Bitcoin Forum

Wall street and bankers are bitcoin's enemies.  

As a means of maintaining value, in the present bitcoin has been defeated.  On 12/17/17 btc=$19379 and today 7/11/18 btc=$6345.  A drop of $13034 or $501/week.  I bailed when I looked at the slope and the previous 2 weeks saw 5.05%/week drop.  Right now the the $501/week average amounts to 2.57%/week.  

One would be an idiot to leave money as bitcoin while it's losing value at 2.57%/week.

Bitcoin's enemies did this.  Wall street brokers and bankers used media to boost the value of bitcoin approaching 12/17/2017, when trading in bitcoin futures took effect, then casting shade driving bitcoin down, classic pump an dump.

I tried buying a few stocks years ago when my bank allowed trading.  I figured oh, no traders to deal with, I was wrong.  Buying a  few stock saw unexpected fees that made the whole exercise a bust.  This was years before bitcoin.  And moving money, the international fees were horrible.  That's why Wall Street brokers and bankers couldn't allow bitcoin to stabilize and rise in value.  They don't want our money in btc.  As fiat currencies increasingly continue to be watered down while money is pumped to the top 1%, the fixed quantity of bitcoin should only allow it to win.  At least that was the case until bitcoin futures trading took effect.

Will eliminating bitcoin futures trading fix it?  Big deposits and withdrawals will still work to pump money out even without bad press to drive value down.  Still, stopping futures trading will kill the incentive for some bad press.  

Early on bitcoin was the place to be when  there was trouble.  That sure changed.  Right now with trade wars a reality one would think money would be heading to bitcoin in a big way.  Why isn't it?  Who's ox was getting gored that that changed?

soy39

(the 39 unrelated to red lining implications - though that 17/17 does bring a pair of grim reapers to mind)

And suppose a ban on bitcoin futures trading resulted in a long term positive recovery of bitcoin?  What would that say about futures trading of equities in general?

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Interesting.  Looking at the Futures Contract Wikipedia page, the Dutch pioneered and had formal futures markets in the 17th century.  I see references to the tulip bubble bust when shade is being cast at bitcoin.  The tulip bubble that burst.  What caught my eye in this wiki was that a tulip futures market appeared near the height of tulipmania in 1636.  February 1637 saw the crash of the tulip market.  Did speculators see an opportunity to make money bursting the tulip bubble?

And while we're at it why not ban bitcoin lending.  Our economy went to serious inflation when fast cash became available from Ready Credit, to Diners Club cards, to credit cards generally.

Wall street traders will look into bitcoin as well, in this case bank is the only one enemy. All traders are the same, they want to gain profit, and Bitcoin provide bigger opportunity for it. Wall street traders can be Bitcoin investors in the future.

There is a good advantage in crypto market for everybody. Volatility is so high. So anybody can make so huge profit in very short time. I think they dont like this.

in fact nothing is easy, trading is still at risk for anyone.
New investors should know that crypto trading is not easy, and I agree that there will be movement from Wall Street traders to trade crypto. but they must know the risks.

It's a well established fact that wallstreet traders and bankers are against bitcoin.They don't want to lose their dominance over the market which they think to get crashed if bitcoin allowed.

I mentioned a try at buying stocks.  Bitcoin is too egalitarian for the world financial industry.   If they can't make bitcoin lose money they lose money.

So, I wonder how this state of affairs happened.  Like in this country, did the approving authority that gave the go ahead to trade bitcoin futures ask anyone if we the bitcoin users minded?  I understand bitcoin doesn't have a ruling authority but was the Bitcoin Foundation even consulted?

In 1972, when the IMM was created, was every country who's fiat currencies were then to become part of currency futures, consulted?

Futures trading is astoundingly tempting to manipulation of markets, currencies, equities.  

