Bitcoin Forum

Massive buy order only on Bitstamp, other exchanges followed the Stamp's lead.

Looks like an attempted ramp from coinbase to me. They are on record stating that they deal with Bitstamp but not with certain other large exchanges due to dubious counterparty risks.

My enemies on this site won't mind knowing that I shorted just 2 minutes before it happened as well. Took a $400 hit.

Needless to say, I am still shorting Bitcoin.

Just the usual behavior we have seen during the last 10 pump and dumps. Some average buying of 500-1500 BTC in 2-3 pieces. After that a lot of small aks 10-30BTC get listed. A few idiots buy in,
silence after that... Just like the last 10 times..

"Looks like an attempted ramp from Coinbase to me."

LOL

I would and am placing my money on this being the case again. That was around 3000 coins in the space of 5 minutes. That is almost 2.5 millions USD. If the peons don't rush in on this. Who has got the means to keep throwing this kind of capital at an obvious declining market. It would take another 2.5 million USD of buying power just to take the price to 830 on Stamp right now.

The market is out to get you and only you. Be careful.

Whatever.

It was a totally inexplicable surge of buying power. 99% no doubt from just one hand. The last time there was this magnitude of buying power, bitcoin went from 820 - 835, and then right down to 720.

That means whoever threw that 3 million USD at Bitcoin last time around was a fucking idiot and has lost a massive fortune.

Coinbase is such a black box it's stupid to try and attribute anything to them. I wouldn't short now either.

Keep shorting that crap, maximum leverage. You can do it, you can keep the market down on your own.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdvTkddp1F0

I don't think whoever is throwing fiat in this market it planning on shorting.

It's good in my opinion because it helps to spread the distribution of wealth in the short term. Every whale who cashes out gives somebody else the opportunity to buy those coins and spread the wealth.

This wasn't a whale cashing out.

This was a whale crashing into a nervous market, the price surged up....and since then....pffffft...nothing. back to no volume and we trend back down whilst the Ask walls pile up again.

Provided they have sold to realise the loss... ;)

If it's new money coming in then it's a good thing for the distribution of BTC. I hope that's what it means; of course it could just be an old whale getting fatter... Who knows?

I think we have one more day of small ups and downs; you might be able to recover without a loss. This weekend I expect one hell of a rally but you never can tell...

I don't consider you an "enemy" at all (but it's telling that you think you have "enemies" here). I just think you are playing a losing game (trying to day trade bitcoin). Another fail: trying to guess the motivations of the various actors in the Bitcoin market, along with attempting to know how many of these actors there are, or who they are.

If there was an exchange I trusted, I would probably play too (albeit with a very, very small amount).

true dat

Hate to harp on about TA again, but this was a terrible buy in point from the point of view of whoever made the 2.5 million USD purchase on the Stamp, just as it was when my short got called as Bitcoin powered through 820 and right up to 836 on the back of a similarly large whale buy-in surge.

This buy in, was the mad surge up. Whoever made these purchases is a fucking idiot who is totally incapable of reading the market or they were trying to instigate something which has failed to materialise. The market creeps back up, but where is the volume? There is none.

If I believed that Bitcoin was away to soar and I had 2.5 Million USD that I wanted to get into Bitcoin, I have seen much better opportunities than this in the past few days.

Your enemies? Like we give a shit :D

You are your biggest enemy, you sold at 10$ and still have guts to call people with 2.5 millions idiots, lol  

While you can always look back and see the opportunities you had with absolute certainty; it's not as easy to look ahead with any level of certainty. They aren't day trading; that's obvious.

Until they decide to sell at a loss you can't call them an idiot... They obviously aren't looking at short term trends and it's way too soon to tell if the gamble they made will pay off. Check back in a year and we'll see. If the price hasn't doubled by then you can check back in two years...

Until they sell for a loss it's an investment with the opportunity to appreciate in value.

Enemies? Oh get over yourself, this board is not the drama you think it is.

Looks like this market is setting up for a breakout to the upside.

http://bitcoinwisdom.com/markets/btce/btcusd

mhmmmm

550 dump to 781$

Since we are speculating anyway, here is what (I imagine) someone with millions of fiat to throw at investments would do: He investigates. Is this a sound investment? Look at the technology, the possible price development over five, ten, twenty years, what's going on with the economy in general, social factors among the general plebian population that may impact things.

