Some interesting observations posted, I remember seeing bitcoin being pushed up higher and higher, highs, lows, sideways...

  Back then you could make good trades and cash in multiple times a day but now it almost seems like every dollar you put in the bottom keeps going lower.

When BTC was hitting 58 and up I kept thinking its going to explode to 100 of course it didn't

I also remember thinking why didnt I buy when it was around 20, LOL.

  One thing I keep seeing that is really just the imagination of writers posting on blogs is this idea that crypto is now tied to the stock market...

IT does look that way right now but it really only appears that way because institutional investors are not panicking they are buying right now.

Another thing that seems just wrong is the idea that long term bonds affect the price of crypto...   (NOPE)

A lot of the big buyers whales, ect, got into crypto because the higher pricing made the market more exclusive.

They made plenty of money but I really believe that most of those "players" did not panic and sell out I suspect a lot of them continued to buy.

Most people still have no idea what crypto is or how it works it's kind of like having a conversation with someone about unix and linux, they have no idea what it even is or what it does most of the time you can tell right away if they are just trying to figure out if they know enough acronyms to make it through the conversation.   It is like that with most "average" crypto buyers and traders most of them have no idea how to determine if a particular crypto is worth investing in or if it's just a superficial sugar coated glaze on a bad donut.   Lower, Higher, Sideways, this is absolutely not going to last at the level it is now.   I think that what we are seeing right now is not a bear market.   The bulls and bear analogy does not fit right now.   I do believe that it is going to go back up and when it does it will be fast and it will probably back down but not to where we are now.   Just guessing here but I suspect we are going to see some 22 to 30 then back down to 18,  then back to 25, then 23, then 32, but you get the idea, of course if we knew this was the bottom, (which I think it is) we would be buying right now instead of waiting for lower prices because it seems like the more you buy the lower it goes, LOL...   When it does go back up a lot of people are going to do really well, (if they don't sell it back too fast)

Energy?  usage?  Billions are spent on useless energy projects every month in the world.   Think about the local automobile dealership, they run lights all night long, parking lot lights, lights inside, they have computers that stay on 24 hours a day.   No one every worries about how much energy they use.   Consider this, Large companies that melt aluminum and other large industries expend huge amounts of energy to produce something as novel as aluminum foil.  Anyone worried about that?  No this is not about energy at all.   Musk is an idiot, if you want to know what this is all about, just think about the bigger picture.   Why are they suddenly so concerned with energy?  No its about banking and finance, they do not like the idea that anyone can access banking and finance with sophisticated crypto financial products.   It is a power they have controlled for centuries.   No one is really concerned with energy use, because Visa and Mastercard, process billions of transactions which are no different than the transactions processed by mining bitcoin.   In fact visa and mastercard consume 30 times more energy than bitcoin and other crypto currency combined.   Just understand that the idea that bitcoin is causing global warming is BULL...   These are the same people that want to save the whales, but never really do save them, they want to they just can't do it because it was never under their control in the first place.   This is emotion over intellect, which is why I say that if Musk really believes that global warming is caused by bitcoin then he is truly stupid.

  There are a number of reasons why the Price went down so far, #1 Several Billion dollars were liquidated when a hedge fund went belly up.   Then there was a number of exchanges in foreign jurisdictions that closed due to fraud.  This created the down trend, that caused margin traders to go under water.   Which caused a further liquidation and margin calls for over 5000 traders which caused the price to go down more.

   None of these things had anything to do with Tweets by a self important billionaire.

  Then China made a move against bitcoin, this created further liquidation because it became a problem for companies in china to hold bitcoin.

  More Liquidation.

  Again had nothing to do with Twitter.

  What is happening now is price manipulation.

  You can see it happening on the order book.

  Until the exchanges instantiate a new algorithm to reduce the ability of bad actors to manipulate the price by reducing the time in which they are able to place orders below the prevailing price point we will continue to see the price artificially lower than it would normally be after a sell off.

It is clear what they are doing is bidding lower than the flow rate and thus reducing the bids of other sellers.

I have seen this on both sides of the ledger.

When the price goes up too far they go to the other side of the ledge and they SUCK all the buying force out of the top and this further reduces the price.

