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

[petahashminer]

now BTC-e is the leading exchange site 

[Dotto]

[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/

This is likely to be the best post on trading proper that I've read in here this year. Thanks a lot for bringing it to our attention.

you're welcome, although its already 6 months old!  

anyway, i dug it up since DRW won the last auction.

seems they are indeed highly invested in the ecosystem now and people asking for wall street sharks to be in may just regret the old days..

i mean wow, HFT trading the shit out of bitcoin is quite threatening.

the dices are rigged gents! just hide your bitcoins and stay the hell out of exchanges for some times!

[koryu]

I am long ltc/btc, lets see how this turns out  

[Tzupy]

I'm disappointed, the western exchanges didn't follow China as I hoped for, so I decided to close my short at 357$,
now if this drops to 340$ I'll have a reason to rant... So far, the bullish scenario has been weakened, but not invalidated.

[r0ach]

Shorts are piling in (@Finex). How much do we need for the potential up move?

What kind of idiot would short after that massive sell off? lol

[mrkavasaki]

Thank you for cheap  Bitcoins, Bears!!  

[r0ach]

Crash over, China going green.

[JorgeStolfi]

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?")

I don't have enough knowledge of the field to look for bugs.  However, the paper has been circulated for a month or so, at least, and was presented at the Monteral scaling conference.  So, if there are bugs, they must not be very obvious.

On the other hand, it is hard to foresee all the bad things that could happen in systems that that include human elements.  One example of a problem that was not quite foreseen when bitcoin was designed is the extreme concentration of bitcoin mining (with 54% of the hashrate now in the hands three Chinese pools).  The protocol becoming the property of a single company was another.  The fast price rise (that made the block reward be worth ~$8/tx) was yet another.  

So, who knows what failure modes the "NG" blockchain coudl have.

Anyway, I see little chance that the proposal will be implemented in bitcoin.  There is already too much software developed out there that assumes the current design.  Implementing a change of that magnitude would be like swimming in molasses.  Maybe some altcoin will adopt the idea.

[Tzupy]

Thank you for cheap  Bitcoins, Bears!!  

You shouldn't thank the bears, but the piglets... Bears provided some support when closing shorts...

[hdbuck]

Thank you for cheap  Bitcoins, Bears!!  

You shouldn't thank the bears, but the piglets... Bears provided some support when closing shorts...

just thank DWR.

[coinpr0n]

That caught me off guard. I wasn't expecting any big moves today and definitely not that China would synchronize it's price with USD markets.

[JayJuanGee]

Crash over, China going green.

Bitstamp does not seem to be done dumping, yet. 

I think we gotta wait for Bitstamp to be done dumping, before we can declare that we are in green territory.  no?

[Trolfi]

awww jorge, 'tis lovely when you actually make sense . . .

[snip]

I don't have enough knowledge of the field to look for bugs.  However, the paper has been circulated for a month or so, at least, and was presented at the Monteral scaling conference.  So, if there are bugs, they must not be very obvious.

On the other hand, it is hard to foresee all the bad things that could happen in systems that that include human elements.  One example of a problem that was not quite foreseen when bitcoin was designed is the extreme concentration of bitcoin mining (with 54% of the hashrate now in the hands three Chinese pools).  The protocol becoming the property of a single company was another.  The fast price rise (that made the block reward be worth ~$8/tx) was yet another.  

So, who knows what failure modes the "NG" blockchain coudl have.

Anyway, I see little chance that the proposal will be implemented in bitcoin.  There is already too much software developed out there that assumes the current design.  Implementing a change of that magnitude would be like swimming in molasses.  Maybe some altcoin will adopt the idea.

[Torque]

That caught me off guard. I wasn't expecting any big moves today and definitely not that China would synchronize it's price with USD markets.

Lol.  You mean that Chinese exchange accounts couldn't possibly be owned by the same whale that own Stamp and Bitfinex accounts?

[BlackSpidy]

At first I started to freak out, but then I decided "I wanna try to catch that falling knife", and bought. Now, I'm waiting for that sweet, sweet rebound. That is, if it comes at all, but I'm confident it'll come.

[tarmi]

At first I started to freak out, but then I decided "I wanna try to catch that falling knife", and bought. Now, I'm waiting for that sweet, sweet rebound. That is, if it comes at all, but I'm confident it'll come.

goooood! more dump incoming your way.

[ChartBuddy]

Coin

Explanation

[blunderer]

^Not pulling any punches, are you, BitBuddy?

[Cereberus]

With that time - get a better ship 

I found one.  I know she looks like a piece of fei wu, but if you treat her proper, she'll be with you for the rest of your life.

Now thats what I am talking about

You can ride that one to the moon!