stamp....so even more margin still, at least until you get your coins onto BTC-E and learn the hard way about trying to take small margins in bot controlled electronic markets.

Moral of the story is that there is no arbitrage and prices on all USD exchanges are being artificially held up for some reason. I never seen such blatantly mechanical trading across the respectable exchanges as I have witnessed today. Certainly this morning, on Bistamp, there was 1000 BTC of Asks standing between spot price and my Stop Loss buy orders. Now there is almost 2000.

How do you artificially hold up an exchange rate? If I wanted to sell my BTC I sell and that now means there are less dollars to buy any more BTC.

Right now, there exists an unusually large gap between Bid and Ask walls on Bistamp with unusually steep walls lining up at 815 and 825 respectively. In between them, there is not very much to speak off. However, all a bot (or a person) has to do is buy 0.01 BTC into the Ask wall, and that is the spot price at 825. So along comes Joe Bloggs to buy some Bitcoins and if he doesn't know any better, he thinks the price of a Bitcoin is 825, and puts in an order for 10 BTC @ 825, thus eating 10 BTC into the ask wall and probably taking the BTC from the bot owners account as their bots will ensure their coins are 1 cent cheaper than all the other coins on the wall. Thus the price is manipulated higher than the market wants it to be and the bot operators get to sell their coins at a higher price than everyone else.

But anytime there is any meaningful volume being shifted on Stamp at the moment, it is always at markedly lower prices than the spot price being maintained by algorithmic bot micro-trades. However as soon as an 80 BTC order goes through at $816, the bot orders 0.001 BTC at the ask wall, and the spot price is back up at 825 within a microsecond.

I might believe a few hundred milliseconds, but within a microsecond?  Surely you are being hyperbolic.

Bots are people too, trying to make a profit. If you are sure of this, use cryptotrader to program one yourself to outwit the "evil" bots.

So are conmen and thieves.

Bot operators are moulding, mishaping, and manipulating market and bring nothing of value to the market except giving their owners an advantage over everyone else.

If they are indeed misshaping the market, the market will correct them eventually.  Bots have no advantage in altering price.

They are operated by whales who have their vast capital stacked on both sides of the Bid/Ask wall, manipulating the unaware into their nets and manipulating panic or bullish sentiment into the market. Without bots, this would be a full time job and would require razor sharp market acumen with still huge margin for slip ups due to limitations of human response times.

With bots, all they need is the capital, the BTC, and the will to rape the market.

If the real market forces are pushing things in a different direction, these guys will be first to know about it and will change their bot algorithmic strategies accordingly.

But is that the definition of a free market enterprise?  If it's legal, which it is, and you can create it, lots of people have, then its free markets at its best.  If you (or anyone) can create a bot that does "better" then the current bots on the various exchanges, they would do it and profit from it.  The hard part is not creating the bot itself, it can be done, the "hard" part is having enough capital to support both sides of the walls while turning enough profit without the fees building up.

....and if you have the capital, then you are free to piss over all other market participants.

Right now for example, the market clearly wants to go down, yet it is being brutally nailed up by bot trading refusing to let it sink to where it wants to sink to across all USD exchanges. Never since I started paying close attention has the spot price manipulation been so blatant and translated on the charts as so mechanical.

In whose benefit is this being done? And incase you are pleased that the price is being artificially propped up in this way, what do you think could happen when/if such artificial supports were to be suddenly removed. Would it be reasonable to consider that we may have a more brutal sell-off than we otherwise might have had. Same thing can happen when the bot trading is keeping spot price down preventing a bull run from taking off and the flood gates are then released resulting in a much more voracious (and volatile) upsurge than would have otherwise occurred.

Either direction, the owners of the bots will be clearly be best positioned to benefit from the consequences of the market disturbances that they cause.

Who the fuck are you to say what the market wants?

Besides, isn't the capital involved in the market what makes the market?  So why shouldn't those with the most capital at risk control the pacing?

I have been sitting for much of the day, watching this absurd $815 - $825 battle going on, whereby any serious volume of trade brings the price down closer to $815 level, only for a microtransaction of 0.02 btc or something to be triggered immediately afterwards bringing the spot price back up to $825. Even on the minute chart this makes it look as though high volume trades are happening at the Ask wall, but this is bullshit and it can be seen to be bullshit by the near perfect ruler drawn lines that appearing along the top of the candlesticks on the short term 1,3,5 minute charts. If the bots were preventing the market from driving price up, these lines would appear along the bottom of the candlesticks.

In the meantime, the Bid and Ask walls are piling up on Bitstamp. At the start of the day, there was 500 BTC of Asks in between the spot price and my stop loss order. There is now over 2000 BTC and the Ask volume has been steadily piling up and advancing on 'no man's' land, whereas the Bid volume in close range to the spot hasn't really moved at all.

That is who I am to say what the market wants u damn fuckwit.