Until the exchanges take action to prevent or at least greatly reduce the ability of these people to influence the price everyone else is going to suffer in this type of market.

 

Did a Tweet or Tweets by one man who is wealthy but apparently not really all that intelligent cause the Crypto Markets to Lose Billions in value?

  NO it did not.

  We always see these preposterous statements made usually by the Media, which as we all know are full of anything but the truth...   

     There is always a reason and it may not always be obvious at first but it always comes to the front eventually.

  Here is the real reason...

  https://www.reuters.com/technology/chinese-financial-payment-bodies-barred-cryptocurrency-business-2021-05-18/

  Since financial institutions have been barred from crypto, they had to unload it, (sell it)   more sellers than buyers, equals lower prices.

  Do not be fooled by the media they are idiots and fools. 

  By Sunday it will be again above 56000

Dip?   This is not a Dip, this is orchestrated and a manipulated "broadside" aimed at leveraged and margin traders, who are in some other universe adding to the margin ...   This is not the Dip everyone felt coming, this is something different.   (Artificial) IF you look at what has been going on for the last month you can see what really happened.   Buyer fatigue,  Price manipulators, scalping the bottom of the order book on the red side.   That caused the price to fall, speculators bought, (likely thinking that it would go right back up)  opps, no that did not happen, (Why did it not go back up?)  Good question and a question that I suspect many people wish they knew the answer to that question.   The most likely reason is one of psychology.

  These market manipulators, conditioned the average buyer into not buying the dip.

  After a while you see what is happening, the price goes down, but you do not buy because you already know its going lower.

So you wait and others just like you also wait, so when the price drops, not as many buyers are waiting to buy the dip.

So the price goes lower.

  Because not as many are buying, so they wait, because hey they see what has been happening and they think hey its going to go lower lets wait.

So they wait and you wait, We Wait, so the price goes lower still.

A popular internet and brick and mortar financial institution, predicted last week a shocking low price prediction, but most people ignored them because they have been wrong about 74 percent of the time in their predictions since Jan 2021. . .     But, this one they might actually be right about not because they "got it right" but because there is this nonsense about Bitcoin somehow causing Global Warming, ....      Got to love that one, kind of like it's the Cow Farts in Montana that is creating global warming...  The thing is in Montana the Air is not polluted with cow farts or people farts for that matter, unlike Mr, Musks office building ...   The price will go up.    You might be crying in your beer for now but at least you have a beer to cry into...

There is almost always a reason behind fluctuations in the market, (really any market) it is not always obvious but one thing is clear it is just as likely that a pigeon that was perched on a fiber line farted and caused the whole thing.   ridiculous yes, same as the idea that one opinion could influence millions of cryptocurrency investors to suddenly stop supporting the market.

  Even if Tesla stops accepting crypto, how many investors were on their way to the dealership to buy one?

  No, that does not fly in any real way.   IT is far more likely that over leveraged margin traders got a call or banking deposits had to be reconciled,  another not obvious likely cause.

  all of these things contribute to an issue but what is going on right now is manipulation, no other way about it.   You can see it clearly in the order book.

  Someone has a big bet out on puts and that is the real problem.

  When a whale or a corporate presence manipulates the price of BTC in order to win a bet.

  It not only affects everyone that holds and trades crypto but everyone else who cannot engage the market because the price will not go up and it will not go down far enough to make it profitable to engage in the market.

  If you bought the dips prior to the new Low, 48 to 50 then you are stuck unless you take the loss and short it.

  You might be tempted to buy more but that is not a healthy method of getting out of a hole.

  The only thing you can do is wait until those options expire and the market returns to a state where the price is not held down by artificial means.

It is interesting, although it covers a narrow and very specific group,  (Non Employee Directors) It could apply to a number of situations, some contractors or consultants might fall into that category.   But normally those that do fit that designation would likely be financially independent in the first place.   So, it will not likely be as important to those high earners who get paid this way.   

