Yeah I think for old people who want to invest in crypto an etf is much better than holding crypto on some CEX with no 2fa. Or they do self custody and end up losing their seed somehow.

Etfs are a great way to expose yourself to crypto without worrying about all the technical stuff you need to learn ahead of time to make sure you don’t lose your crypto. I think it will reduce scams.

I don’t think you can arbitrage these days. I used to arbitrage back in 2015 on Poloniex, Mintpal and Bittrex because back then there was no money in crypto pretty much and most of the MM stayed out.

Basically I had a crappy Python script which would track prices of certain pairs using API and if I got a match I would get an alert and manually I would buy the coin, then send it to the other exchange and sell it there. Back then transaction fees were near free and you could make decent money this way.

Now? Forget about it. Your competition is some ultra fast bot with deep pockets. If you want you can try and buy bitcoin and sell Bitcoin futures and use your bitcoin as collateral for the trade. Last I checked I think you could make 12% APR this way. Just do 1x leverage so you don’t get liquidated.

After the etf was approved there was many parties that were selling. The largest was the GBTC holders because the premium was pretty much at par. People held for many years and wanted to finally get out.

There is also rumors that FTX is selling their bitcoins since the price is near highs. They also sold like $1B or so back in November if I recall. And they will keep selling until they liquidate everything.

Last there are those that bought when the blackrock announcement was made and they made a good profit and decide to take profits. Sure it’s possible that it might go to new ATHs but their position is in great profit and they want to cash out.

So I wanted to do a transaction today and I look and again I need to pay something crazy like 200 sat/vbyte. Its also on the weekend. I look and of course there is some mempool spam going on.

Head over to Coinmarketcap and the only two coins that are pumping are ORDI and SATS. I noticed that whenever there is a mempool spam these are pumping and I am wondering how its related? What does transaction fees have to do with these coins going up slightly in value? I tried reading how Ordinals work but I am very confused since its nothing like regular mining or ERC20 tokens.

Wanted to get a transaction going, I was going to use 31 sats/vbyte which has been quick for the past few days and I look and the recommended fee is like 250 sat/byte. I go to mempool explorer and I see that the fees are at least 200 sat/vbyte. And this is on a Saturday. Makes no sense. I was going to do a transaction on the weekend thinking it would be lower than 31 sats/vbyte but I guess I was wrong.

Very difficult to gauge when these Ordinals are going to be spamming the mempool. I remember it was the same during the holidays, you assumed that on New Years day it would be clear because people are taking a day off, but no there was another day of 200 sat/vbyte of transactions. Whats strange is that during the ETF launch it was actually affordable, the mempool wasn't expensive but no idea why now all of a sudden it is.

Apparently this is a yearly thing on the genesis block anniversary where people send satoshi money. If you look at the graph for the inflows you will see that someone or a group of people send large sums of bitcoins to this address.

I found it odd at first because I noticed last January someone sent like $60K which was a lot because Bitcoin was cheaper last January. And now sending this large amount. Probably some early adopter who is thanking him.

Do you think CNBC, Bloomberg, Seeking Alpha is any better? They are all just for views. They are opinions and anyone can pretty much have their own opinion on a type of investment. However they will be correct 50% of the time.

It will either go up or down, other than that there is no guarantee. Look how many hedge funds which are billion dollar businesses couldn’t even beat the NASDAQ last year. Any new trader could of bought the nasdaq index and make more profit than all these hedge funds which were in and out of trades all year and made less profit.

I think what happened was that many were reading articles about bitcoin heading to new ATH or heading to $100K or $1M due to these bitcoin etfs. And so as soon as it launches, nothing happened.

When it was approved,  Nothing happened until the next morning when NY session was live. It went up for about an hour and then a huge dump. As it kept dipping people had the sell the news mentality and just sold and today was the same thing.

We need to look at the flows, for a week or so and see how much gets added to these etfs. And then we can judge if there is interest with these etfs from boomers and retirement portfolios.

We should wait a week and see how the flows will be to these etfs.

Yes it’s strange that as soon as it launched it had a huge dump. Especially on both days. Today we had a -$3000 day.

However when the flows were released from the funds, we net almost close to +$700M. So why did we dump? Maybe it was GBTC but they only outflow $90M.

