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

[Bagatell]

I can't find the exact discussions or theories on reddit at the moment,

See my link above. From the thread "while integrating Alphapoint our margin check system was disabled for a period of time."

[Fatman3001]

What about the theories that the event last night was only foiled by Finex's trade/margin-engine malfunctioning!? Do you buy that rumour or can we safely assume that support simply held and the bears just plain failed to crash the market?

I have not been following that issue on Reddit close enough to comment. Watching the events unfold last night it just looked like selling/shorting into solid support. What specifically are people saying happened?

I can't find the exact discussions or theories on reddit at the moment, but even though I feel guilty linking this site, look at the second paragraph: http://shitco.in/2015/05/07/bitfinex-appears-to-have-crossed-streams-btc-crash-on-hold/. I know, take this with a HUGE grain of salt, but it's always worth to consider all the sides there are to a story. The exact theory for this incident is still missing, though!

https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/353yu8/bitfinex_having_serious_lag_issues_be_very/cr12ouy

[Morecoin Freeman]

[Chainsaw]

https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/353yu8/bitfinex_having_serious_lag_issues_be_very/

zanetackett has posted from Bitfinex:
"Hey everyone,

The issue has been fixed. We're looking into exactly what happened now and I'll be sure to post a detailed explanation in the future. Please don't hesitate to reach out to me with any problems that this may have caused you and I'll try to get it fixed asap. Sorry for the inconvenience."

.......
"We know what the problem was; while integrating Alphapoint our margin check system was disabled for a period of time. Now we need to get the exact details of why this happened."

[inca]

price keeps artificially supressed by london bearwhale team and followers. make use of them as your tools.

I'm just patiently waiting for this 5000 coin sale to go through on GBTC..

Being short now is like being long at 1000 dollars. What bears don't seem to realise is that most bitcoin bulls are happy to buy at these prices and support the mining supply and then some. The BTFD mentality gets stronger the lower the price is forced because bulls know it is likely to rise again. We have been here before (myself twice).

Bitcoin is a demonstration of how price manipulation is easy - both up and down - un unregulated markets. It is simply an artificial destabilisation of supply and demand - principally by selling large numbers of coins into the market all at once, overwhelming the real bids with artificial asks. But the only point of doing that (unless it is a nefarious party like a central bank) is for profit - either by gaining coins by relying on sheep traders to momentum sell the price lower for you, or, by shorting and using derivatives at the same time as you sell.

Manipulation works until it doesn't. Since the 160 bottom where a huge amount of coins were purchased we have seen 5 attempts to break down through resistance between 200 and 220. Each have been rebuffed. Last night was a clear attempt to push us into or through that range.

In my mind the difference now is that I will only increase my buying in response to such artificial selling.

[Wings1987]

I just scanned the reddit threads. Interested to me that most of the complaints are from people with low volume accounts. (5-6 BTC) I guess it makes sense that the big players would not be posting on Reddit.

[Fatman3001]

https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/353yu8/bitfinex_having_serious_lag_issues_be_very/

zanetackett has posted from Bitfinex:
"Hey everyone,

The issue has been fixed. We're looking into exactly what happened now and I'll be sure to post a detailed explanation in the future. Please don't hesitate to reach out to me with any problems that this may have caused you and I'll try to get it fixed asap. Sorry for the inconvenience."

.......
"We know what the problem was; while integrating Alphapoint our margin check system was disabled for a period of time. Now we need to get the exact details of why this happened."

"Why would people want to buy shares in a fund when they can just send their money to Bitstamp or Bitfinex?"

"Siiiiir, I know, I know, pick meeeee!"

[adamstgBit]

https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/353yu8/bitfinex_having_serious_lag_issues_be_very/

zanetackett has posted from Bitfinex:
"Hey everyone,

The issue has been fixed. We're looking into exactly what happened now and I'll be sure to post a detailed explanation in the future. Please don't hesitate to reach out to me with any problems that this may have caused you and I'll try to get it fixed asap. Sorry for the inconvenience."

.......
"We know what the problem was; while integrating Alphapoint our margin check system was disabled for a period of time. Now we need to get the exact details of why this happened."

what doesn't kill you only makes you stronger.
very good.

[uhoh]

Actually don't remember the last time that the bid side looked so healthy on Finex. Reminds me of mtgoxlive.com!

[Fatman3001]

https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/353yu8/bitfinex_having_serious_lag_issues_be_very/

zanetackett has posted from Bitfinex:
"Hey everyone,

The issue has been fixed. We're looking into exactly what happened now and I'll be sure to post a detailed explanation in the future. Please don't hesitate to reach out to me with any problems that this may have caused you and I'll try to get it fixed asap. Sorry for the inconvenience."

