I had believed in some of those ideas of differing OTC prices, yet I am not really buying that story anymore either.. so OTC prices are still likely largely within 5% of the exchange prices.. Sure there might be outliers, yet guys are likely finding it quite difficult to obtain BTC for prices that are way out of sync with exchange prices..
Luckily this is a limited edge.. but I imagine it is still there for now.
We can agree to disagree.. I have quite a few doubts that these days the price differences between OTC and exchanges are very large.
I might not be expressing my thoughts clearly. I do not think there is a big difference between prices at exchanges vs OTC prices. Certainly not a "discount" either. In fact I think a buyer will likely pay a price HIGHER than retail market prices for a very large OTC trade for the luxury of not having to incur slippage.
But the main bit of what I believe is happening is perhaps best seen in this particular example.
Blackrock buys a large lot of Bitcoin OTC from wherever -> They set aside 15% of this purchase -> The other 85% is used to back incoming orders to IBIT shares. -> Now they use that 15% to hold or drop prices at the top exchanges. Then repeat... but with the advantage of prices being lower than they would have been without their dumping.
I am not going to argue against you in terms of Blackrock having some pretty high likelihoods of having quite advanced abilities to manipulate and governments may well turn a blind eye to quite a few aspects of their shenanigans, including that some of their shenanigans (or abilities to engage in such shenanigans) is also built into the systems - the extent to which they have to have all of their holdings backed by specified BTC or they can have them backed by other assets, including that the backing might even be allowed to disappear from time to time - perhaps even with some implicit agreements that would allow bailing out one segment or another and with this money or that money that may be tax payer money or may be share holder money and surely the level of the crash may well be sustainable, until it is not, and yeah, some of the players are so BIG, so they are able to tolerate $100s of billions and perhaps even several trillions of dollars of losses on one side of the ledger or the other, so I am not going to proclaim to know their various tricks, but I am not going to act as if they are not engaging in such behaviors and perhaps even being able to be successful for years and years and maybe even decades (until they are not).. and so while they are successful, they likely are fucking over a variety of folks.. and they could end up getting over their heads too.
There is almost no way that FTX was allowed to get away with various things that it was doing, and there is almost no way that Binance was not somewhat coopted by Blackrock and/or various government forces when Binance negotiated an arrangement and CZ ONLY had to spend 4 months in some modified custody arrangement. The various tentacles go far and including going into Tether currently (increasingly), but there still are needs to keep the various balls in the air.. .with the various stable coin nonsense that seems to be backdoor ways of creating CBDC like transaction mechanisms
This would only work if retail trading was much shallower than OTC trading for an ETF or corporate treasury. And I think arguably it is. And if the 3 largest buyers of bitcoin were to coordinate this action they would be even more effective.
I have no problem with those ways of describing some of the underlying dynamics that are likely attempts to control prices and to control bitcoin within bounds that might somewhat be possible... but ONLY somewhat possible.
The key thing here is where the action for DEEP buys is happening is separate from where the price (oracle) is decided.
If there is a large enough imbalance between retail and OTC depth/volume then they would be fools not to exploit it.
I am not going to deny that some of those kinds of things are happening, and they have likely always been happening to some extent, yet the players involved in those kinds of behind the scenes manipulations have gotten BIGGER in recent times, and their tools have become more and more sophisticated, including that they would like to make sure to channel more and more transactions through known channels rather than through unknown and uncontrolled channels.
And like EVERY exploit the shelf like of this trick is limited.
AND when they can't do it anymore the price will then release all that energy that had been held back. Possibly in a fairly short amount of time.
Sure. They blow up, and many BIG players have systems in place so that they are covered in any direction, including the blow up direction, including that some retail will likely suffer pretty intensely in the blow up.. which is what happened in the various blow ups in 2022 with various entities.. and so some of the players this time around might overlap, but some of the players changed and some of the tools have changed too.. so I doubt that I am disagreeing with any of these matters, whether they are framed as successful manipulation or manipulation that is temporarily successful until it is not.. and if they survive, they go on to manipulate in other ways and some of the BIGGER players that are getting into this "crypto" and bitcoin game may even get BIGGER when some of the blow up ends up taking place.
Well I am naturally dramatic, and life has dealt me some difficult cards (along with some good ones) in recent times and that might add to my negative side. I dunno.
No problem.
Let's hug it out.
I am pretty sure that you are not a bear, but you come up with some doosies sometimes, and even though I don't have problems considering some of those kinds of "out there" ideas, there likely still needs to be some kind of thread in your posting of these ideas to remind normies (especially normie newbies) that it is best (in their own personal interests - not just to save bitcoin blah blah blah) for an overwhelming majority of newbies (no coiners and/or low coiners) to keep buying bitcoin persistently, consistently, ongoingly, regularly and perhaps even aggressively, even if some variation of your overly and unnecessary negative (seemingly wet dream for bears) scenario ends up playing out.
I am not a bear in the slightest. In fact I am probably WAY more bullish that the current sentiment.
That's what they all say, to the extent it even matters how bullish or not bullish you happen to be.
It is still fair to call names, so if some of us might be overly bearish or overly bullish (or maybe misinterpreted) then it would still be fair to frame matters in terms of bullishness or bearishness in order that our points and/or counterpoints can be made.
Devil is also in the details too and I am not even going to go back and try to show any track record. I go from my general memory, which might not even be close to 100% accurate.. I might be lucky to be in the ballpark of 70% to 80% accurate.
I think most likely we are witnessing a sort of adolescence for Bitcoin. It is growing out of it's turbulent emotionally volatile childhood into a more stable adult who may not have the sort of highs it had when it was a little kid, but conversely does not have the sort of lows either. But the magic is nothing can stop the inner nature which is "it's going up forever, Laura".