Maybe and maybe not. They could be doing something to crash the price of Bitcoin. But the fact of the matter is that huge almost 20k USD spike is a fluke. If you follow the trend, it shouldn't increase that much. It should've been around only 10k USD and the 6k USD correction if fine. Besides, i think Bitcoin is strong enough to weather these kinds of enemies.

Yups only the bankers are considered as enemy in this case and not the wall street and besides wall traders sometimes gives good outlook in cryptocurrency specially bitcoins thats why i dont see and related issue to declare war on this high valued traders.and dont make this kind of speculation when theres really none happening

So, with no real central authority to consult they just put futures trading in place.  Brings to mind a large corporation that would insure some of its workers with life insurance and the corporation as the beneficiary.  Say a worker would die at home, the corporation would collect the life insurance and the worker's family would get nothing from the life insurance policy.  The practice was ruled illegal.

Certainly yes. Wall street and banks are the first and biggest enemies of Bitcoin because their business will shut down if Bitcoin accepted worldwide and the purpose of Wall street and banks to steal people's money in the form of charges and fees will be stopped since Bitcoin is a peer to peer platform where there is no intermediate person or institution is not required for any transactions.

Wall Street and banks are hostile to BTC because BTC has stolen their profits!
With the development of blockchain technology and the popularity of BTC, they can be friends with BTC when they can make profits on BTC in the future!

There is also a third enemy. The government is actually the real enemy of BTC. The government's prohibition on trading and fighting BTC is the biggest harm to BTC.

I do not think so. It seems to me that in the case of bitcoin, each of the parties can make a profit: institutional investors (banks), traders, investors, etc.

On the other hand, we've been stable, oscillating around $6000 for quite a while now.  I don't get why people think jumping from $1000 to $20,000 as fast as bitcoin did would have been sustainable--that sort of rise is never permanent, and I think we should all count ourselves lucky that bitcoin didn't drop even more than it did, i.e., that it kept a lot of the gains it made on its way up to $20k. 

If you remember the dot com stock craze of the 90s, most of those stocks went to ZERO, and many of the ones that did survive lost a significant amount of value.  That's what happens when speculators get carried away with buying an asset and drive its price up into the stratosphere.  Now, I'm not sure if there are any "enemies" here, much less that they're bankers or anyone on Wall Street.  I'd argue that there were plenty of people worldwide who bought bitcoin in the hopes that they'd get filthy, stinking rich.  They're responsible for where bitcoin is at now, too.

Along with the fairly steady decline of Bitcoin value since that Black Sunday, Dec. 17, 2017, when Bitcoin futures trading commenced, has been sharp large volume increases and decreases. Those jumps also have an effect of triggering wins and losses in futures. So, a large enough house with enough Bitcoin to make the large jumps can decide how much to buy or sell for a period in the then coming days to maximize profit on futures. It's pumping money out. And it can do this even without using bad press to change expectations.

I think without the margin payouts this would become unprofitable to the house.

How can you say that 'theres really none happening' in the face of the near constant decline since Black Sunday Dec. 17, 2017 when Bitcoin futures trading was started?  Soon after futures contract trading was called out as causing the decline, the decline slowed and as voices were raised the non-big-jumps, ordinary trading, has leveled out.

Buy the rumor sell the news, that clearly happened. Another thing is that everyone was expecting them to bring big institutional capital to Bitcoin, but many failed to understand that cash settled contracts don't bring actually capital to Bitcoin. It's nothing more than an empty side product for whoever wants to bet on Bitcoin's price. If we look at financial tools that could actually bring in big money, then the Bitcoin backed Solidx ETF will be it. For every share purchase of $200,000 (which is the minimum entry point), $200,000 worth of Bitcoin will be taken out of circulation. This ETF is worth fomo'ing for, future markets aren't.

I think that's most obvious thing is that  Wall Street Traders are worrying about their income that can be affected while many Traders will be transferred to cryptocurrency trading from stock market. And this will decrease the Demand on the stock market.

