It is expectedly the same with any commodity market

As the "population" there consists mostly of speculators who are not in the least interested in buying any physical gold. That's why they are selling before expiry and rolling over. Besides, these are by far the biggest markets out there, so where else should the price be discovered? And as I told in my previous post in this thread, Bitcoin is different from gold, crude oil, etc since you don't need storage tanks, vaults, etc for it, which is why physical delivery is virtually impossible for such traders in these commodities, but not Bitcoin. Additionally, if we are talking specifically about deliverable futures (say, crude oil), with actual delivery of the underlying instrument, it is not like there are only speculators filling the market. Oil producers (since we are speaking of oil now) are an important part of the market as they are interested in predictable prices for many months ahead. Gold is likely more speculative in this regard, that I agree with, but so far no major exchange has defaulted on their obligations. And yes, I've read all those horror stories about no gold in their vaults



The rumors have been circulating for years, if not decades, but so far no solid evidence has been presented

There is a gap in your reasoning

Simply put, you don't need these fucking ETF's for the purposes you described. You, and by you here I mean an institutional investor like a hedge or pension fund, just go and buy as many bitcoins as you need directly on the same exchange where Bitcoin futures would be traded, or anywhere they are traded for cash. Exchange-traded funds are good for things like commodities, e.g. gold, which you can't or don't want to burden yourself with keeping. Bitcoin is different in this regard as you don't need reinforced vaults and storage facilities. In fact, all these proposals are no more than a workaround to get Bitcoin accepted by the financial establishment, but they are pretty useless when you can buy as many bitcoins as you please all by yourself at a single click. In other words, you don't need ETF's for things which you buy and put in your pocket (like, say, dollars). On the other hand, futures as well as options, for that matter, are quite handy as they provide a virtually unlimited stack of strategies, including hedging against volatility (options specifically)

You make rather bold statements

As you might know, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I for one don't see the reasoning following which you came to the conclusion that this topic has nothing to do with cryptocurrencies. In case you failed to notice, there are local boards here and quite a lot of them at that, so it is definitely not an English-only forum, by any means. Dare tell theymos to remove them all? Besides, if you peeked into the Services board right now (unlikely but still), you would see that someone is desperately looking for a Chinese translator and, surprisingly, it has everything to do with cryptocurrencies and indirectly with my topic as well. You can go there and check for yourself if that is your point. Though I seriously doubt that as you seem to be looking more for a fight than a discussion. But we are in different weight classes, and you are not in a position to challenge me, sorry

If they are cash-settled they are as close to irrelevant as it ever gets (the point which we seem to agree on)


And here lies the problem, or rather a dilemma

Namely, you can't issue physically delivered derivatives without first accepting the underlying, right? Since otherwise how are you going to deliver at the expiry and with what exactly? But accepting real bitcoins on an exchange like CME would be a game changer for sure. If you trade, for example, physically delivered futures, you should trade the underlying as well. And I would venture to say that in that case it would beat in its effect and consequence all ETF proposals combined even if they were accepted all at once in their entirety

Are you serious, bro?

Telegram channels you mentioned are most often used to trick people into trades that will cost them dear. It has become an imperative here to remind people to stay away from these groups at all costs as they are used exclusively for emptying the pockets of their guileless participants. Basically, you are suggesting to fight fire with fire, i.e. to respond to an attack by using a similar approach, a counterattack. This will only double the amount of market manipulation, not eradicate it. Apart from that, organizing such "conspiracies" to overtake more covert manipulators would itself count as a downright market manipulation, and once caught you may end up having to pay serious penalties or even get in jail in certain jurisdictions. Obviously, this is not applicable to cryptocurrency markets which are mostly unregulated but you get the point