If you don't have the expertise (or time) to figure it all out yourself, you hire someone to do it for you. First you get your general right-hand man to look at it. What is this strange thing I keep hearing about, look into it and explain it to me like I'm five so I can understand it. Then you hire a geek (or a geek squad) to comb through the code, really make sure it's secure. Take all the data points together, form a vision of what it could become in the future... and then make a decision. For some people, sometimes people with a lot of money, the answer will be: Buy and Hold. Not everyone is a trader. You don't become rich by trading, you become rich by making smart decisions. That means different things to different people depending on temper and ability. Not all billionaires know trader-fu, as unbelievable as that may sound.

this. I also think that anybody who seriously thinks that a 10-million dollar startup would conspire to game them out of 400$ needs to see a doctor ;)

I bought several times on the way from $32 back down to $2. It was really difficult to convince my lizard brain that I was doing the right thing, because I just kept seeing loss after loss rack up on every trade.

I also had quite a lot of fiat tied up in orders from $2 all the way down to $0.05.

By traders logic pretty much every trade I made for 6 months solid made me a "fucking idiot" because I bought coins that I could have got for much cheaper if I'd waited. I also subsequently failed to deploy all my fiat at the bottom. I then had to buy coins for far more than $2 on the way back up. These hard lessons amongst others received trading a wide variety of other instruments, teach you what the reality of trading is. Every post you make (like the OP here) fills me with a kind of anti-nostalgia. Non-fondly remembering saying, doing, feeling all the things you describe. I know I can't (reliably enough to be consistently profitable) read the market. I know most people can't. Maybe you can though, props to you.

Over that six months, when the price just kept going down, there were countless people just like you. They all extolled the profitability of shorting, how stupid I was for buying, holding was foolish bitcoin was dying etc etc

There arguments were far more compelling then, you know before the US recognised it as a legitimate thing and China said that it was fine for people to have it, and also before major online retailers accepted it, and before it had a market cap in the billions. You could almost believe these people had a case for it going to zero. They were entitled to their opinions, and they certainly gave me pause for thought.

Now, 2 years on, people tell me how lucky I was. I'm not sure they understand risk.

You know what maybe I was lucky, I was lucky not to listen to all the trading "experts" and instead *invest* in a technology that I believed at the time would be a game changer. At the time it was harder to believe it, but I believed it. Thats also why it was cheaper. Thesedays its easier to believe, and as such is less risky, and as such is more expensive. The point that is lost on most people as that the high price is exactly the reason why it is lower risk, and not the contrary.

My assessment at the time was that it was a (very?) high risk investment, and so I didn't bet the farm, it didn't help I was on my ass at the time, but I knew to not buy any would be a big mistake. I'm not sure anyone at that time really considered that counter risk.

People still don't see/understand it to this day (not the people here on the whole, however 'bearish' they seem to be!). People are focused entirely on the possibility of losing their capital. They entirely ignore the fact that they might be *forced* to buy BTC later for much, much higher. These same people are quite happy to enter into negative EV situations in all sorts of ways.

It should be obvious that I am not saying you should bet the farm because DA MOON etc. You should look at how much you value that $100 though, what the chance of losing it all vs the chance of it becoming $1000 is, and how much you value that $1000. The chance of it becoming $10k how much you value that. This is all personal but give you a basic idea of your risk profile and thus how much as percentage of NW you are prepared to risk.

Of course I understand all of this has no bearing on trading, because you traders aren't in it for the big bucks. You are just riding the dopamine high in front of the oncoming train of despair. Thats a fact for ~99% of traders out there (how many traders are there? how many trading legends are there? do the math).

I thought you might be interested to know why I think HODL is better, what some of the though process is behind it (as opposed to it just being an idiotic meme thing to do - I do actually understand what I am doing and why I am doing it). My "enemy" is corruption, the abuse of capitalism etc random guys on the internet - not so much.

