Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion

[JayJuanGee]

I'm very disheartened today. Lost a major chunk of my bitcoin holdings (almost 0.38 BTC) on Bitmex even though I've been longing since $8000 with just 4x leverage (adding more & more after every dump to average it further down), but still at $6140, I got liquidated. With this, I can pretty much assure that $6140 was actually the bottom. It was only to liquidate me, hard luck. Don't comment that I need to risk only what I can afford to lose, I know that very well, just had some real bad luck (as well as confusion) this time.

For reasons like this, I continue to conclude (personally) that leveraging is not necessary, especially in bitcoin.  In bitcoin we are lucky to experience outrageously stupendous returns, and I we do not need to leverage in order to achieve such outrageously stupendous returns on our investment. 

Accordingly, if you just invest regularly, then the most that you can lose is 100% of what you put in - but if you employ leverage (especially using the margin trade vehicles supplied by exchanges), you not only can lose your 100% more quickly, you also lose it way faster, which causes a kind of magnification that if you employ 4x leverage than you can lose 400% - something like that.  Therefore, I still consider any kind of leveraging to be too far into a "gambling" rather than "investing" category, especially with bitcoin.

That's exactly what I'd like to conclude. It's a total gamble, and I'd not suggest anyone anymore to be a part of leveraging at BitMex. I still can't believe how easily I lost it all just because of a dump which is not even visible on CoinMarketCap (I'd repeat that again - I'm 100% sure & confident that I got liquidated right at the bottom which was $6140). Moreover, when I was about to get liquidated at $6140, I tried to increase the margin further with a little bit of more BTC (which would've increased the liquidation level to $6050 instead of $6140 and I'd have been saved from being liquidated), but effing system of BitMex gave me an error (system overload, try again later). It's not easy for me to just invest more into bitcoin when I've my whole family to support, my education bills to pay and all other hell. It's surely going to take a while to recover from the two recent losses of BitMex and DENT at CoinRail (I highly doubt that I'll get the DENT back from CoinRail, even though they've been telling me to calm down).

A recap:

-Sold my GPT websites network for 919 bitcoins in 2011, used bitcoin as "just another" payment processor. Started saving the dollars at LibertyReserve.com.
-Lost every penny of savings at LibertyReserve.com (this is when I realized that bitcoin could be the future after reading an article at CoinDesk).
-Bought a huge bag of ZCL from my savings in mid-2017 thinking it has gone down by 70%, and can't go further down, but it continued its decline.
-Shilled ZCL in almost all 2017. Gave idea of Bitcoin Private to Rhett, but he said it's "worthless" and he's going to abandon the project of ZCL. I could've developed BTCP on my own if it wasn't for integration of stupid two way replay protection. Sold all ZCL in November at $2 each due to fear of getting it de-listed from Bittrex (as there was no trading volume present). He then introduced my idea of BTCP in December and ZCL skyrocketed to $200. Now John McAfee shills BTCP all the time.

All of this can be considered as a proof that I got my savings liquidated right at the bottom and we won't see bitcoin below $6100 again.

Nice words tweeted by Vinny Lingham:

Your situation (and luck) comes off quite a bit worse than even I had anticipated.

I think that in the last year or more Vinny Lingham has lost a lot of credibility in the bitcoin space, and  I would take, even his pessimistic statement that you provided, with a BIG ASS grain of salt.

Throughout most of my adult life, I have been considerably conservative with my finances, so perhaps I am the wrong person to be commenting on the topic, and surely, when I started investing (around 30 years ago), there was no 24/7 individually flexible investment like bitcoin (or some of the other crypto options and temptations). 

Anyhow, i personally believe that each of us should attempt to build our base through strategy and systematic application of ideas.  Surely, when we are younger we can afford to gamble with some of our investment, but who the fuck wants to be digging themselves out of a hole, if he does not gamble correctly, and for that reason, I have never been much of a gambler.

So, yeah, I agree that largely, it takes money to make money, so if you do not have money you have to build a base upon which you can increasingly raise the stakes of your investment and or your ability to tolerate some kind of reasonable and safe leveraging strategy.  If you end up losing your base, then in my thinking that means that you were risking too much in your plays.. And, if you lose your base, then that means that you have to get back to building your base, rather than resuming with double down gambling.   So, to the extent that any gambling is occurring with any of your capital, that should be coming from fringe money rather than with either your central investing money and certainly not from your principle or your base that you have either built or are in the process of building.

It tends to take a long time to build a base, and you cannot really rush such building, even though sometimes if you employ solid investment principles, then you could get lucky to be in a good place to get luck and to have some lucky breaks that allow for faster building of a base.