Sorry to say that but this problem is applicable to anyone, not just newbies

There is an adage (sort of) which says that people rarely make the same mistake twice. It is thrice and more times. We all follow our mental patterns deeply engraved in the chemistry of our brains, which make us repeat the same mistakes over and over again. In retrospect, you often can not even believe that it was you. So it is not just about newbies or only about trading as it takes a lot of in-depth introspection and analysis (and sometimes even the help of a mental health professional) to get rid of our dangerous habits. It is said that we learn only the hard way, but in fact most people don't learn at all. In trading, such people eventually lose all and then go home in tears or rage feeling deceived, humiliated, worthless

It may turn out too expensive in the end

Indeed, if you are looking to spend your precious holidays in Japan no matter what, a positive attitude toward Bitcoin may be of great help there. But other than that, you can exchange your bitcoins to fiat "in situ" and get done with that where you happen to live. On the other hand, Japan seems to be a decent country to move to (provided you have enough bitcoins) - if we discard that this country is somewhat expensive (let's call it an Asian version of Switzerland) and deep inside the Japanese folks are not really very friendly to outsiders despite their seeming hospitality and cordiality. Japan remains a pretty closed-in culture

Things seem to be more complicated than that

While in general I definitely agree with your point of view, especially about the part where helpless and hapless bots can't defend themselves and about irretrievably lame journalism looking for flashy headlines, controversies, and accusations, I still can't agree that bots are as innocent and innocuous as you make them appear to be. They may be in other areas where speculation is not so engulfing and encompassing (but even in these areas HFT trading is made into a main villain for severe price swings), however, with crypto, algorithmic trading kills all human which is still left there, and as there's not much anyway, such automatic trading may be killing the market after all as there is not much else beyond speculation

I don't think it is as bad as it is painted

The price being stable for so long may be depressing or even frustrating for speculators and their kind, and this is understandable, but in the long term it is a good thing for the currency aspect of Bitcoin. So far the speculative (or investment if you please) facet of it has been more pronounced but it is not a good thing for Bitcoin in real life. With prices stabilizing and volatility declining we should expect wider recognition of Bitcoin as a trusted, reliable currency, not as a vehicle for relentless and reckless speculation more based on gambling than value investing (in Warren Buffett's speak). And with that solid growth will come eventually. If you need volatility, look into altcoins

Nothing compared to what Russian authorities did

As they simply declared that local officials are not obliged to declare their income earned with cryptocurrencies for the time being. In plain and simple terms, it means that cryptocurrencies are officially completely tax-exempt in Russia. And that is quite in line with the practice by which the Tax Service of Russia, a federal body responsible for taxing in Russia (like the IRS in the US), doesn't go after profits earned by individuals through currency exchange operations (apart from trading), which feels kind of natural

No, I don't think it's possible. I mean ordinary people losing their interest and leaving the market for good. I don't know how true the claim is, but I heard that the most of casinos income comes from ordinary working guys (like your grandpa and grandma in their youth) gambling now and then, not from compulsive gamblers. Of course, it is questionable if crypto is like a casino (though opinions vary), but if these people left the scene completely, the prices wouldn't be sustainable as manipulors would soon leave crypto too. The bottom line is that Bitcoin at 6k+ is not something to sneeze at even if it crashed 3 times from last December highs. Basically, these highs themselves were a crash played in reverse, so to speak, and we are back to where we started at (actually, a lot better than that)

I'd rather say it is the latter who abandoned crypto, and good riddance to them

The problem is not with manipulation as such

I'm curious if that dude, Kjetil Eilersten, understands that you are able to manipulate the market specifically because you have resources to do that, financial, administrative, technical, and so on, while others have not. Claiming that everyone should be manipulating to avoid manipulation is equal to saying that everyone should have equal conditions, first and foremost, financial ones. But anyone with a half functioning brain understands that it is impossible and even delusional. Still, there are dudes who put it somewhat differently, and presto! It no longer looks like a stupid idea