So you do whatever you wanna do, but whilst you might think I am "fucking idiot" for what I've done (or rather, not done), I think dismissing it as lucky is a bit puerile. I can assure you that I don't think you are  a "fucking idiot". I think what you are doing is crazy, misguided and delusional, but people do all sorts of crazy things, and who am I to say they *shouldn't*

My advice remains buy and hold. (for the longest time)

the abuse of capitalism corporatism

FTFY. :)

CONFIRMED

Thank you for this background on your experiences, sgbett.  What you went through echoes my own since November.  I bought on the way up (thank the gods not all at the top!), and I am now buying a bit here and there on the way back down.  I have some fiat waiting for a final capitulation, but realize that it may or may not materialize.  As a n00b I made some rookie mistakes, but I can forgive myself since I basically discovered bitcoin right at the beginning of the China rally, and thus had no time to really analyze the market or fully understand what the heck was going on with Bitcoin.  It was all brand new to me, so I sort of just went all in.  (Also Coinbase made things difficult to get a sizable position going early on and I actually lost money with their slow onboarding process, but that's another story....)

Now I feel like I know this market a little better than I did then.  But overall, I'm not a day trader.  I'm in it for the long haul because I believe in Bitcoin.  Right now, I'm just trying to amass as many BTC as I can before the next leg up.  After that, my appetite for buying more will greatly decrease.  I plan to hold for at least 1.5 to 2 years before taking any profits.

My advice to anyone is, "Buy some and then buy some more. Keep buying until you are satisfied that you have enough."  :)

Very nicely and squarely put! RESPECT!

Woah, steady on! I bought around that level too! Bitcoins may drop a little but longer term the bull still looks like its in good shape to me.

I can't disagree on that more, if you are new player with big money, now is the time..

Nice post!

Just to be clear, only put in money that you are quite prepared to *never* see again. Always remember it could go to zero.

Woah its getting too deep in here. These are just stop loss and trigger orders with bitfinex or bots. There was a 6000btc dump just the other day too.

eh wot!?

What kind of Stop-Loss buys in 3000 BTC causing a market spike to non-maintainable highs?

I have witnessed the rancid (and probably fraudulent) market sweeps where a few hundred coins are dumped followed instantly by a few hundred coins purchased, triggering a big bunch of orders and effectively stealing coins and/or USD from market players. This buying surge just wasn't that kind of activity.

Or do I seriously lack some kind of market understanding here?



You are buying just a handful of Bitcoins.

This person (yup, probably just one single entity here) bought about 3000K BTC. Now, if someone is looking to make a long term investment with a 2.5 Million USD ball of capital, he isn't going to be chomping at the bit at his computer waiting for his funds to clear at the exchange before just jumping right in. Over the past few days, there has been much better buying opportunities for someone looking at investing that kind of volume all in one go and actually, there were better opportunities even just today. Like the 820 - 836 mass whale buy in, this buy in itself was the top of the market, which makes it a fucking shocking bit of business, even if this time next year Bitcoin is at 5K.

I don't know, perhaps in the Bitcoin pond there is a different category of multi-millionaire swimming around, with zero business acumen and who isn't that bothered about winning or losing. Perhaps this was done to try and give Bitcoin some sort of boost on the back of the NY hearings, perhaps hoping that the great Bitcoin supporting public just chomping at the bit for a bit of positive market action would pile in right behind him. It was a very very strange an inexplicable piece of market action......and it cost me.

@sgbett.

Good post and credit to you for getting in and taking the risk for something in which you believed was the future, back at a time when Bitcoin did seem like a renegade anarchistic innovation that just might help free the people from bankster oppression. Obviously it has paid off for you. Of course, if you were a bit more of a market player you could have done a lot better for yourself than you have although that may all seem immaterial now after you having witnessed 50000% of upside. But that was then and this is now. No fucking way is Bitcoin going to see anything like the same growth that the early adopters have been treated to, yet all you early adopters are still religiously and forcibly preaching the same advice on everyone; Namely, 'buy and hold as much as you can regardless of price, because whatever you buy will be worth ten times that amount in no time at all'. All well and good for you guys, but what if the advice you dish out to newbs on this forum turns out to be wrong? Where would I be now if I caved into the scoffing and derision I got on here when I stated that I was selling $1100 range Bitcoins at a loss in $1000 dollar range?

