How many of you have been Zhoutonged?

[gewure]

A bear's call woke me up this morning, and before I could clear my head I bought bought bought, bought so much that I zoutonged myself:) My last buy and my liquidation was at the same time lol!

I timed it right (buying at $4. but failed on the 10 to 1 leverage rule. When are we going to get 50 to 1?   

humm^^

try 5:1 - its high enough

[1713950680]

1713950680

[1713950680]

1713950680

[old_engineer]

Hi, my name is old_engineer, and I got liquidated yesterday at 3:1 leverage.  I saw the squeeze coming, and had enough margin available at Mt. Gox and on home wallet to drop this to 1.5:1, but couldn't move the funds from MtGox to bitcoinica due to daily limits, and the speed of the crash which kept me from transferring coins from my home wallet in time.

As my posts have probably made clear, I'm not a fan of leveraged trading, so what was I doing at bitcoinica?  Well, when Zhou announced he was having a one-day-only special with no spread (Jan 14th), I thought I'd lock up some of his cash using my long coins to reduce funds available to silly speculators, and then not close the position until this summer.  The long coins were just sitting there, not doing anything, and so I put the asterisk on the site by taking out a large long position using them as collateral.  And it backfired.  I lost 1400 btc + $2k USD, but I'm not too sore since I'm still up by a little bit ($1k) since I started trading in June, so I basically gave back most of my winnings.  Meh.

But what annoys me more than the loss of winnings is that I've been spending a lot of time daytrading to reduce volatility, catching spikes up and down, with the goal of creating a spread of less than 3% (the typical fee on VISA). Not only has it taken a lot of time, but because I've been setting my orders close to the current selling price, I'm left holding bitcoins whenever the price drops significantly (like now, when I bought all my coins at $6.5), and I sell out completely and am holding USD whenever there's a big rise.  This has obviously not been a good profit-making strategy, requiring both more time and with reduced profits in a bull market, but I've been intentionally doing it anyway.

And the big market maker (The Manipulator) pissed all over my efforts by slyly built up all bid walls and removing sell walls so that there were 4x as many buys as sells visible, intentionally driving the price up to $7 timed with the prime-time TV exposure, then initiated the sell-off with multiple 20k+ btc sells to $6.50, removing the bid walls, and adding huge sell walls. The result?  $6.5 to $4.8 and back to $6.9 in the span of 20 minutes.  Fuck.  Bitcoin can't be taken seriously for months after an event like that.

I know it's a rigged market, and I'm fine with that - the implementation of bitcoin or any new digital currency pretty much guarantees whale players -  but it's the intentional volatility to maximize his/her stake that chafes me.  Just because he can, doesn't mean he should.  One would hope that early adopters would be benevolent rather than malevolent with a fragile and precious new market, but alas, this just isn't not the case.  Why can't he just be satisfied with the the natural increase in value as usage expands, and nudge the market subtly whenever it gets too bullish or bearish?  There's no need to intentionally lead on the market, then shake market confidence with wild swings.  I think I'll take my coins and go home, at least for a while. </rant>

tl;dr: lost 1400 btc + $2k, pissed at manipulator roughly manipulating fragile market rather than caressing it tenderly

[Mushoz]

Damn, I'm sorry to hear that. I don't think it's an early adapter, though. Most likely a person with deep pockets who entered the game months ago and is here only for his personal gains by speculating and manipulation. Too bad

[legitnick]

Hi, my name is old_engineer, and I got liquidated yesterday at 3:1 leverage.  I saw the squeeze coming, and had enough margin available at Mt. Gox and on home wallet to drop this to 1.5:1, but couldn't move the funds from MtGox to bitcoinica due to daily limits, and the speed of the crash which kept me from transferring coins from my home wallet in time.

As my posts have probably made clear, I'm not a fan of leveraged trading, so what was I doing at bitcoinica?  Well, when Zhou announced he was having a one-day-only special with no spread (Jan 14th), I thought I'd lock up some of his cash using my long coins to reduce funds available to silly speculators, and then not close the position until this summer.  The long coins were just sitting there, not doing anything, and so I put the asterisk on the site by taking out a large long position using them as collateral.  And it backfired.  I lost 1400 btc + $2k USD, but I'm not too sore since I'm still up by a little bit ($1k) since I started trading in June, so I basically gave back most of my winnings.  Meh.

