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

[ChartBuddy]

Coin

Explanation

[ghandi]

LTC/CNY on OKCoin just went full retard hitting 1CNY with ~1.5Mio Volume

[gizmoh]

LTC/CNY on OKCoin just went full retard hitting 1CNY with ~1.5Mio Volume

My chart says 11 CNY, 1 CNY indeed.  Seems like margin calling from leveraged bull there.

For Btc: Volume drying up, Decision time. Betting on down, with 1D turning red in coming days, going in the low 300's.
 

[macsga]

LTC/CNY on OKCoin just went full retard hitting 1CNY with ~1.5Mio Volume

That was "only" 50K dump that zeroed the order book. Go away, nothing to see here...

[ChartBuddy]

Coin

Explanation

[gizmoh]

LTC/CNY on OKCoin just went full retard hitting 1CNY with ~1.5Mio Volume

That was "only" 50K dump that zeroed the order book. Go away, nothing to see here...

You missed a 0, its 500k dump.

[macsga]

LTC/CNY on OKCoin just went full retard hitting 1CNY with ~1.5Mio Volume

That was "only" 50K dump that zeroed the order book. Go away, nothing to see here...

You missed a 0, its 500k dump.

Like the one who dumped them he cares if I missed a zero or not... FWIW: LTC seems like a nice investment at the moment.

[podyx]

"While proposing we "forget about Bitcoin", "Blockchain" woman Blythe Masters has been buying BTC hands over fist"

https://np.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3s7wck/while_proposing_we_forget_about_bitcoin/

Yep.

Bullish?? 

[Bicmac1973]

LTC/CNY on OKCoin just went full retard hitting 1CNY with ~1.5Mio Volume

My chart says 11 CNY, 1 CNY indeed.  Seems like margin calling from leveraged bull there.

For Btc: Volume drying up, Decision time. Betting on down, with 1D turning red in coming days, going in the low 300's.
 

That would be reasonable, if BTC would be a freely moving market ... but it is not. Shorts are up, longs are very low and market makers tend to provoke margin calls. My bet is that the ask walls will disappear magically once the triangle breaks and the price will shoot up. Just my personal opinion based on personal sentiment, do not bet your money on it!

[Monnt]

Is this going to be a temporary price drop? When is it going to go back up again? 

[Searing]

Is this going to be a temporary price drop? When is it going to go back up again? 

Well if you are asking "Paul Krugman Nobel Prize Winner in Economics" it would be NEVER!

Though he has been saying such since 2013 or so, if not before .......

(Hey just saying don't throw stuff at me in the thread..you could take out an I )

[oda.krell]

Anyone with a bit of a deeper network and cryptography knowledge care to comment on this technical proposal:

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bitcoin-ng-or-how-cornell-researchers-think-a-radical-redesign-can-solve-bitcoin-s-scaling-issues-1447108649

Basic idea seems to be to decouple proof of work blocks from transactions blocks (while keeping the two connected, obviously), without the usual trade off that means more tx -> bigger blocks.

Looks plausible to me, and actually a lot less "radical" than, say, turning Bitcoin into a proof-of-stake system. That said, I don't have sufficient technical knowledge to judge if it only appears plausible at a glance or if there's a catch I don't see right now.

(... he asked on the Wall Observer thread, thinking "What could possibly go wrong?")

[fairglu]

"While proposing we "forget about Bitcoin", "Blockchain" woman Blythe Masters has been buying BTC hands over fist"

IIRC she has always been quite bullish about bitcoin.

[ghandi]

I say: Shit is about to hit the fan. Going down.

[ChartBuddy]

Coin

Explanation

[hdbuck]

so basically yes, hedge funds and HFT companies are in...

Up until now the Bitcoin markets & trading-sphere have largely been an outworld where legacy HFT firms could not dare enter -- they were instead left sidelined to peer through the murky ether at an untapped virgin goddess with her large bid/ask spreads and fragmentation. These aligning characteristics has caused a growing restlessness and salivating for the potential profits of "tapping that".

Enter the recent AlphaPoint integration into BitFinex's backend and one of the final pieces for institutional order flow to enter the Bitcoin trading ecosystem is near complete -- although this may not be in the form of hopium bitcoin believers perceive as "Wall Street getting in" -- more on that later

Here is the latest release:

http://globenewswire.com/news-release/2015/04/28/729278/0/en/Bitfinex-Completes-AlphaPoint-Integration.html

TLDR: The most significant point I took away from this is the ability to interact with BFX through the FIX protocol -- "FIX has become the de facto messaging standard for pre-trade and trade communication in the global equity markets, and is expanding into the post-trade space to support straight through as well as continuing to expand into FX, fixed income and derivatives markets." FIX is essentially the backbone of modern financial interactions between broker-dealer and hedge fund communications to the exchanges. OKCoin has had FIX enabled for some time now and it was announced on our very own Google Hangout that a EURO based hedge fund was utilizing their platform -- enter the well known 20x OKC "woodchipper" and I will allow you to draw your own conclusions on that matter. (http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2m04s4/okcoin_rep_says_a_new_hedge_fund_controlling_3/)

It has also become public that the specific HFT firms DRW Trading Group and Citadel have taken steps to enter the crypto space(http://www.wsj.com/articles/big-investor-involvement-could-boost-bitcoin-1428259814 ). This is not only apparent in DRW's presence at the latest Inside Bitcoins NYC conference speaking privately to both OKCoin and BFX but also their large winning of the DPR coins at the last auction via their subsidiary Cumberland Mining -- all signs pointing toward a large and active presence for DRW in the BTC markets.