Oh, there we go. The old bear whimper again. let me pictorize that...

http://s.buzzfed.com/static/imagebuzz/terminal01/2010/1/26/14/bear-with-foot-long-tongue-14326-1264534270-16.jpg

Maybe you should take a walk.  Sitting all day staring at charts isn't good for you.  There's plenty of money to be made here without stressing out about it.

You asked who I was to proclaim that the market wants to trend down. Hopefully my explanation was sufficient enough that even a complete fool could look at the charts and development of the Ask/Bid wall for themselves and comprehend that what I am stating about the market being obstructed is in fact undeniably correct.

The market wants Bitcoin to trend down. This is what would happen if there wasn't a defensive dam preventing it from doing so. Because it is what should happen, I am betting heavily on it playing out. This however is no guarantee that it will happen, as it is not hard to grasp, that if man is capable of putting flood barriers in place to protect his land until the flood waters drain away or the tide goes back out, he is certainly capable of erecting a different type flood barrier to protect the market value of a financial asset, providing of course that is his intentions............perhaps he just wants to save all that flood water up and let it go in one devastating flush?

Whatever the case, there is such a huge amount of pressure building up, that if the market does break to the down side, it could smash right through the $765 floor. For this reason, I have removed my $772 profit taking buy in order. If this is gonna go my way, it is gonna go a lot further my way than that.

Youre screwed, by the time you realize it you will cover short and go long and THATS when it will go down. When  everyone least expects it. BTW how many people do you know got richer going short vs long on BTC? I saw the same type of people getting wiped out in 2011 when the fed was "going to stop QE2" ha now look at it.

I am far from screwed my friend.

I could already position my short cover to a break even level and still have 1500 BTC of Ask orders in front of me.

His analysis about the behaviour of the bots are spot on. I´m not sure if a huge drop is about to come in in the next hours/days,
but right now  it´s bots who are keeping the price up on Stamp/Gox for whatever reason it is.

I was looking at using the current price difference to send some money from coinbase to buy a little more LTC.  In the past we have consistently seen bitstamp (and therefore coinbase), be slightly higher than btc-e, so by sending btc in the past you were already losing some money off the top (in addition to the fees from coinbase and the trading fees of btc-e).

I agree his observations are valid in that the "last" price is being pegged to the ask side.  What I disagree with is his jump to the conclusion that the market wants to go down.  If the market, which is made up of the capital at risk in the market, wanted to go down it would be down. Since it is not down, we can assume that there is sufficient capital to absorb any sells at this point in time.  He is also right that pressure is building.  But I am far less certain than he of the direction we will break out.  All I know is that when we do start moving, we will move decisively.

Perhaps some big boys need to cash out. Perhaps they are Chinese. Perhaps the FBI are wanting as healthy a bidding war for the DPR coins as possible. Perhaps someone is really wanting to fk market over and is intentionally allowing huge sell-off pressure to build up.

???

Who knows, but what I do know is that it is the most dodgy and fabricated that these charts have ever behaved since I started paying attention over the past couple of months.

The market wants to go down, only if there was no other market that is preventing it from going down.  Silly market.

Yes. The market where BTC really changes actually hands in large volumes is being obstructed by the market where BTC gets passed from a whales left pocket to his right pocket in mostly micro-sized volumes.

Silly market.

Any imaginary cord shouldn't be too hard to break.

Nothing big will happen before jan 31. Just relax and watch the show unfold till then.

Eh?

Do you trade at all? If you did, and did so within short time frames, you would know that it can be a right fucker trying to get either in or out of market at Ask/Sell walls depending on which direction bots are manipulating. If you get in easy at the Bid wall, then you will generally have difficulty getting out at Ask wall with any meaningful volume. So often have I thought myselkf to be a real clever dick by judging little $30 swings perfectly, only to find that I am forced to cut my 'profits margins' considerably in order to exit the market, and this is with as little as 10-20 BTC.

If there is enough clout behind these chords, then they can be damn hard to break.

Did everyone miss this part where Coinwhalebase boasts on their whaleness>?

http://www.wired.com/business/2014/01/overstock-bitcoin-live/ (http://www.wired.com/business/2014/01/overstock-bitcoin-live/)

Still, Coinbase — which recently received $25 million from big-name Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz — is confident it can minimize the risk by using software to carefully monitor price fluctuations. Coinbase runs a system that manages bitcoin transactions not only for businesses like Overstock but for about 750,000 individuals. Much as a bank like Goldman Sachs runs software to track price fluctuations as it juggles billions of dollars, Coinbase uses its hedging software to track all of the bitcoins it manages, deciding when to buy and sell bitcoins and adjust its exchange rate in an effort to minimize risk.

Goldman, where Coinbase’s Ehrsam previously worked, uses its software in an effort to make highly profitable trades, and Coinbase merely uses its system to protect its own position. But the inner-workings of the software are similar. “It’s algorithmic trading,” says Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong. “It hedges that exchange rate risk in the background, every day.”