But what annoys me more than the loss of winnings is that I've been spending a lot of time daytrading to reduce volatility, catching spikes up and down, with the goal of creating a spread of less than 3% (the typical fee on VISA). Not only has it taken a lot of time, but because I've been setting my orders close to the current selling price, I'm left holding bitcoins whenever the price drops significantly (like now, when I bought all my coins at $6.5), and I sell out completely and am holding USD whenever there's a big rise.  This has obviously not been a good profit-making strategy, requiring both more time and with reduced profits in a bull market, but I've been intentionally doing it anyway.

And the big market maker (The Manipulator) pissed all over my efforts by slyly built up all bid walls and removing sell walls so that there were 4x as many buys as sells visible, intentionally driving the price up to $7 timed with the prime-time TV exposure, then initiated the sell-off with multiple 20k+ btc sells to $6.50, removing the bid walls, and adding huge sell walls. The result?  $6.5 to $4.8 and back to $6.9 in the span of 20 minutes.  Fuck.  Bitcoin can't be taken seriously for months after an event like that.

I know it's a rigged market, and I'm fine with that - the implementation of bitcoin or any new digital currency pretty much guarantees whale players -  but it's the intentional volatility to maximize his/her stake that chafes me.  Just because he can, doesn't mean he should.  One would hope that early adopters would be benevolent rather than malevolent with a fragile and precious new market, but alas, this just isn't not the case.  Why can't he just be satisfied with the the natural increase in value as usage expands, and nudge the market subtly whenever it gets too bullish or bearish?  There's no need to intentionally lead on the market, then shake market confidence with wild swings.  I think I'll take my coins and go home, at least for a while. </rant>

tl;dr: lost 1400 btc + $2k, pissed at manipulator roughly manipulating fragile market rather than caressing it tenderly

Same thing happened to me but with $300. 

[pirateat40]

Damn, I'm sorry to hear that. I don't think it's an early adapter, though. Most likely a person with deep pockets who entered the game months ago and is here only for his personal gains by speculating and manipulation. Too bad

I believe it's someone that picked up a shit-ton of coins when the Mt Gox hack happened.

[ineededausername]

Damn, I'm sorry to hear that. I don't think it's an early adapter, though. Most likely a person with deep pockets who entered the game months ago and is here only for his personal gains by speculating and manipulation. Too bad

I believe it's someone that picked up a shit-ton of coins when the Mt Gox hack happened.

ohhh. that's very possible... I hear they withdrew 100k BTC.

[old_engineer]

Whoever the manipulator is has at least $500k USD + 100k btc.  Which do you think is more likely: someone depositing $1M into MtGox to play in a highly risky market like this, or someone that got 200k btc back when they were $0.01 each = $2k investment, and are toying with the market willy-nilly?  I surmise the latter is more probable.

KnightMB is an obvious suspect, with a claimed 370k btc, and his apparent lack of morality in securing his bitcoins from his former employer leads me to believe he'd also be fine with jerking the market around for his own gain.

[Mushoz]

Damn, I'm sorry to hear that. I don't think it's an early adapter, though. Most likely a person with deep pockets who entered the game months ago and is here only for his personal gains by speculating and manipulation. Too bad

I believe it's someone that picked up a shit-ton of coins when the Mt Gox hack happened.

ohhh. that's very possible... I hear they withdrew 100k BTC.

AFAIK they couldn't withdraw that much, because there was a 1k USD withdraw limit. And they used the BTC weighted average price to determine how many BTC equals 1000$. It was only a couple of thousand max I think. Can't remember it that well, though. It's been a long time. (In Bitcoin time that is :p)

[Mushoz]

Whoever the manipulator is has at least $500k USD + 100k btc.  Which do you think is more likely: someone depositing $1M into MtGox to play in a highly risky market like this, or someone that got 200k btc back when they were $0.01 each = $2k investment, and are toying with the market willy-nilly?  I surmise the latter is more probable.

KnightMB is an obvious suspect, with a claimed 370k btc, and his apparent lack of morality in securing his bitcoins from his former employer leads me to believe he'd also be fine with jerking the market around for his own gain.

Most early adopters are geeks though. They won't have the know-how nor the guts to play the market with these huge sums of money and BTC to manipulate the market in a way which earns them money. I just can't see that happening to be honest.