.......
"We know what the problem was; while integrating Alphapoint our margin check system was disabled for a period of time. Now we need to get the exact details of why this happened."

what doesn't kill you only makes you stronger.
very good.

Yeah, like Stephen Hawking. Fit as a fiddle.

[Chainsaw]

I just scanned the reddit threads. Interested to me that most of the complaints are from people with low volume accounts. (5-6 BTC) I guess it makes sense that the big players would not be posting on Reddit.

They would be more prone to going bankrupt from the error than a larger holder.

It appears that the BTC and USD streams crossed.

If I hold 5,000 BTC, my position will be affected less if my 0.23 BTC buy for $234.99 changes to a 234.99 BTC buy at $0.23.

The large stakeholders would not be bankrupted, but would serve as 'go fully long/short at current prices'.
They'd know an issue occurred, and be able to have it cleaned up without it totally stopping their trading in the interim.
Small stakeholders may have gone from a 0.4 BTC account, to owing $17,000.

Their wheel will squeak more.

[ChartBuddy]

Coin
Explanation

[Fatman3001]

I just scanned the reddit threads. Interested to me that most of the complaints are from people with low volume accounts. (5-6 BTC) I guess it makes sense that the big players would not be posting on Reddit.

They would be more prone to going bankrupt from the error than a larger holder.

It appears that the BTC and USD streams crossed.

If I hold 5,000 BTC, my position will be affected less if my 0.23 BTC buy for $234.99 changes to a 234.99 BTC buy at $0.23.

The large stakeholders would not be bankrupted, but would serve as 'go fully long/short at current prices'.
They'd know an issue occurred, and be able to have it cleaned up without it totally stopping their trading in the interim.
Small stakeholders may have gone from a 0.4 BTC account, to owing $17,000.

Their wheel will squeak more.

Crossed streams?!?! That sounds like the first thing you make sure never happens.

These exchanges are like sausages. The more you know about them, the less you like them.

Ok, I think I'm done ranting.

[Norway]

I just scanned the reddit threads. Interested to me that most of the complaints are from people with low volume accounts. (5-6 BTC) I guess it makes sense that the big players would not be posting on Reddit.

They would be more prone to going bankrupt from the error than a larger holder.

It appears that the BTC and USD streams crossed.

If I hold 5,000 BTC, my position will be affected less if my 0.23 BTC buy for $234.99 changes to a 234.99 BTC buy at $0.23.

The large stakeholders would not be bankrupted, but would serve as 'go fully long/short at current prices'.
They'd know an issue occurred, and be able to have it cleaned up without it totally stopping their trading in the interim.
Small stakeholders may have gone from a 0.4 BTC account, to owing $17,000.

Their wheel will squeak more.

Crossed streams?!?! That sounds like the first thing you make sure never happens.

These exchanges are like sausages. The more you know about them, the less you like them.

Ok, I think I'm done ranting.

[ThatDGuy]

I'm just patiently waiting for this 5000 coin sale to go through on GBTC..

Being short now is like being long at 1000 dollars. What bears don't seem to realise is that most bitcoin bulls are happy to buy at these prices and support the mining supply and then some. The BTFD mentality gets stronger the lower the price is forced because bulls know it is likely to rise again. We have been here before (myself twice).

Bitcoin is a demonstration of how price manipulation is easy - both up and down - un unregulated markets. It is simply an artificial destabilisation of supply and demand - principally by selling large numbers of coins into the market all at once, overwhelming the real bids with artificial asks. But the only point of doing that (unless it is a nefarious party like a central bank) is for profit - either by gaining coins by relying on sheep traders to momentum sell the price lower for you, or, by shorting and using derivatives at the same time as you sell.

Manipulation works until it doesn't. Since the 160 bottom where a huge amount of coins were purchased we have seen 5 attempts to break down through resistance between 200 and 220. Each have been rebuffed. Last night was a clear attempt to push us into or through that range.

In my mind the difference now is that I will only increase my buying in response to such artificial selling.

Great points here and think they bear (bull?) repeating.

[lay785]

so as the price goes back up more shorts open up.

Does that mean that the BTC supply is artificial and if not for shorters the value of BTC would be much higher?

If that is so then bulls should be thanking bears for keeping BTC prices at such affordable levels.

[Chainsaw]

I just scanned the reddit threads. Interested to me that most of the complaints are from people with low volume accounts. (5-6 BTC) I guess it makes sense that the big players would not be posting on Reddit.

They would be more prone to going bankrupt from the error than a larger holder.

It appears that the BTC and USD streams crossed.

If I hold 5,000 BTC, my position will be affected less if my 0.23 BTC buy for $234.99 changes to a 234.99 BTC buy at $0.23.