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[regent4]

https://i.imgur.com/Xxoi1L5.png

same as yesterday.

hourly

https://i.imgur.com/80Fcdeb.png

daily analysis here

http://blockchainshowdown.blogspot.com/2018/06/btc-usd-15th-june.html

[realr0ach]

Hilarious IMGUR propaganda post claiming "anti-vaxxers" are stupid because you will die from smallpox without a vaccine...except the US DOESN'T vaccinate against smallpox in the first place, so if any type of biological warfare occurs, this is exactly how you will die:

https://imgur.com/gallery/oF6EQOo

[JayJuanGee]

I'm very disheartened today. Lost a major chunk of my bitcoin holdings (almost 0.38 BTC) on Bitmex even though I've been longing since $8000 with just 4x leverage (adding more & more after every dump to average it further down), but still at $6140, I got liquidated. With this, I can pretty much assure that $6140 was actually the bottom. It was only to liquidate me, hard luck. Don't comment that I need to risk only what I can afford to lose, I know that very well, just had some real bad luck (as well as confusion) this time.

For reasons like this, I continue to conclude (personally) that leveraging is not necessary, especially in bitcoin.  In bitcoin we are lucky to experience outrageously stupendous returns, and I we do not need to leverage in order to achieve such outrageously stupendous returns on our investment.

Leveraging is a power tool that shouldn't be used lightheartedly. An understanding of the underlying arithmetic helps. On Bitmex in particular, shorts that are leveraged under 1 can't be liquidated at any price and only become a loss if/when the position is closed.

Accordingly, if you just invest regularly, then the most that you can lose is 100% of what you put in - but if you employ leverage (especially using the margin trade vehicles supplied by exchanges), you not only can lose your 100% more quickly, you also lose it way faster, which causes a kind of magnification that if you employ 4x leverage than you can lose 400% - something like that.

Well, kind of, yes. For example, if you make 4 repeated trades that burn each of their 100% approximately 4x times faster. Other side of the coin: for example, if you are using a leveraged position as a hedge, so you can hedge 4x times as much for the same "cost" (margin), admittedly on a smaller range. Not necessarily 4x smaller, though. The arithmetic details can get tricky.

I would defer to you based on any of the actual mathematical details or perhaps to some other credible posters who are attempting to employ a moderately reasonable margin and/or leveraging BTC strategy.

My main point was not really so much to get caught up with mathematical details, but to assert that employing leverage/margin trading causes a considerable amount of amplification that I believe to be unnecessary because bitcoin is already very volatile to play around with that can also cause a lot of upside profits without even employing margin/leverage.

 Let's say in the past 5 years, you had been dollar cost average buying into bitcoin, you could have really screwed up and have an average cost of BTC of $2k, and you would still be ahead.

If you leverage traded, you can multiply your earnings and reduce your costs; however, you could also either lose all of your investment or end up having a much higher cost per BTC.  I don't think that your odds of earning increase merely because you use leverage, and refraining from leverage is likely much safer.. especially since BTC went up nearly 80x in the past 3 years, and also continues to be 3.2x up, even if you screwed up and somehow averaged out at $2k per BTC.

[Panthers52]

I read through the Tether manipulation paper. IMO it made two convincing points:

#1 Someone has a habit of doing this:
 - Issuing new USDT
 - Within days, moving that USDT to BitFinex, Bittrex, and/or Poloniex
 - Using that USDT to buy crypto (seemingly a portfolio of BTC & others). They especially like to buy crypto when the price is just below whole numbers.
 - Moving the resulting crypto back to BitFinex
 - Rarely or never selling the crypto for USDT again
 
The authors argue that this is Tether/BitFinex themselves, and I think that this is in fact the most likely explanation. But the authors didn't address the alternative possibility of this being a particularly ham-fisted whale who is a close partner of Tether.

Bitfinex has been tailoring their operations over the past year and a half or so to appeal to institutions, and apparently have attracted a decent number of institutional customers. Also, if you believe their published orderbook, their BTC/fiat orderbook is by far the most liquid among exchanges. Bitfinex also has an OTC trading desk that apparently has been fairly successful (when a trader buys BTC via OTC from bitfinex, then the OTC trading desk will be effectively short BTC [at an above market basis], and will need to buy BTC to cover their position).