Benjamin's Big Short & the DRW Connection

Another page out of the BTC trading folklore is the larger than life character known by the handle Benjamin(http://tradingview.com/u/Benjamin%20/  ) on TradingView and sporting his Uncle Ben's Rice avatar -- many await his appearance like a Lock Ness Monster sighting in TradingView Chat or TeamSpeak. In early January his 3 person team borrowed 50,000 BTC to short bitcoin sub $200 -- he announced on TeamSpeak that his team was originally planning on borrowing these coins from a chinese connection but ended up going through a London hedge fund -- I give you DRW Trading Group's London office.

Many of the myoptic minded bitcoiners quibbled that why would a hedge fund allow someone to borrow coins for the purpose of shorting -- only to return them with significantly less value at a future date. Regardless if DRW was hedging off the risk before hand they would be charging a fair amount of interest fees on that amount of borrowed coins but the MOST interesting "coincidence" was the backdrop of the looming DPR auction. An auction in which Cumberland Mining scooped up an additional 27,000 BTC adding to their inventory and reducing their cost basis. The question remains if they are still looking to acquire in the next auction and I will stop short of speculating whether they are.

[I was actually debating whether to exclude this portion entirely as I thought it would distract from the real substance of what I was getting at knowing well that /r/bitcoinmarkets likes to devolve into /r/conspiracytheory very quickly. It is just really something to ponder of all the pieces involving DRW/Cumberland Mining]

The Changing Retail Trader Landscape

I do not want to go into the minutia of the Auction details itself and the Cumberland Mining mystery as I think the Coindesk article(http://www.coindesk.com/secretive-mining-firm-revealed-as-possible-us-marshals-auction-winner/ ) does a great job of divining into topic for those interested. What I do want to focus on is the consequences to bitcoin retail trading going forward with these new players stepping in.

What these funds are doing is engaging in is mainly market making and advanced algorithmic trading where they simply see BTC as part of their asset inventory to feed off of the supple virgin order flow that has been inaccessible until now. BTC is a new speculative asset class and they see the price of BTC only as a cost basis and are not necessarily interested in its direct appreciation as an investment vehicle. With that said active retail traders may find that their strategies stop working and can & will be used against them. As Sang Lucci says pertaining to the listed space any retail strategy that can be algorithm-itised has been and will be soon enough into Bitcoin as well.

Largely, I believe that this is a necessarily step towards seeing the institutional (portfolio style) money come in that the bitcoin believers have been ranting about for so long. But to be perfectly clear these HFT/algo hedge funds make their money on the order flow not the fundamental appreciation of the underlying security -- however -- they may not be mutually exclusive but it is important to make this distinction as I believe it is often conflated and misrepresented as overtly bullish.

https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/351le4/bitcoins_virginity_benjamins_big_short_the_drw/

[tarmi]

so, I heard they all locking down accounts over at okponzi if they did catch that ltc dip?  

we need another goxxing.

[ChartBuddy]

Coin

Explanation

[ErisDiscordia]

Anyone with a bit of a deeper network and cryptography knowledge care to comment on this technical proposal:

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bitcoin-ng-or-how-cornell-researchers-think-a-radical-redesign-can-solve-bitcoin-s-scaling-issues-1447108649

Basic idea seems to be to decouple proof of work blocks from transactions blocks (while keeping the two connected, obviously), without the usual trade off that means more tx -> bigger blocks.

Looks plausible to me, and actually a lot less "radical" than, say, turning Bitcoin into a proof-of-stake system. That said, I don't have sufficient technical knowledge to judge if it only appears plausible at a glance or if there's a catch I don't see right now.

(... he asked on the Wall Observer thread, thinking "What could possibly go wrong?")

This looks like an interesting idea which seems to both address the transaction limit concerns voiced by large blockers and the mining centralization due to slow propagation of large blocks feared by small blockers. It might open up new attack vectors though. First thought which comes to my mind is that if the miner currently responsible for verifying transactions goes offline/something happens to them, do we get a delay in transaction confirmations until the next block is mined? If so this would open the door to an attack where you would just DDOS or otherwise incapacitate the miner and the network grinds to a halt. Such centralization, very scare. Also what happens if the miner decides to double-spend transactions worth more than the coinbase reward + transaction fees combined? As far as I can tell the only punishment seems to be that their block rewards gets taken away retroactively by the network. Also what happens to such a reward afterwards? Wouldn't that mess with Bitcoins steady predictable inflation rate? So many questions...

[Fatman3001]

BAAAAAAAHHH!!!!!

To all of those who's followed this thread for the last year:


$374 $378!!!!! WOOOOOHOOOOO!!!!!!!