The large stakeholders would not be bankrupted, but would serve as 'go fully long/short at current prices'.
They'd know an issue occurred, and be able to have it cleaned up without it totally stopping their trading in the interim.
Small stakeholders may have gone from a 0.4 BTC account, to owing $17,000.

Their wheel will squeak more.

Crossed streams?!?! That sounds like the first thing you make sure never happens.

These exchanges are like sausages. The more you know about them, the less you like them.

Ok, I think I'm done ranting.

They should have done better testing.
This is purely speculating based on my time as a Software Engineer, and the kinds of problems that typically happen in these scenarios.

We know they have been integrating behind the scenes with the more scalable alphapoint engine.
They have communicated in the past that they were going to use both streams for awhile as an audit of sorts, and then cross over to the new platform.

Along with scalability, another listed reason was the robustness, quality of the replaced code.

But you still need to port a legacy system to a new one.
That requires new, translation code.

I am guessing an easily-overlooked copy error occurred, nested within a conditional statement only triggered by whatever obscure market event initiated it.

Or, they had just completed an incomplete set of tests, threw new code to live, and chaos immediately ensued because their test set did not include the case that the market data had.

Most of the time in retrospective (when it IS this kind of error), the culprit is one of two things:
-Failing to plan for an impossible event that is very, very possible.
-Penny-wise-pound-foolish lazy variable naming in 'temporary' or 'boilerplate' code.  i.e. you need to copy btc (a) and usd (b) values from stream1 to stream2.
So someone writes the 'temporary' code
s1.a = s2.a
s1.b = s2.b
and above they assigned A and B correctly (but poorly named) for one stream, and the opposite for the other, not caught by our first little conscious filter, because with names like A and B the cognitive dissonance never occurs when writing the assignment.

TL;DR - I'm hopeful this is an unfortunate but necessary risk that is occasionally realized when migrating legacy systems to new and improved systems.  Improved validation and testing practices will hopefully be applied and communicated outwardly as a result of this error.

[Fatman3001]

I just scanned the reddit threads. Interested to me that most of the complaints are from people with low volume accounts. (5-6 BTC) I guess it makes sense that the big players would not be posting on Reddit.

They would be more prone to going bankrupt from the error than a larger holder.

It appears that the BTC and USD streams crossed.

If I hold 5,000 BTC, my position will be affected less if my 0.23 BTC buy for $234.99 changes to a 234.99 BTC buy at $0.23.

The large stakeholders would not be bankrupted, but would serve as 'go fully long/short at current prices'.
They'd know an issue occurred, and be able to have it cleaned up without it totally stopping their trading in the interim.
Small stakeholders may have gone from a 0.4 BTC account, to owing $17,000.

Their wheel will squeak more.

Crossed streams?!?! That sounds like the first thing you make sure never happens.

These exchanges are like sausages. The more you know about them, the less you like them.

Ok, I think I'm done ranting.

They should have done better testing.
This is purely speculating based on my time as a Software Engineer, and the kinds of problems that typically happen in these scenarios.

We know they have been integrating behind the scenes with the more scalable alphapoint engine.
They have communicated in the past that they were going to use both streams for awhile as an audit of sorts, and then cross over to the new platform.

Along with scalability, another listed reason was the robustness, quality of the replaced code.

But you still need to port a legacy system to a new one.
That requires new, translation code.

I am guessing an easily-overlooked copy error occurred, nested within a conditional statement only triggered by whatever obscure market event initiated it.

Or, they had just completed an incomplete set of tests, threw new code to live, and chaos immediately ensued because their test set did not include the case that the market data had.

Most of the time in retrospective (when it IS this kind of error), the culprit is one of two things:
-Failing to plan for an impossible event that is very, very possible.
-Penny-wise-pound-foolish lazy variable naming in 'temporary' or 'boilerplate' code.  i.e. you need to copy btc (a) and usd (b) values from stream1 to stream2.
So someone writes the 'temporary' code
s1.a = s2.a
s1.b = s2.b
and above they assigned A and B correctly (but poorly named) for one stream, and the opposite for the other, not caught by our first little conscious filter, because with names like A and B the cognitive dissonance never occurs when writing the assignment.

TL;DR - I'm hopeful this is an unfortunate but necessary risk that is occasionally realized when migrating legacy systems to new and improved systems.  Improved validation and testing practices will hopefully be applied and communicated outwardly as a result of this error.

To be fair, this kind of stuff happens all the time in the regular banking system. But Bitcoin can ill afford  it.

[ChartBuddy]

Coin
Explanation

[LFC_Bitcoin]

Coin
Explanation

Look at the volume on Finex, Jeez.
Slight bit of buying volume on Stamp too by the looks of it.
Coinbase pretty flat as per usual.
Anybody neutral want to predict what the next move will be, up or down?