[notme]

Hi, my name is old_engineer, and I got liquidated yesterday at 3:1 leverage.  I saw the squeeze coming, and had enough margin available at Mt. Gox and on home wallet to drop this to 1.5:1, but couldn't move the funds from MtGox to bitcoinica due to daily limits, and the speed of the crash which kept me from transferring coins from my home wallet in time.

As my posts have probably made clear, I'm not a fan of leveraged trading, so what was I doing at bitcoinica?  Well, when Zhou announced he was having a one-day-only special with no spread (Jan 14th), I thought I'd lock up some of his cash using my long coins to reduce funds available to silly speculators, and then not close the position until this summer.  The long coins were just sitting there, not doing anything, and so I put the asterisk on the site by taking out a large long position using them as collateral.  And it backfired.  I lost 1400 btc + $2k USD, but I'm not too sore since I'm still up by a little bit ($1k) since I started trading in June, so I basically gave back most of my winnings.  Meh.

But what annoys me more than the loss of winnings is that I've been spending a lot of time daytrading to reduce volatility, catching spikes up and down, with the goal of creating a spread of less than 3% (the typical fee on VISA). Not only has it taken a lot of time, but because I've been setting my orders close to the current selling price, I'm left holding bitcoins whenever the price drops significantly (like now, when I bought all my coins at $6.5), and I sell out completely and am holding USD whenever there's a big rise.  This has obviously not been a good profit-making strategy, requiring both more time and with reduced profits in a bull market, but I've been intentionally doing it anyway.

And the big market maker (The Manipulator) pissed all over my efforts by slyly built up all bid walls and removing sell walls so that there were 4x as many buys as sells visible, intentionally driving the price up to $7 timed with the prime-time TV exposure, then initiated the sell-off with multiple 20k+ btc sells to $6.50, removing the bid walls, and adding huge sell walls. The result?  $6.5 to $4.8 and back to $6.9 in the span of 20 minutes.  Fuck.  Bitcoin can't be taken seriously for months after an event like that.

I know it's a rigged market, and I'm fine with that - the implementation of bitcoin or any new digital currency pretty much guarantees whale players -  but it's the intentional volatility to maximize his/her stake that chafes me.  Just because he can, doesn't mean he should.  One would hope that early adopters would be benevolent rather than malevolent with a fragile and precious new market, but alas, this just isn't not the case.  Why can't he just be satisfied with the the natural increase in value as usage expands, and nudge the market subtly whenever it gets too bullish or bearish?  There's no need to intentionally lead on the market, then shake market confidence with wild swings.  I think I'll take my coins and go home, at least for a while. </rant>

tl;dr: lost 1400 btc + $2k, pissed at manipulator roughly manipulating fragile market rather than caressing it tenderly

Emphasis mine.

Translation: I tried to stop the speculators by taking the same position they would so they couldn't.  I lost along with them because I overleveraged.

Facepalm.

[old_engineer]

I still think it was the right idea to help to reduce market volatility, but poor execution.  I was temporarily overleveraged since free money day was a one day only event, and I was moving over the max allowable from Mt.Gox to Bitcoinica every day since free money day to back it up, but the crash happened sooner than expected.  Were the crash to have happened tomorrow instead, I would have been fine.

[gewure]

Nice guys, nice.

all day no buying on bitcoinica. lol.

[notme]

I still think it was the right idea to help to reduce market volatility, but poor execution.  I was temporarily overleveraged since free money day was a one day only event, and I was moving over the max allowable from Mt.Gox to Bitcoinica every day since free money day to back it up, but the crash happened sooner than expected.  Were the crash to have happened tomorrow instead, I would have been fine.

Bitcoin can't be stable at this exchange rate.

It's going to need magnitudes more people involved, a much higher exchange rate, and a much greater distribution of coins.

When one (I don't even want to say rich here, because you don't need to be "rich" to move this market) slightly well off individual can push the market by a large percentage, it can't be stable.

Expecting good will from people trying to make money seems naive to me.

Edit: Don't get me wrong, I applaud anyone trying to bring stability. Unfortunately, you not only failed, you contributed to the opposite.

+1.

Remember, when there is a special event and you are tempted to "take advantage of the opportunity", so are lots of others.  And when that opportunity involves taking out a loan to speculate, you're asking for trouble if you don't count on many of those loan takers losing.