Personally I most remember the surge to Bitcoin when there were international difficulties and Bitcoin was touted as where to put one's money in troubled times.  But that got killed somehow and I don't quite know how that happened or by whom.

So, I expected that ordinary citizens in countries where retirees are seeing entry level personnel starting wage at close to what the retirees made going out, currency devalued, those ordinary citizens would put their money where Bitcoin's absolute limited quantity works against inflation.  And I expected that idea to spread and swell.

But regarding Bitcoin and Bitcoin Futures contracts and the effect of negative press for profit.  Cryptocurrency in itself is impossible for some to accept or even fathom.  So, bad press for the sake of profit would hit cryptocurrencies harder than say some utility futures, not that utility futures would expect bad press as some very difficult types control energy and the press.



And how does that differ from buying Bit20 coins in bulk?

Home is where the heart is.  So traders into cryptocurrency will be prone to make money weakening Bitcoin.  After all, their 401ks aren't seeing contributions from crypto.

Lets not talk as if Wall Street traders only just got into cryptcurrencies.  If they weren't in very quickly I'd be shocked.  That to earlier posts in the thread.

You say it should've been around only 10k.  I remember when Bitcoin when to $100 and speculation that it would hit $1k by year's end seemed outlandish.  

That the great migration of wealth upward to the top 1% or 2% in our lifetimes has been so pervasive in every country of the world that the idea of Bitcoin with its absolute limited number of coins could very well have caused it to pass $20k, $50k, $100k - a fig to the powers that be.

But compare the price today the price from past years. Even if you take the price exactly 1 year ago, which is not even a good buying point, you still have a gain from $2000 to $6400.

The problem with these kind of analysis is it compares ATH, which was a ridiculous pump, to the current price. While completely disregarding the bigger picture.

Anyone who bought at maybe around $10000 and didn't sell at the peak made a rookie mistake of joining in the hype. The consequence is that they have to wait longer than they would've expected, and that's completely acceptable.

Well, sorry for the loss that may cause on that, you can't jump in from the last year price compared recent price.
If you missed that you cant jump in into recent price from last year price because of time to time bitcoin will be growing up and it has a high volatile value that makes the price up and down.
Correct, don't sell if you have found that you have a loss besides just waiting for a months before bitcoin will bounce back in the market.

Institutions mostly aren't allowed to expose themselves to Bitcoin by actually buying the unregulated asset itself, which Bitcoin still is today. The second problem that pops up is custody -- institutions don't want to own the asset itself, and have no proper way to store it themselves in a secure but fully backed manner. They just love to buy a product that's actually backed by it. Let's pretend an institution buys 1 ETF share, what happens is that an exchange that works with CBOE (the platform the ETF will be listed on) will take care of the underlying asset and the storage process. It's more a tool for institutions rather than individuals. If it concerns individuals they are better off buying the asset itself.

I think the point is that it could have been real.  Somewhere that belief Bitcoin was a place to put money in bad times was killed.  Maybe it was the MtGox theft.  But at one time a real continued rise to great numbers could have been possible and some of us who had been around for the $100 -> $1000 rise believed it was happening.  Those of us not stock/bond market analysts.  That it was a deliberate pump to 12/17/17 then a really disheartening decline was intentional by those who knew of the tulip bust, that arguably from tulip futures.  The bigger picture of financial analysts isn't visible to me but it didn't include Bitcoin remaining a 'store of value' of any consequence.

And the reason this should worry us is that if something is a financial threat, buy it, own it, change it?

In my humble opinion I can say that I doubt that even they are thinking about cryptocurrency market because it is not that big a stock market is yet, so I am not considering crypto currency trading as a threat for stock market, with his magnificance.

I like Google and Musk.  Early on I made a conscious decision to trust Google searches.  I still do.

There's an article on today's Hacker News called Elon Musk vs. Short sellers.  The author says he has nothing against short sellers, that people should be able to bet against a stock as well as for.