  Signals, well the bottom line is that what you are doing is allowing "other people"  to decide when to buy and sell, (it's not their money) it's yours.   IF they signal to buy when you should be selling, or to sell when you should be buying...    it's a problem, there are trading bots, that do basically the same thing.   They are difficult to setup, often buggy and most of them are profoundly inept at what they say that they are supposed to do.   Then there are the exchanges to consider.   IF you are using an exchange that "stacks" the deck against you then no matter how great the "signal" or how good the "Trading software is"  you are going to find it exceedingly difficult to profit in any meaningful way.

Take for instance the coinbase pro platform, selling on that platform is severely degraded by use of a laging assigned value that they (to my knowledge) do not publish.

  So you look at the spot price, watch the assigned value, (portfolio value) which is updated so slowly that any value is slow to update and quick to degrade.

  An example of this would be if your assigned portfolio value was 18,900 and the spot price were 59,600.00  then the spot price jumps to 60,388.00  But the portfolio value does not update to the new price, this is because it is not updated in real time, it is only updated during the quick down trend.   They are not using Asynchronous updates to the value that they assign to the portfolio.   It is because of this that when you try to sell at the higher spot price, the trade will only execute at the lower price assigned to the portfolio.   This is a profound disadvantage to the trader.  In reality signals mean nothing IF your trading platform is substandard.

Interesting, I just had a friend who I went to  highschool with asked me about if Bitcoin was something he should look into, this was several months ago, at the time, I think BTC was around 30,000.   I told him that I had bitcoin and was in on it from the beginning, (with disclaimer, (this is not financial advice) LOL)  I do not know if he decided to invest or not.   (have not heard anything so I think he did not buy any) who knows for sure but it does look like the average person is just not going to be interested in nerd stuff, (That is basically what this is) Nerdsville, If you were a nerd in school, chances are that you are doing much better than your contemporary classmates.   The one thing that is interesting here about BTC that is, Inflation is not a problem, this is the opposite of classic inflation like in the past, in the 1900s, Hyperinflation, with regard to paper money because a real issue, As well today, we have paper money that has been inflated by printing more money, which devalues the overall value of that currency.   With Bitcoin, it is the opposite at least for now.   I expect the price to go up and down, with a big adjustment likely coming up this month or early next month.   But it will go back up.

They say hindsight is 20/20 and of course it is, but back in 2008, at the very beginning there was no value to it, at the time it was suggested that one cent would be the starting point, again, no one really understood the future in 2008.  So it should not be a surprise that years later, a lot of people cannot locate their paper wallets and actually there was no wallet in 2008.   I was running the beta, DEC 2008, ran it for days, until feb 2 2009, when the video card burned up.  I know how many were generated and at the time, I thought ok, mining bitcoin for 22 days, with a 150 mb internet connection and if each bitcoin was worth 1 penny, well that's $10.46 cents, A pizza from papa johns was $14.95 cents.  So really did not even think about it, util about a year ago.  Could someone who lost their paper wallet or just cannot find it, still get what they have on the blockchain?  It is possible, but only if they can locate that private key and file or the recovery phrase, which really came later.   So if someone had untouched bitcoin on the blockchain, they would need that private key and password to get it.   Because there was no wallet and no recovery until later in 2009.  Who knows for sure how this might one day work out for all of those people who lost access, lost wallets, lost passwords.  I suspect there are a lot of people in that same boat.

  I looked at the paypal crypto offering and while it is interesting, there are a few things that are a "Turn off"  they use a padding system, which inflates the cost, (understandable to a degree) but you cannot move your bitcoin away from paypal.   (at least right now) You can sell it, but the same padding reduces the sell price, so it's not really something that you could really use to make any kind of profit.  When I checked it out, the spot buy was 48973,   I checked paypal buy price, 52,745  So they were offering a $10 credit if you made a minimum purchase, up to 100
So I decided to what the heck I will just try it out, but by the time that I got the screen loaded to do a buy, the buy price went up to 53,800  So I checked the spot buy again and it was 49113 Didn't make a buy because the process just felt wrong.

  I have seen a lot of publications, that are posting somewhat misleading headlines, (naturally its click bait) But over all the main topic seems to be that Elon Musk made a mistake or here is a good one, Elon Musk purchase of 1.5 Billion in Bitcoin has tied Tesla to bitcoin?  Those are just meant to create curiosity about how it might have been a mistake for Elon to buy bitcoin.