So maybe it’s dumping because of the sell the news traders.

Credit goes to Bitmex research at


Despite the horrible selling by GBTC, their outflows were only $95M. I assumed they would sell $1B worth and $1B of positive flows would cancel out. Either way here are the numbers

BITB +$237.9M
HODL +$10.6M
GBTC -$95.1M
FBTC +$227M
IBIT +$111.7M
EZBC +$50.1M
ARKB +$65.3M
BTCO +$17.4M
BTCW +$1M

So its not bad as it looks. I think when BITO went live it had $500M in net positive flows. So why the selling?

EDIT: Valkryie posted theirs at $29.4M so total right now is +$655M

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5476436.0

Yeah I called this a month ago. I was hoping I would be wrong but it went exactly to that area and started to go down. I didnt even get a chance to sell because it was there for a few minutes and the mempool was clogged and I couldn't get my orders in time.

I think now we look at the weekly candle close and if it closes as a wick then its a local top. However its still early before Sunday hits until we get a new weekly candle. But if the weekly candle closes like in your graph above, its a massive sell signal.

Its also a perfect way to outrun the $50K spot sellers who had their orders in that area.

I think bitcoins chance of going to $0 is much lower than the stock of a publicly traded company. Look how many companies go bankrupt and they have pretty close to $0 a share valuation.

Since bitcoin is not a company it can’t go bankrupt however it’s possible some bug could be discovered or some exploit and cause someone to print 1Billion bitcoins and market sell them all, this actually happened when Bitcoin was new but they forked and fixed the issue, I think satoshi was working on it when it happened.

So it’s possible but not likely.

I think after the Grayscale court case, he had pretty much no choice. Look at how many people wanted him to resign. If he voted no, he knows that everybody would be against him and make his job hell so he voted yes.

He just put that disclaimer that he is against bitcoin and crypto personally and that to invest at your risks. Either way I don’t think he will remain in office for long. After all this etf fiasco that happened for the past week, makes the sec look like a big joke.

I think Bitwise is the first one that I saw. And when it was posted, it gave a hint that we might actually be getting this etf since they put In all the money and effort to find this commercial so it’ll most likely go live.

Besides twitter I didn’t see it anywhere. Maybe if I watched cnbc or Bloomberg I would see them frequently but pretty sure I won’t see these commercials on my Netflix or prime shows.

Yeah it’s the AP which are doing the buying and selling of these bitcoins with most likely coinbase custody.

Today we had huge volume but I am checking and the AUM is still not released for any of the etfs. Usually after the close is available. Want to know exactly how many flows came out of GBTC and into IBIT. However most likely will need to wait until tomorrow because it doesn’t seem like it will be released today.

Well.

So far it looks like the fib held. Spiked into it and is heading down. If it closes like this on the daily or weekly this might be the local top. At least for the mid term.

Tomorrow will be the big deciding factor if we go to a new ATH or not.

After the market closes we will see the total flows into all these etfs. If it’s a small amount like $10M then we will get a massive dump.

But if we get like $4B of flows like predicted then we might have a crazy 20% day. Similar thing happened with BITO. It had a great flow on the first day and then it died down and hence why the sell off started.

This is not what caused him to get robbed. Most businesses that accept crypto usually use a service like Coinbase where it automatically converts to fiat and sent to your bank account. People do this because crypto is just too volatile.

It was probably someone that knew he had tons of bitcoins and word got around. Hence why it’s a good idea never to talk about your crypto holdings with anyone.

Been a stressful 24 hours pretty much.

Yesterday we had that fake tweet from the hack where we spiked to $48K and then few minutes after started to tank.

Then today we had the CBOE publish that they will list all those tickers tomorrow and we started to rally and then they withdraw those orders.

Then a few minutes prior to NY close they uploaded the approved and then they deleted shortly after. And then a few minutes later we get the official approval.

Been a crazy roller coaster ride.

I remember a few months back there was the coin telegraph tweet which said the blackrock etf was approved. Then the sec said not to trust any tweet unless it comes from the sec. And here now we got the SEC posting fake approvals and causing many people to lose money if they longed at the time of the tweet.

Even though it was quickly corrected, many people probably bought in anticipation of a larger rally and ended up getting liquidated when it turned out more and more people discovered it wasn’t a real tweet.