That said, under Profit and Beyond the author says:     "The thing is though, I think when Elon Musk looks around, he realizes the greatest threat to his company is not the Mission E or Model 3 take rate or whatever. It is the massive amount of capital betting against him steered by bad actors with malicious intent and an incriminating history."

The same with Bitcoin.

Did I mention that early in my Bitcoin days I tried selling on a downtrend to buy when it started to rise.  It was during an early pump and dump.  I lost a couple of hundred dollars if I remember correctly and decided then to just hold.  Really developed a low opinion of pump and dumpers with that my first experience with them.

I don't agree with the author's opinion that betting against a stock is okay.

But I'm not halfway through the article: https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/elon-musk-vs-short-sellers.118431/

it is temporary money flow from stock market moved to cryptocurrency.they think right now in cryptocurrency market, especially bitcoin give them huge potential market if they buy it right now.

Of course, but when's the right time to buy?  Looking at how low it can be allowed to go with mining costs as a major mitigating factor, that prediction of $2800 a month or so ago sounds about right to kill mining in the US and still allow mining in low energy cost countries for the dwindling number of bitcoins that will ever be mined.  That's not to say they, those mining in low energy cost countries, are driving the value down but that their bitcoins can be used to counter the drive down by bad actors with malicious intent and an incriminating history

Stocks and cryptocurrency are different and if most of the stock traders before are now preferring to trade in cryptocurrency then the economy of stock market might fall in the future.

There is no enemies for Bitcoin. Once the wall street, banks, and governments figured out how to monetize with it. There is no way to stop bitcoin but just slowing it down.

When I took Economics nights at a local college in the mid-70's although the course covered the IMF and World Bank, no mention was made of the IMM.  Futures trading was left out of the 917 page text although some mention of the Chicago Mercantile futures was made in class.

So, futures contracts trading sounds a lot like the application of the Invisible Hand of the Marketplace as espoused by the rumored Mafia bookkeeper/economist.

So, if power cost is a defining factor for the near future of the absolute lowest value Bitcoin might reach, what's to drive it up?  And anti-US sentiment will allow the price to drop and bad actors will put the price down there for the cheap energy country miners.  Maybe it will stabilize and rise with dollar inflation.  But that's the value storage idea that appears to be getting killed so they'd counter that if they can.  When mining reward halves again the price will rise but not double.  That there are more living college graduates in the US than there will ever be Bitcoins means that every US college graduate can't each own one.  That's the kind of thing that can take hold of the imagination and drive demand.  So, the future is in question.

Bitcoin survival depends on us the cryptocurrencies enthusiasts!  From beginning bitcoin has this enemy that is the bankers.  The bankers see bitcoin as enemy because it is going to takes food from they mouth in future.  If the future trade was not introduce in November we would not have see the price falling in this way.

Oh, how I love the clairvoyants, the preachers and the "I told you" so trolls.
First of all, no asset investor or trader is its enemy. That person had to buy first to be able to sell. You have a wrong understanding of trading.
Destroying it would mean lack of opportunities and traders live on those opportunities. Their main goal is prediction the price move or, even better, influence the people to play along by creating fake pumps and dumps, spread FUD and so on. If they are shorting they'd like everyone to short as well, if they are longing, the would like us to long too.
After a huge pump it's natural that shorting can be more successful, but when the price stabilizes they will switch to longs again, because that's what is profitable.

As for the usual "you should have sold" nobody knew what will happen. We had bans and hacks along the way that brought the price to much lower levels than expected. I'm not a trader anymore, so I'm not selling as long as the fundamental analysis doesn't tell me to. Especially not below 10k USD. 

Okay, one took one's money out of bitcoin while it was dropping steadily with plans to buy when one's best guess is it won't go lower or has already started to rise.  That's the thing.  With the swings the value takes it's apparent big money can do what it pleases to the value pretty much.  One guesses wrong, buys and it plummets because they can do that.  So, the power cost of mining in low-energy-cost-countries is not an unreasonable low ball guess.   Above that they have a cushion to work with to transfer wealth to themselves.  But for that reason, that it's obvious, it probably won't go that low.