Healthy? There's no such thing in purely speculative markets

His "resetting capital" in practice means that people are moving money from altcoins to Bitcoin, and that explains why the former had been falling off the cliff when the latter remained stable, give or take a few hundred dollars. When the reshuffle of money is over, which we may already be close to, Bitcoin may start to fall again as it runs out of the fuel and support that the crash of altcoins provided. This is a real possibility, and there is no bottom like in, for example, commodity markets

That's how market fools naive traders

If you take any established market as an example, say, crude oil market, and analyze price dynamics over a sufficiently long period, you will see that most of the time prices are sticking around some base value with low or negligible volatility. In order to take advantage of it, you have to increase your positions dramatically. But when the price does change in the end, it changes abruptly in the range of a few or even a few dozen percentages. And no matter what end of the trade you are on, you will either lose the opportunity of earning big time by selling too much too early or will suffer losses and all your hard-earned profits will get instantly eaten away by this massive price move as you don't expect such a powerful change and get caught unprepared

In a few words, because there's no more free lunch in crypto



These days are over, get used to it


I understand why you are so angry and upset, probably even depressed and frustrated. But this is how "normal" currencies should behave (I don't mean some shit like Zimbabwean dollar or Venezuelan bolivar, of course). If you are looking for volatility, which is what you apparently do, go for currency derivatives like futures and options, or even volatility indexes if you have titanium guts and balls of steel. Bitcoin is just becoming one that currency, and I'm thinking that's good. Go hunt elsewhere, maybe, in altcoins?

I understand (more or less) how your system works

But this is not the direction in which decentralized exchanges should evolve as I come to think. Actually, I wouldn't call your system an exchange as there is no competition between traders that we see on centralized exchanges. So my question is, have you ever considered using Lightning Network or similar technologies to implement something more like a regular exchange with full-fledged orderbooks but without a central server (read, a third party) receiving, accumulating and sending all this data? In other words, a personal desktop wallet would serve as a part of a distributed exchange, with updates and order execution close to being instant. I understand that this requires strong cooperation between the developers of different coins in order to be done in practice, but it might be helpful to build an MVP enabling real time exchange between two currencies specifically modified to enable this feature on the blockchain (wallet) level

If you want my take on this, it smells fishy

As for myself, this story feels concocted and doesn't sound convincing. There are real chances to lose money due to a hack or an exchange running away with your dough (think WEX here), but they don't feel tragic and are kind of normal in the cryptoworld. Just like there are things which are too good to be true, there also seem to be things which are too bad to be true as well. I don't know but I have a feeling that this piece is written by somebody close to the ones who had been writing (in)famous tear-jerking Nigerian letters about "a terminally ill wealthy person with no relatives who deposited a huge sum of money in the bank just before dying in a plane crash" (as per Wiki)

That's the main problem with trading

You in fact need luck since trading as it is for the vast majority of traders, or rather players, is a variety of gambling. It is not about you personally (as you may not even trade at all), it is about statistics. If we look at trading as such without considering crypto specifically, we will see that most traders end up with losses, losing all or significant part of their balance and then quitting in tears and with curses. Crypto was different for the first years, but now it is more and more like any other market where this rule is fully applicable. And statistically, over time the only chance to win for the majority is by chance alone (pardon the pun). But luck doesn't love time (and vice versa), it comes all of a sudden and goes away as suddenly

It is easier said than done!

What can we really do? The only way to make Bitcoin great again, i.e. to decentralize it properly is to move it from the POW to POS consensus paradigm, but that would require miners agreement. Obviously, they are not going to kill the goose laying golden eggs, so the only way you can change things is to fork Bitcoin. But do you know how many Bitcoin forks have already been there during just the last year? At least a few dozens, so good luck and more power to you with switching Bitcoin to POS. And I don't think that many would agree that Bitcoin has died. Last time I checked it was still alive and kicking, probably more alive than the total majority of its competitors taken together

Thanks a lot!

Have the owners expressed their intention to continue with the campaign yet? I mean beyond this last week starting today?