With the above being said (using made up numbers), if someone wanted to 5000 BTC at no more than 102% of the current trading price, they might be able to buy up 4000 BTC on the bitfinex orderbook at that price, but if the orderbook of poloniex and bittrex are also used, they might be able to buy the entire 5000 BTC they want. This could be done by an institutional trader, or by bitfinex themselves to cover an effective short position caused by an OTC trade.

Unfortunately, I am unable to account for the month end price decline issue. Maybe this is noise, maybe there is some other explanation, or maybe the authors are right. I would tend to think this is probably noise.  

I've thought for a long time that USDT is almost certainly a scam, and this paper makes me think so even more. Though I was actually a little surprised that this provides evidence (via the end-of-month trading) that USDT ever had any real USD.

Bitmex published a research report on tether this past February in which they found a bank in Puerto Rico they believe is likely holding the USD deposits of tether and bitfinex, as according to publicly available data (that I believe is not available in real time), had USD deposits grow at rates above the growth of USDT in circulation.

Further, tether has shown what is nearly proof of funds in the amount of ~$442 million as of September 2017, which exceeded the amount of USDT in circulation at the time.

The late months of Mt Gox showed what happens when customers are unable to withdraw USD from an exchange -- the price trades at a premium to other exchanges. Gox customers would deposit BTC into their Gox account, sell their BTC, request a USD withdrawal, and eventually cancel their USD withdrawal use that USD to purchase BTC to withdraw and eventually deposit and sell on another exchange. In the case of bitfinex, the USD price of BTC is almost always the same (for all intents and purposes -- it is generally within 30 basis points) of other major exchanges.

Kind Regards
Panthers52

[Karartma1]

@jbreher
Ok, you are skeptic, fine. My question to you would be: are you even using SegWit enabled features in Bitcoin? Have you tried the LN (testnet is fine too) I'm curious to know if you are skeptic on a theoretical level only

[Elwar]

2014:


Today:

[jbreher]

@jbreher
Ok, you are skeptic, fine. My question to you would be: are you even using SegWit enabled features in Bitcoin?

Of course not. I am a Segwit skeptic. Why would I commit any of my funds to something I think is fundamentally flawed? That would be irrational, right?

Have you tried the LN (testnet is fine too) I'm curious to know if you are skeptic on a theoretical level only

No. What does that LN to do with Segwit? I'm not following your train of inquiry here.

Here is a question for you. Are you familiar with the term 'fungibility'? Can you understand how creating two classes of BTC destroys this property? (Well, after claiming one question, you asked two.)

[vroom]

https://satoshis.place is driving Lighting innovation via real-world stress testing. Over 8,000 daily users, 8,000,000 pixels drawn, and 3,000 settled payments. Lightning devs are writing performance patches in direct response to feedback provided by @LightningK0ala

that's more activity then the top 10 ethereum dapps combined.

here is a time lapse video. so NSFW, much dirty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9BMILCC1hY&feature=youtu.be

[Cassius]

I read through the Tether manipulation paper. IMO it made two convincing points:

#1 Someone has a habit of doing this:
 - Issuing new USDT
 - Within days, moving that USDT to BitFinex, Bittrex, and/or Poloniex
 - Using that USDT to buy crypto (seemingly a portfolio of BTC & others). They especially like to buy crypto when the price is just below whole numbers.
 - Moving the resulting crypto back to BitFinex
 - Rarely or never selling the crypto for USDT again
 
The authors argue that this is Tether/BitFinex themselves, and I think that this is in fact the most likely explanation. But the authors didn't address the alternative possibility of this being a particularly ham-fisted whale who is a close partner of Tether.

Bitfinex has been tailoring their operations over the past year and a half or so to appeal to institutions, and apparently have attracted a decent number of institutional customers. Also, if you believe their published orderbook, their BTC/fiat orderbook is by far the most liquid among exchanges. Bitfinex also has an OTC trading desk that apparently has been fairly successful (when a trader buys BTC via OTC from bitfinex, then the OTC trading desk will be effectively short BTC [at an above market basis], and will need to buy BTC to cover their position).

With the above being said (using made up numbers), if someone wanted to 5000 BTC at no more than 102% of the current trading price, they might be able to buy up 4000 BTC on the bitfinex orderbook at that price, but if the orderbook of poloniex and bittrex are also used, they might be able to buy the entire 5000 BTC they want. This could be done by an institutional trader, or by bitfinex themselves to cover an effective short position caused by an OTC trade.

Unfortunately, I am unable to account for the month end price decline issue. Maybe this is noise, maybe there is some other explanation, or maybe the authors are right. I would tend to think this is probably noise.  