Here is the rub from my point of view.

Bitcoin can no longer be viewed as an anarchistic or liberalising techno venture. Bitcoin is not anonymous. I can still see a 366 Bitcoin  transaction (it wasn't that much in GBP back when it was made) to my old SR1 wallet. This is in the blockchain forever. Anyone with access to information linking my Intersango account to my identity (very easily done) can soon start to piece together my financial activity in Bitcoin. Perhaps this is still generally a bit of a pain in the arse for state intelligence agencies but I am pretty sure that if The Man is to welcome Bitcoin into the fold, then there are 101 innovative measures that can be taken to take all anonymity out of Bitcoin transactions. Perhaps Bitcoin is the prototype for the great beast's global currency. Perhaps Bitcoin will itself be transformed into it.

As for its valuation. If it is true that less than 5% of all Bitcoins are regularly transacted and just 49 whales own more than half of all Bitcoins in the world today. Bitcoin is a fucking shockingly cornered market which has undoubtedly played a massive role in the meteoric rise of its price as determined on a handful of shady exchanges run largely by crooks. This a market where individual entities, who in the grander scheme of things may even be considered as pipsqueeks, have the power to absolutely destroy all your purchasing power. Perhaps some of the whales genuinely want to see Bitcoin succeed out of ideological reasons. Perhaps some are awaiting the chance to cash in on riches of avarice beyond their wildest dreams. Perhaps there are entities now in this market who intend to destroy it. Whatever the complexities of the reality out there are, this whole market hangs on the end of just a relative handful of strings that lead back to just a relative few hands, yet you early adopter luckers keep barking out the same old mantra and paradigms from 2-3 years ago.

Perhaps things have changed? Perhaps someone 'buying in and holding at these bargain prices' is not going to see multiple profits in the coming months, but multiple losses, or who knows, perhaps even get wiped out altogether?

Bitcoin right now, is a very dangerous financial playground. I am in it, because I am looking for that clear long opportunity but I just don't see it coming at this point in time. Therefore, unlike yourself on the bear trend down from $32 - $2, I refuse to invest and hold on the longside until I either feel the bottom is in and the trend has reversed, or their is such a bloodbath that any coins that are purchased will either prove to be the biggest waste of capital in a lifetime, or an investment of a lifetime.

I'll be a broken record here and remind everyone that coinbase has 1% fees and a wider, paralyzed clientele that have to deal with their gaping market maker spreads and days of delays while coinbase get to cruise in the bitstamp sea and pay smaller whale tx fees....  they can trade at losses and still 'win' until someone crowds their space and squeeze their margins

so if you can get away with moving 1000's of coins in your local satoshi square with localbitcoins wide spreads and then also trade as a whale on btce to balance your ledger you can play their game too

but you would probably get swat teamed up your ass or mugged

I am still not quite sure what you mean with all this coinbase stuff, but are you essentially saying that Coinbase can afford to smash into any towering Ask wall at the most inopportune of investing moments, and still make a profit?

if you lose $3 on one deal and make $5 on another you made $2 and if someone only looks at your one hand they think you are a dumb loser

I am still none the wiser.

If you win $5, then why lose $3 by playing when you have a shitty hand?

you miss that part where I said 'to balance your ledger'

they trade only if they need to even out their $$$ or coins..  if they have enough action on both sides of their doorstep they dont need to use bitstamp.. but if they are heavy oneway they have to.. they frontrun their customers like pimps so they already know what prices they need, etc

it is childs play for folks that have connections to goldman wizkids

This was truly an unusually epic post!

Mat, how about this. Buy for $100 worth of bitcoins, right now, at whatever price it is going for. Then put it in a separate wallet and leave it alone for a year. Keep doing your thing, and a year from now compare ROI on the non-traded wallet with the part you trade for. The worst that can happen here is that you risk learning something.

Mat, your only enemy is yourself.  There is no "market manipulation."  No one is out to get you.  Most traders have probably lost money over the past month in this choppy market.  I know I have.  You are the only one complaining about every move the market makes.  Its called a sideways correction.  Completely normal.  Wait for the next trend to develop, whether up or down, and try to find an entry point.