The guys who have always liked to make money and ready to fight about it ask what do ya need and can't do without.  Housing, winter heating oil, urban garbage collection.  Not the  kind of financial opportunities one would make a short term investment in while waiting for a solid change in bitcoin value.

Futures contracts are the cause of this bull run. And until the volume of the crypto market increases the future contract investors will command the market.

In the Trading world as long as you profit from the trade how different its channels it would be the same but when if the two counter effect its other to lose its value then a conflict may arise but I think this will not happen because traders who have been in the market before crypto have already established their skills they have anticipated some of the things that may happen and they can take advantage of the young age of crypto to benefit.

Banks are afraid of bitcoins because if most of the investors will focus on cryptocurrency then their business might go down since there will be less people who are going to place money on the banks.

Okay, so maybe the banks aren't afraid of bitcoin.  I can recall around 1986 there were a great many complaints from Central and South American countries that their debts to the US were impossible to pay.  I'd guessed how that came about and figured banks wanted to dump money to reduce availability so sold the governments on borrowing.  Figured that the banks had too much money for some reason relating to the Arab oil embargo not all that many years before.  That perhaps the higher petroleum prices saw the Arabs dumping money into US banks.  I wondered because Mexico had built copper smelters along their northern border that were suddenly polluting north as far as Wyoming, causing acid rain that measurably changed the lakes causing defects in frogs as a for instance.  Not an accident.  But I was wrong as to how those Central and South American debts came about and only realized that after reading Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins.  The countries were sold huge construction projects, dams, power plants, etc.  That's what the money was spent on although the banks profited from the loans.  Those are huge debts and I doubt Bitcoin's market cap compares.  So, the invasion of the US by Central and South American refugees might have its roots in that debt.  The social inequalities and violence that triggered that migration may partly be intentional as payback for that bank debt.

And "Futures contracts give traders a way to bet on bitcoin prices and earn profits without buying the actual cryptocurrency." a businessinsider.com bullet point before futures launch.  Another bullet point on that page "The Chicago Mercantile Exchange says it will launch its bitcoin futures contracts on December 18."  So, they could beat bitcoin all to hell without ever buying any.

Would you say it's a bull market for bitcoin futures and a bear for bitcoin itself?

I expect the government will see a nice tax bump from hodl-ers having cashed out.  So, the CFTC, an agency of the US government, must have been wearing a cheshire grin when approving bitcoin futures contracts trading.

Yes, bitcoin has no enemies but greedy ones, wanting to acquire them. The high value and profit that bitcoin makes to the investor community is tremendous. From there intermediaries such as banks, taxes, government, etc.
They all want more commissions from these electronic money transactions. But it certainly will not do much because the sustainability of bitcoin is stable. Strong communities will decide everything.

I don't think Bitcoin has enemies. Banaks and Wall Street traders are doing what they have to do but Bitcoin is just a currency where traders used to purchase and to sell goods in the blockchain. In other words, Bitcoin is used by traders and cryptobanks to their business in the blockchain that traditional banks cannot sustain.

Based on my own experience, In cryptocurrency, futures contracts trading sounds a lot like the application of the Invisible Hand of the Marketplace as espoused by the rumored Mafia bookkeeper/economist. So just keep the good work on these.

Not really. What we're seeing right now is short term volatility, and nothing other than that.

In the long run, I think that bitcoin would still be a much better store of value than something like fiat, which has proven that it would drop in value imminently, and consistently. I'd much rather store my wealth in something independent like BTC than a government issued and controlled fiat currency.

These institutions that you talk of are actually becoming interested in crypto on a massive scale. I don't think that they are the ones that are pushing prices down at all. It's just a normal phase in the bitcoin's price cycles, which iterate every few years. Futures could be the source of some manipulation, but it would be hard to see how they can be stopped.