..nothing like frontrunning your clients and customers to make sure you pinch every trade..  he is from Goldman afterall!
and yes they trade on Stamp and they used to trade on Gox when they started..  not sure if they still do

Watch coinbase's price during takedowns of the price on either stamp or btc-e...  you will see the spread go as wide as $30 and in fact i have seen it widen before the takedowns on stamp happen which means that was the times they were the ones doing the takedown... and yes I have frontrunned that a few times

Sorry, but isn't this simply the market being "efficient"? It is making it harder for you to exploit the inefficiency you were looking to exploit.

eh! WTF?

You obviously aint been listening!

First, everyone whines that bitcoin is volatile.  And now that it's stable, everyone whines that they can no longer make money off the volatility.

because mining is dying and just about dead too...  we all would of been happy for stable $1200 price since Nov!

but with both mining and trading about dead we probably have to work now to make more money   :P

But its not stable.

Its fake manipulated stable and when enough Bid orders build up, Fkn Whack! Some whale drops a shit ton of coin right on the Bid wall triggering about 800 suckers' bids within 20 seconds, then the price dips and bounces back on low volume, and is artificially upheld to allow for conditions to build up for next mammoth cash out.

We are in a cash-out phase just now and I wouldn't be surprised to see yet more surprising 'strength' at this slightly lower but almost equally narrow trading range as yesterday, only for a Bid wall to be triggered by some bot dumping 800+ coins on the market in a big dirty manipulating rat oner.

I constantly have my eyes on the Ask depth standing in front of my Stop Loss buy order, and it is piling up incessantly as the Ask's accumulate around the spot, yet Bitcoin remains 'stable'.

Bullshit....totall fkn sham the whole lot of it.

hah the great rotation.. it'll probably stay in this range until wall street can scam IRA money into this

Question is, what happens to the market after the whales have cashed out enough and the bots stop holding the market up?

miner apocalypse

Historically, difficulty has corrected when mining remained unprofitable long enough.  The ASIC ramp up with mostly preorders, and the subsequent rally has delayed the correction to difficulty, but new hardware that is currently available is still tough to justify.  There are still preorders of more efficient hardware in development though, so we have a bit of a delay between purchase decision and operations that will provide support to difficulty though short periods (2-3 months) of price bearishness.  If price doesn't recover in that time, difficulty will slow it's growth or even decline after this next generation of hardware ships and saturates.

Well.  As of now, Gox and Huobi have completely decoupled from Stamp.There is a clear pattern of Coinbase / whale / mysterious dark force keeping the price stable on stamp. Betting on the horse, feeding it with love. The goal may be artificial support towards cash out, the goal may just as well be artificial support for bitcoin's image towards an investor group, the goal may be to slowly accumulate all these coins that are being cashed out. Who knows. Does it matter? Facts are facts. The price is being supported. No point hyperventilating. Choose your theory as to why, and place your bets accordingly.

I see actually a great deal of logic in a careful accumulation of all coins being cashed out through stamp whilst the other exchanges breathe their last. Especiallly if a stable price is maintained, with all the outward cred that broadcasts to whatever investors / public image one is trying to keep corralled.

Refreshing to see others around that can see the wood for the trees.

It would matter a great deal whether the artificial price support was geared towards cashing out a certain volume of BTC at as high a price as possible or projecting an image of stability towards an investor group, or even to accumulate 'cheap' coins (which I doubt cos $820 'aint cheap'). Depending on what the motivations were behind the policy of artificial price support, would greatly determine what my own outlook on Bitcoin was going to be.

it boils down to wondering what the inflow/outflows of btc & fiat are in each exchange and in coinbase..  if you have that you remove the fog of war..  of course we don't get to see that but the ones running those place do...

and they aren't regulated like a casino (casinos have to disclose everything)
they are basically dark pools, and some actually have dark pools inside as well

as Llyod of Goldman once said..  they are doing 'God's Work'

....and the amusing thing is that there are still a huge amount of Bitcoiner's who believe that Bitcoin will lead the path to monetary freedom.

A vapourware asset, that can be and will be controlled, cornered, and manipulated by those with the deepest pockets, is going to free humanity from the banksters!?

Jesus Wept!

if bitcoin came out in the 60's somehow with the hippies then it would of been monetary freedom since they wouldn't give a shit about value in fiat and just live on their communes and then transact to other communes with bitcoin or hipcoin

they would probably opt for a premined coin so there wouldn't be an arms race and just divvy it up to all the communes

but nah. greed is central to bitcoin!!

That´s a real nice comparison, i lold hard. But i honestly think that hippies would have gone mad about Doge.
Such friendly, very nice, everybody be rich! It´s for the community!

ha lol back at you..  the freaking doge totally