Fair enough... and early adolescence at best.. since I hardly appreciate those attempts to characterize bitcoin as if it were a mature asset, even if, from time to time, it is playing with the mature assets.. like a 12 year old who is told to behave at the dinner table with adults, and sure it might be able to pull it off most of the time, but every once in a while the 12 year old might go into a little temper tantrum and screw up the dinner plans.
On this silly chart the black line represents the ideal BTC price rise if it could be calculated purely on demand/supply, and that there were no other factors like demand increasing at different rates, and human psychology. And the orange line represents what we have experienced so fas as the 210000 block cycle.
My thesis (and this is hardly original) is the orange line is going to constantly approach the black line over time.
A further bit of my thesis is the ideal line will not be linear, but an logistic curve more like this:
So now you could plt the orange line with it's crazy extremes over this ideal.. but this time reduce the variance in the orange line as you move right as well. It will never reach the ideal. There would have to be infinite demand sources at all times for that to happen. So there will always be ups and downs... AND they may follow the 210000 block cycle for quite some time.
I have no problems with your squigglies and/or the accompanying explanation.
So... I think I also have a tendency to state extreme scenarios as if they were facts when I am working through the full array of possibility. I might be proclaiming the supremacy of the inevitable (in my view) S-curve in one breath, and lamenting the deepest possible valley of the orange line of human interference in the next. And these would SEEM contradictory, though they are not.
For example. At this point the real power brokers like Blackrock are either simply trying to control as much Bitcoin as they possibly can, or they are participating in a complicated, and possibly VERY dangerous to them, gambit to do what Charlie Munger said which is to tame (or control) Bitcoin and neutralize it in the way they have Gold.
But the facts as they currently lie do not support this dire scenario. And even gold (which they most definitely HAVE neutered) is slipping away from them. Bitcoin does not have the same attack surface of gold.
Yep. They have old tools that they can try to apply, and they can try to develop new tools, too. So, yeah, I have no problem with the idea that they are doing whatever they can to control bitcoin through co-optation, and yeah bitcoin is a bit more difficult to wrangle, and they may well even have various abilities to be somewhat successful, especially if they can get a lot of folks to channel through various KYC vehicles and the various exchanges and/or third-party services that they control (or mostly control)
So, I will often try to steel-man the argument against my current beliefs to try to attack them. And I will do this publicly here. Let me make the strongest argument I can to support the idea that Blackrock is in league with the fed and the US regulatory agencies to destroy bitcoin by holding lots of it and/or selling paper bitcoin. But this would require government collusion since IBIT is REQUIRED to back all it's shares with 1:1 BTC holdings.
I think that there is various kinds of wiggle room in regards to the 1-1 backing, and it is not merely for 12-72 hour periods that they have the wiggle room.. yet I am not claiming to know all of the details, and I am not going to take the fuckwat manipulators at their word or that the government is enforcing standards equally and fairly upon Blackrock as they might do with some other smaller entities.
Sure no problem do various research about what is supposedly going on with the various settlements and/or backings, yet at the same time, we surely should be taking these matters with a decently large grain of salt in terms of how many bitcoin they have backing each of their clients and including the various ways that their custodial arrangements are clearly backing coins that are ETF coins versus Saylor coins, versus various exchange client coins.. and how fast do they have to hand over their supposed coins if anyone demands them or if there were a run on the bank.. and yeah, surely some of the contractual arrangements have contracted away the ability to self-custody, and even if there were a right to self-custody - so far there have not been large scale runs on the bank - and recall the FTX situatiion.. whether the run on the bank starts (if there is an ability to do it), then after a while there is not enough coins to cover such runs.
I am pretty sure that historically there have been some fairly strong bitcoiner entities that survived outrageously large runs on their banks including but not limited to Silvergate, Tether and Binance.. and those stronger bitcoiner entities still were attacked and not protected, at that time, by governments, yet alliances have changed from time to time, and we cannot always know which entities will be "allowed" to survive if there are various ways that some of the entities are undermined too.. so that they might no longer have the backings that they had in earlier times. It is difficult for various normies (like you and I presumptively) to be able to follow a lot of the details, even though some of us might come across various information or even share it in a group sourcing kind of way, in order to come up with better answers or to rely on the work of others who might have been able to dig into trying to unravel and/or put together certain areas of the puzzle.
Is it possible? Hell yes. Is it likely? Less and less the further we go.
(supercycle)
Attempts at manipulation is likely going to last quite a long time. There could end up being some avenues into bitcoin that end up destroying it or taking away or neuter the ability to transact directly with it and/or attacks on self-custody.. and some of the attacks might end up with backlash from time to time, like Streisand effects, perhaps?
In spite of positive and negative scenarios around bitcoin, we still need to ongoingly decide our position size, and sure, guys who have been in for a while are in a different place from the newer entrants or the brand new entrants.
Many of us still evangelize, to some extent, newbies to get into bitcoin based on our ongoing conviction that it is better to be in bitcoin somewhat rather than being a no coiner or a low coiner, so we are not necessarily pumping our bags, yet still some folks get scared off in their finding out of the various BIGGER picture underlying battles that are ongoingly taking place that ongoingly lends a certain amount of uncertainty to bitcoin, so I am not faulting you in regards to acknowledging the various underlying battles in bitcoin that ongoingly contribute some level of certainty, since bitcoin is not guaranteed to go up to $1 billion per coin.. even though $1 billion per coin is not out of question either, so ongoingly we should be attempting to hedge our positions accordingly including that the most that we could lose is 100% that we put into bitcoin, as long as we did not leverage our position. If we leveraged, then we could lose more than 100%.
Poll