I've thought for a long time that USDT is almost certainly a scam, and this paper makes me think so even more. Though I was actually a little surprised that this provides evidence (via the end-of-month trading) that USDT ever had any real USD.

Bitmex published a research report on tether this past February in which they found a bank in Puerto Rico they believe is likely holding the USD deposits of tether and bitfinex, as according to publicly available data (that I believe is not available in real time), had USD deposits grow at rates above the growth of USDT in circulation.

Further, tether has shown what is nearly proof of funds in the amount of ~$442 million as of September 2017, which exceeded the amount of USDT in circulation at the time.

The late months of Mt Gox showed what happens when customers are unable to withdraw USD from an exchange -- the price trades at a premium to other exchanges. Gox customers would deposit BTC into their Gox account, sell their BTC, request a USD withdrawal, and eventually cancel their USD withdrawal use that USD to purchase BTC to withdraw and eventually deposit and sell on another exchange. In the case of bitfinex, the USD price of BTC is almost always the same (for all intents and purposes -- it is generally within 30 basis points) of other major exchanges.

Kind Regards
Panthers52

I'm almost certain that the scam is a slightly different one than originally thought.
1. Create USDT
2. Buy BTC with unbacked USDT, pumping prices
3. Sell BTC at higher prices on OTC, or GDAX
4. Bank fiat, retrospectively backing newly-created USDT
5. Ta-da! Tether is fully backed

This explains anecdotal reports of Tether/Finex bank accounts being stuffed full of cash, but also shady behaviour. They cannot audit, not because they don't have the funds but because they arrived in the wrong order.

[El duderino_]

QUICK list 12288 is finisht GOOD LUCK   WO's

16/04/2018 serveria.com
27/04/2018 BinaryReign
<snip>
10/04/2020 yefi
05/09/2020 samson   
23/06/2021 fortune143             

I really hope I'm wrong on this speculation....

Maybe you see iT wrong and thought iT was @122880 or So  

[Syke]

https://satoshis.place is driving Lighting innovation via real-world stress testing. Over 8,000 daily users, 8,000,000 pixels drawn, and 3,000 settled payments. Lightning devs are writing performance patches in direct response to feedback provided by @LightningK0ala

that's more activity then the top 10 ethereum dapps combined.

here is a time lapse video. so NSFW, much dirty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9BMILCC1hY&feature=youtu.be

Pretty cool http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/ is still up.

[greensheep]

Does anyone own a shitcoin? 
http://doiownashitcoin.com/

[samson]

QUICK list 12288 is finisht GOOD LUCK   WO's

16/04/2018 serveria.com
27/04/2018 BinaryReign
<snip>
10/04/2020 yefi
05/09/2020 samson   
23/06/2021 fortune143             

I really hope I'm wrong on this speculation....

Maybe you see iT wrong and thought iT was @122880 or So  

Nope, it's based on a 2 year bear market and next halving date in 2020.

[mindrust]

Does anyone own a shitcoin?  
http://doiownashitcoin.com/

It happens to be I own 5 shitcoins *one of them is ltc, half-shitcoin* out of 5 6. (my non-shitcoin pick is obviously btc, and none of the other 4 are bcash)   I don't care though they are mostly airdrops or similar stuff which I got for free.

I made some quick searches and I guess I should invest some in xmr and etc too.

[greensheep]

Does anyone own a shitcoin?  
http://doiownashitcoin.com/

It happens to be I own 4 shitcoins out of 5. (my non-shitcoin pick is obviously btc, and none of the other 4 are bcash)   I don't care though they are mostly airdrops or similar stuff which I got for free.

I made some quick searches and I guess I should invest some in xmr and etc too.

ETC was also surprising to me

[El duderino_]

Does anyone own a shitcoin? 
http://doiownashitcoin.com/

yeah i think 10-15 procent of my crypto is in shitcoins .... just for sport and you never know thinking... like buying selling few alts as gamble and hodling a very few alts for longer term ,and  few in masternodes .....

[El duderino_]

 

[RivAngE]

Does anyone own a shitcoin? 
http://doiownashitcoin.com/

What is defined as shitcoin though?
For me copy/paste coins that offer nothing more than a blockchain and empty promises for the future are shitcoins. Among the "just blockchains" which only transfer coins from one address to another, I only accept BTC/LTC/XRP as real coins because they're widely used by people and even accepted (or used in the case of XRP) by businesses.

I also hold ARK, ETN and RVN which I consider "start-ups with good potential but some risk to turn into useless shitcoins"... draw your own conclusions!

[sirazimuth]

Oldie but goodie...

https://youtu.be/3gfntBEI3Aw