The real truth is that regardless of IF buying the bitcoin was good or bad for Tesla; Trading BTC would be so much easier for a big account like that and indeed reports are leaking out that he may have already leveraged up to one billion BTC, (were talking profit) So the idea that it was a bad idea and that Tesla would suffer for it in the future is ignorant.

It is far more likely that he will make fore more money than he ever loses.

I believe that a lot of these big Banks are kicking themselves for missing out on this only to have to buy in late.

Well the world was up until Cain and Able, after that well its been with us.  One of the things that is particularly ironic is that in order to buy BTC, on an exchange you have to present a bank account, identification, not everyone could or even can get a bank account, which to many seems hard to understand but in the US it is common for a bank to refuse someone a bank account if they do not have good credit.  (IF you think about that for a moment)  How can that be anything but yet another way to keep the poor,  (poor)  In the US those that are poor, have to pay more for automobile insurance, they have to pay more for rent, they cannot get as good of a job if they have bad or not really good credit.   These are all methods of keeping those that are poor in a constant state of remaining poor.   

Perhaps, But in the US considering how Wacky the people are that are issuing bonds, (local governments, state governments, institutions, ect) People would have to be somewhat off kilter to think that the same people that over reacted during the "Pandemic" are the same people who are now saying that bonds rates are rising?  Who trusts those people?  The media broadcasts that Bond yields are up so BTC is down and what happens?   People panic and sell.   Just like today, NY, SEC, files yet another Crypto based lawsuit and BTC goes down.   (ITS a shake down) but watch over the next six to 8 hours as BTC goes down...

Domains for sale, domain, ask price in BTC, estimated value,   All are aged domains

2her.com  0.06966543  value $3400.00

flvtv.com  0.03069308  value 1500.00

anitext.com 0.05119707  value 2500.00   Animated Text, you could make some money with this one.

anitext.net  included with AniText.com

ebooksale.com  0.08201049  value  4000.00

Escrow required,  using Godaddy, so all is safe.

price is negotiable, fair offers considered, I can be had but I Ain’t totally easy, LOL.

These are priced way lower than what they will be worth in the future.

Greetings to all, by way of a quick backstory on the self same poster, I have a long history of Geekdom beginning at an early age with just a pair of wire cutters, I routinely dismantled, electronics, sometimes in horrifying ways. 

I saw one of the first Macintosh computers, on PAFB, in the late 1960s, I learned early assembly languages and have kept up to date all the way to the newer, full stack, web what ever you like here, (web 2.0 ,4, 6, 8, whatever)

So, it was no real surprise to see bitcoin become so well for lack of a better word, (bloated)

In 2008, in the winter, I was running one of the beta versions of what is now (a very much different) bitcoin, there was no wallet at least not at that time.   

Fast forward to now…

I mean there is a ton of stuff I could say about the beta how it worked, how it crashed, how it fried a video card, LOL, but that is mostly in the past by now..

What I find particularly interesting here is how some of these exchanges are literally flying by the seat of their pants and some of them are on fire….  The Pants that is...  Their seats should be on fire too allegedly.

Over the last three months I have avidly taken an interest in what was going on in the world of bitcoin.

Mostly I have other things to do, but some of that I have been looking at has been a little disturbing...

 

Because I do not want to be booted off any exchange I will refer to exchanges here in a very general way.  (not pointing the finger, at least not yet) and not in the way you think. LOL.

However, I feel it is essential to broadcast, a warning to some of these (know it all nannies,) who are running these exchanges, using a loose algorithm,  That limits the ability of a trader to buy and sell at what should be a spot off price but is not.

I see a really large gaping hole in the way these exchanges are using their individual software and what I see as a serious failing of these organizations to participate in the leveraging blockchain activity that bitcoin was really meant to provide.

Right now, these “exchanges”  are kind of manipulating, input and output, (that is not the exact way to put it) but it is as close as I think we need to get in order to have a serious discussion about these issues.

I say issues because that is what I see happening.

I see intentional or unintentional issues that are about to become more problematic mostly because what I see happening here is that Bitcoin is becoming more like a traded commodity than something you would use as a means to pay for or to buy products.