It's not neccessarily from one person but from multiple people. Trigger orders once they hit their target will execute at market price regardless of what that price is. This may drive the price up on its own or may set up a chain reaction where additional higher trigger orders are triggered.

https://blockchain.info/tx/8f947b8e05344dddf8294e54f07ae4a8cf995e06c20d0511d374d7e72faf29f8

(You have to have the excess digits too, I don't like having fractions of coins beyond 5 d.p.)

LOL Tera is that you I saw 'confirming' in the BTC-E chat box? lmao to see the word of proudhon spread accross the BTC world.

Sound advice. Blaming "outside agencies" / "market manipulation" every time you lose money isn't a good sign. You have to look at your own trading strategy. It starts and ends there.

the way I like to put it -
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." Hanlon's Razor.

I must fulfill my destiny to spread proudhon's trolling into the trollbox - this is confirmed by authentic foreign sources in a legend in a chinese scroll.

Excellent advice.

oh, I aint lost money, not overall anyhow. I fkn hate losing money.

and I dont suggest for a minute that the whales are out to get me and my stash......I just notice some very strange tendencies and occurrences in the market that don't seem to make sense, or at least I can't make sense of them...

....and if u think that big hands in marketplaces don't attempt to bend and manipulate the market, then...erm....

..WAKEN UP LADDIE!

is the prices goin up or down??

Looks like they're going sideways for now.

Out of curiosity, MatTheCat, how would you define "manipulation"?  Is posting a big ask wall to try to scare smaller fish into selling "manipulation" or is that just "strategy"?  How about if your "buddy" is the one who eats your big ask wall?

I'm trying to figure out where you draw the line between natural and unnatural price movements.  

Theyve been going sideways, seemingly for quite some time now...

A very long time - in bitcointime at least. I think lots of people are sitting on the sidelines ahead of ... today.

Let's see what happens when the Chinese dust clears. There will be movement one way or other.

From reddit:

Patrick Byrne retracts statement that Overstock.com will not hold bitcoins, also announces personal investment


...in today's Q4 Earnings Conference Call.
http://edge.media-server.com/m/p/xeadrvij/lan/en
@24.10 - 24.38:
"It's not out of the question that we will be holding a small amount of bitcoin."
"I personally have gone out in the past few days and bought several million dollars of bitcoin."
(Discussion of benefits to the company at 22.00, preceded by the story of adoption also told in the LTB interview.)
Edit: formatting

i wonder where

Yeah, i was thinking:

-Maybe he made a deal with coinbase (who saved incoming coins from consumer purchases for him), Or coinbase bought it for him at stamp.
-Or he wired money straight to bitstamp himself.
-Off exchange deal


I can't come up with other scenarios (gox? haha).

He probably just kept some of the BTC overstock has acquired in the last month.

i would

And I'm sure he did. No coincidence he takes millions of dollars in BTC sale, then announces he has several millions of dollars worth of BTC. I doubt he would go the long way round e.g. coinbase, lose 10%, if he just wanted bitcoins. Doesn't make any sense.

I don't think he would have to pay any fee's, coinbase is happy enough with this guy.

Nice buy again on stamp as we speak.

You mean the 500 that just happened? Guess its a quiet day :) possibly calm before the storm!

Wow. Great post, actually. What happened to foam at the mouth retardo shorting Mat?

Anyway. Two remarks.

re: anonymity. You're right, that, on average, anonymity will probably vanish. But tumblers (or similar methods) will be to Bitcoin what Tor is to the Internet as a whole.

re: bad advice from early adopters. You got a point there, but it's pretty damn difficult to say if it's a good point yet. Every. Damn. Time. guys like you came out of the wood work saying "this time, it's different. buy and hold simply doesn't cut it anymore. the time of the big returns is over." And every. single. damn. time they were proven wrong.

True, you won't capture the entirety (by definition) of growth if you buy in now, but even if BTC tops out at 10k (something which a lot of people would at least consider possible), that's a god damn 12 fold increase.

Keep your point in mind, and come back if, in 1 or 2 years from now, we still didn't get to a new ATH.

wow thats incredibly kind. thanks!