[chunglam]

Got liquidated @$~5(leverage @2.5+1 BTC reserve), lost 1k BTC . Just thought I can take advantage of Zhou's zero interest loan, it proved that is not a good idea.

[old_engineer]

Expecting good will from people trying to make money seems naive to me.

Yeah, perhaps I'm projecting to think that there are others here for ideological reasons rather than trying to maximize profits.  The pyramid scheme aspect of bitcoin rather turns me off, to tell you the truth, though I see no other solution to the distributional issues of a new currency system.

And at least some (presumably greedy) speculators are needed to increase liquidity, and I have no problem with that. It's intentional large-scale market manipulation that turns me off.  It might sound like a comic book, but with power comes responsibility, and someone is playing god in a sandbox.  I expect more, and I am disappoint.

Edit: Don't get me wrong, I applaud anyone trying to bring stability. Unfortunately, you not only failed, you contributed to the opposite.

Yep, I did contribute to the problem - as I said, the plan backfired.   My self-prescribed penitence is that I sold off all my coins at a loss, and have orders in the $4.x range help catch another fall, if there is one.

Also, I feel like I need a break as I'm also annoyed with the whole bitcoin trading infrastructure:
* MtGox orders sat in the queue for 5-10 minutes.  Hundreds of traders shouldn't be able to bring a server to it's knees.  This isn't like serving up 1Gbps video to thousands of people; it's just a few numbers moving around, and a 386 could handle their order volume if written correctly.
* MtGoxLive going down or stuttering (which was actually kind of funny).  Even under light load, there's a lag of 10-20 seconds between when I make an order, and when it appears on Mt. Gox.  Not to mention the huge CPU load
* Moody's being down much of the day
* bitcoinity is still down
* and I don't even need to mention the issues with bitcoinica.

The whole system is rinky-dink and immature, but I suppose I shouldn't be surprised given that bitcoin is barely 3 years old.

[notme]

Expecting good will from people trying to make money seems naive to me.

Yeah, perhaps I'm projecting to think that there are others here for ideological reasons rather than trying to maximize profits.  The pyramid scheme aspect of bitcoin rather turns me off, to tell you the truth, though I see no other solution to the distributional issues of a new currency system.

And at least some (presumably greedy) speculators are needed to increase liquidity, and I have no problem with that. It's intentional large-scale market manipulation that turns me off.  It might sound like a comic book, but with power comes responsibility, and someone is playing god in a sandbox.  I expect more, and I am disappoint.

Edit: Don't get me wrong, I applaud anyone trying to bring stability. Unfortunately, you not only failed, you contributed to the opposite.

Yep, I did contribute to the problem - as I said, the plan backfired.   My self-prescribed penitence is that I sold off all my coins at a loss, and have orders in the $4.x range help catch another fall, if there is one.

Also, I feel like I need a break as I'm also annoyed with the whole bitcoin trading infrastructure:
* MtGox orders sat in the queue for 5-10 minutes.  Hundreds of traders shouldn't be able to bring a server to it's knees.  This isn't like serving up 1Gbps video to thousands of people; it's just a few numbers moving around, and a 386 could handle their order volume if written correctly.
* MtGoxLive going down or stuttering (which was actually kind of funny).  Even under light load, there's a lag of 10-20 seconds between when I make an order, and when it appears on Mt. Gox.  Not to mention the huge CPU load
* Moody's being down much of the day
* bitcoinity is still down
* and I don't even need to mention the issues with bitcoinica.

The whole system is rinky-dink and immature, but I suppose I shouldn't be surprised given that bitcoin is barely 3 years old.

Ironically, I believe Zhoutong's new plans will help with this.  Especially if he winds up having his own order book and hedging on multiple exchanges.  It will kill the profits of many arbitrage traders, but it will increase liquidity and trading speed for everyone.

[da2ce7]

tl;dr: lost 1400 btc + $2k, pissed at manipulator roughly manipulating fragile market rather than caressing it tenderly

The sad thing isn't that you lost the coins because of the margin; but because you lost them from an artificial limit (the mtgox daily withdraw limit).

[Oldminer]

ZHOUTONGED!!  

Damnit I had orders in @ $5.75. I think the whole idea of the site is kinda pointless if you can't leverage. May as well trade on Gox.

[legitnick]

ZHOUTONGED!! 

[cypherdoc]

oh my.

the USD is taking a dump tonite and the Dow futures, gold, silver, and oil just jumped.

UP we go.