Without revealing the identity of this one particular exchange, we will just refer to it as “ADDRESSBOOK16”  just for a little fun and perhaps even a riddle as well, but to make it more simplified, lets just say AB16,

AB16  may or might be engaging in some rather flighty protocols that tend to limit a trader from engaging in a meaningful and open ledger submission.

I studied the way that this system submits to the book and what happens when that submission is routed to the book.

I also noticed three changes to the way this system works.

I also identified a range of about 30 to 50 usd, where orders were falling off the books, unfilled.

To test this theory out, orders were placed, at market, at limit, at stop,

Never, would an order go through when the over all portfolio value, would be increased by 10 percent.

So, even if you bought, say at 29 and sold at 59  IF your over all portfolio value was at a certain value. 

Then the trade would fail to execute.   (Using Market)

So, I tested out a theory, using the Sell Limit form, and I was able to execute, at 25 percent higher rates than “AB16” was offering, I was able to do this because I could see the prices of previous trades, making it easier to anticipate the rate at which I could increase the sell price.

Now I basically said all of that to say this.

Changes were made to the system, perhaps they did not like it that I was able to move around in their system and make more than what they were willing to give.

If that is in fact the case then I suspect they are in some really deep trouble that will surface in the next quarter.

Now things have been changed,…

#1  It is now impossible to sell above a certain percentage of the total portfolio value, at least as of today.

What I mean by that is IF you purchase at X price, then later in the day, you try to execute a limit sell order where your portfolio value would increase then the order does not execute in the way that you meant for it to execute.

Lets, say for example, I set a limit sell, for .004  and the limit price is a value of the first four parameters of the sales price engine.

Now I should be able to increase the value in order to gain additional price value.

This is being prevented.

Which may or may not be a real huge issue.

I say that because I executed, a limit sell order, at 300 usd.

But what happened, was that the order executed at a level that was mathematically impossible.

The order executed at 287.00   Now when I saw this happen I was stupefied.

Because the engine should have executed or killed the order.

It did not do that.

So, I started to look at previous orders.

#2  Issue number two.

Prices of execution and USD cost pricing columns, have now been removed.

So once you start executing an order the details that should be present are no longer shown.

This is a second huge problem and one that should this exchange fail to fix…   They may or may not find themselves in some serious regulation type problems.

This brings us almost to a close here.

#3…

The third and perhaps most egregious issue I found today is that when looking at the over all value of a portfolio.

I found that the inconsistent execution of limit fill or kill orders, were “MAGICALLY”  the exact amount of the value of the portfolio minus the market cost.

What?   

Do not feel bad if you are staring at your computer screen with your tongue out getting a suntan.

This completely dumfounded me but not for long.


To test this theory out, I went to the sell market tab, entered a value, (recorded that value in a notepad)

Then I subtracted, the amount of that market spot price, from the total value of the portfolio.

I recorded that data as well.

Then I went and I setup a limit sell, at lets say, 9000,   When the order was received by the book it showed, the price, but as soon as the order was settled, the price was not at the correct rate…

The order had executed, at the previous market spot, price, Not the fill or kill price.

So I went back and did the math on this and discovered that the previous price that I had recorded minus the value of the portfolio was the highest allowed price point regardless of if the order had been entered at market or at limit or at stop.

(Perhaps they will “Discover” this error)  and say Oh, did we make a mistake were so sorry.

But, I believe that this kind of behavior.

And I saw behavior because this is really more about manipulation than it is about some kind of programing mistake.

Looking at this situation from a birds nest view.

What I see or I must say what It appears to look like from this vantage point here is that there is a limiting feature that has been placed into the overall system.

What this does is to reduce the traders ability to buy and sell at a price that he can control, or at least at a spot price that does not include the spread and the value of the portfolio.

The spread should not be tied directly into the value of the portfolio.

Now, at this point we must use the term alleged.   Mostly because we need to have a serious discussion about Honesty free of the politics of local tax considerations, which have no place at this figurative and virtual table.

Allegedly, this could be a coding error, a mistake, but I suspect that like one of the more infamous movie quotes,  “ There are no coincidences,   coincidences are plans other people make and just do not tell you about, Allegedly ;“

So, with these kinds of issues, it is important for these exchanges to understand that they do not really control the market like they believe that they do.

Mostly because they believe that there is a certain supply of (X amount) of active circulating coinage.   They plan, (allegedly) on how they engage in the marketplace based on that one idea.   The idea that they know how much circulating coin is capable of market integration.

But that is based on an assumption.

An Assumption that they know more about this coin than the people who made it.

Here is where I hope that this and other exchanges may be listening and perhaps they will “Rethink” what they are doing right now.

I hope they are listening and I suspect that they are.

So, here goes, IF you are listening, you should rethink, what you are doing right now.

The reason why you “should” consider changing the way that you are either intentionally limiting and or allegedly accidentally making coding mistakes in the order book, is that it is possible, that there are many more active blocks that you think are inactive and thus perhaps are making valuation criteria based on what you think is in the marketplace.


Should some of this odd behavior continue, it is also equally possible that inactive blocks might become active.

Not making any serious statement, not playing games either, just saying that when you first practice to deceive by taking things from the little people who are just trying to enjoy a free market, well that is something that some folks would consider a low class thing to do.

Just understand this not everyone that is trading have overlooked these issues.

IF We can see this Others can see it too.

Don’t mess up a good thing by getting greedy.

Because that will bring the regulators, Bitcoin has seen a great success recently but it has also attracted the eyes of politicians who would like nothing better than to tax bitcoin back down to the dirt.

I believe that there is plenty of money to be made here and we do not have to play dirty and manipulate a trading platform in dirty ways in order to make money.

Pay attention here because a lot of people are depending on honesty in trading platforms and it is very unfair to try to rig the game one way or the other.

The preceding statement in no way obligates the reader or the writer in any meaningful way.   but only in hopes that the reader may tend to begin to examine what is actually happening on various trading platforms, exchanges, ect.

There is no intent to create and or instantiate any assertion of accurate or identifiable trade practices and or any business practices.   This is meant only as an exercise in thought or a medium of a conundrum at least for now.   Everything changes, mostly because we look at it. . .

This is a great topic, here is a thought provoking "What if"  Uncle John Doe, has a terrible accident, without a will the state marches in and takes the house, cars, all property and auctions it off for "whatever they can get"  What happens to his bitcoin?  probably ends up on ebay in the form of someone that bought the old laptop that is mostly useful for parts.   So that 20.00 hard drive with bitcoin on it, ends up in the eager hands of a kid who formats the drive in the hopes he can mine some bitcoin...  Ironic. LOL,  But in reality You need a Will and a lawyer, (if you can find a good one)  A lawyer that is. 

Lots of good comments, IMO, humble or otherwise, what I see right now is a lot of buying and selling with the intent of moving the market up and down.
I just saw a user dump 22 bitcoins on one of the exchanges and it choked on it.   The price went from 31950 down to 31200 in seconds.  What struck me was that this kind of thing is not really what bitcoin was made to do.   People are buying in the hopes that it will go back up to 40,000 and they can make a mint.
That is NOT going to happen anytime soon.   I believe that the real value over time is going to be in purchase power.  More so when we start seeing less and less value over the next few weeks.   The main problem right now is that this constant up and down action driven by people who are manipulating the market for what they can get out of it, that is going to continue to drive down the price and without some kind of market place beyond just the buying and selling of the product (just like a stock) eventually we are going to see the SEC and the FED, (us only) come in and start regulating it simply because what they see is only the manipulation as it were a stock, without any kind of oversight.  I dislike the idea of the SEC and its many tentacles of greed but its coming..  Unless we start to see some real world provision for spending and using this crypto, (which is difficult, because of how high or low it continues to move)  One day you might get a tank of gas the next something off the dollar menu at burger king.   That just does not work well for the average Joe or Jane.  Up down or sideways, I really think that a lot of people are going to be looking for trade value or purchase value, over selling on an exchange, (another whole topic) (stinking exchanges< LOL) IF you got some bitcoin at 30,000 and you look at value, when you try to sell it, you end up barely breaking even but if you can find a trust worthy market and buy some things that you would normally spend money on, well that's better breaking even and that is where I suspect a lot of people are going to end up over time.