nrd525 Market Tracker

[nrd525]

See their definition of U.S. Person.  It excludes corporations.

[nrd525]

What is going on with Bitcoin Diamond at Binance?  It trades for 0.01 - 0.02 BTC which is 5x-10x the other exchanges. If deposits and withdrawals from Binances are possible using cryptos (sell for BTC and then transfer into LTC or another crypto for fast transfers), people should be going crazy and get rid of this premium.

New accoount registrations are closed. But old accounts should be more than enough.  Very fishy.

Edit: Apparently Binance doesn't allow Bitcoin Diamond deposits.

[nrd525]

I'm working on extracting and selling my Bitcoin fork coins. Where can US residents sell Bitcoin Diamond?  I was looking at gate.io - but they don't allow US residents (and I haven't got the email confirmation).

Also looking to sell Super Bitcoin.

Going to sell Bitcoin Gold on Bitfinex.

My general process
-move BTC to a new wallet
-installed BitPie and Bither (mobile aps - had to use my mobile phone)
-get the coins in Bither (import the seed and then it is under advanced options)
-send to BitPie
-send to exchanges
-market sell

[Syke]

HitBTC supports a lot of the fork coins (deposits and withdrawals of crypto without ID verification and ok for USers).

[Deeyoh]

I'm working on extracting and selling my Bitcoin fork coins. Where can US residents sell Bitcoin Diamond?  I was looking at gate.io - but they don't allow US residents (and I haven't got the email confirmation).

Also looking to sell Super Bitcoin.

Going to sell Bitcoin Gold on Bitfinex.

My general process
-move BTC to a new wallet
-installed BitPie and Bither (mobile aps - had to use my mobile phone)
-get the coins in Bither (import the seed and then it is under advanced options)
-send to BitPie
-send to exchanges
-market sell

No need for a smart phone. I did this today using the Bluestacks Android emulation program for Windows.  Works great.

[nrd525]

Bitcoin diamond doesn't seem to be listed on hitbtc
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-diamond/#markets

The android emulation is a great idea for typing in seeds.  Though the mobile phone is good for QR codes.

[nrd525]

Selling more BTC. I think I'm not going to worry too much about exceeding the 48k+ tax bracket.  Likely to hit it if BTC goes to 20k (and I sell more) or if BFX swaps pay well.

So far in 2018, sold around 1.6 BTC at 14200ish.  Goal is to buy back sub 5k.

[nrd525]

I'm thinking that it doesn't make sense to count bitcoin forks as income (IRS) until the mainnet goes live.  At least if you are holding your own coins in a wallet.  So for Bitcoin Diamond this is Jan 4, 2018 (at least according to their twitter).  Even then it takes a while for wallets to support it.  It's a very fuzzy area and I have no idea how the IRS is going to make a ruling.

Bitcoin Diamond is a marginal case - as a lot of people aren't going to bother (or even be able) to sell it.

[nrd525]

Market sold most of my Bitcoin Gold on Bitfinex at $359 =)

I might still have a bit left in another wallet that I need to sweep.

[nrd525]

Is Lightning Network not going to be that useful?  If most people are using Bitcoin to store wealth - they don't need hot wallets.  Our primary use case is sending all our bitcoin (hard forks), or sending most of it (buying/selling on exchanges - moving to hardware wallets).   As such payment channels aren't useful.  We need bigger blocks (or to convert into altcoins and use them to increase the block size).

For most of the world, we have capital gains tax - which makes paying for coffee with Bitcoin very complicated.

[nrd525]

As we drop sharply (but not as sharply as a flash crash) to $10700(ish) BTC and barely bounce this might be a strong indicator of the long term bear market.  Now we just need to break 10k on Bitcoin and for the alt-coins to drop another 20% (for the semi-serious alts) to 50% (for the more marginal alts).

Market sentiment isn't that bearish. Which means the bear market, if we are in one, has only started and has a lot further to go.

If you use a VPN, I've heard  that you can sell Bitcoin Diamond on Okex (and also Super BTC).  Though they are down about 50% from the peak.  Normally you could wait for a good pump as both coins are new and relatively under-pumped (I cannot believe I'm saying this!).  However in a serious bear market, all the super sketchy pump coins are going to zero (or near enough zero).

[nrd525]

Sold 0.5 BTC at 11720 GDAX. 

Now sold 2.1 BTC total in 2017.

[nrd525]

You might hear arguments like 2018 is different from 2014. But 2014 was different from 2011 (eg vast improvements in projects and public awareness).  So we're still going down.

[nrd525]

Korea premium still at 18%.  Probably won't see the bottom until this goes to zero. I'd call it a necessary but not sufficient cause (eg. we'd need other causes as well, but it is unlikely to happen without the premium going to zero).

Bitfinex dropped as low as 9200 and GDAX bounced off 9005.

BitConnect was already showing signs of nearing collapse. The sheer size of the ponzi caused the future roadmap to get out of control crazy (the ICO, ATMs, etc).  It's likely that the btc bear market contributed to their collapse.  Not sure if the collapse is having a major impact on the markets.  In theory, there are hundreds of millions (possibly a billion) in dollars that are scammed.  It's also a lot of people who are hopefully (as they are ill suited for it) going to swear off investing in crypto currency and tell all their friends that crypto is a scam (less fortunate - but it could stop a lot of people from investing unwisely).  And there should be a round of major media stories about BitConnect.

[nrd525]

Tether data:
https://wallet.tether.to/transparency

Tether rich list
https://wallet.tether.to/richlist
Amazing to see Bitfinex only has $30 million in their top address.  Compare to $400+ million for Binance and Bittrex.

Is Bitfinex not the big user of Tether that everyone has thought?

[TheQuin]

Amazing to see Bitfinex only has $30 million in their top address.  Compare to $400+ million for Binance and Bittrex.

Is Bitfinex not the big user of Tether that everyone has thought?

My understanding on this is it is due to the way Bitfinex treats USD and USDT as the same thing in customer accounts. They only need to hold enough Tether to maintain a hot wallet for withdrawals and with their relationship with Tether it is quick and easy for them to top it up whenever needed. So in effect, they hold customer funds in USD bank accounts as the cold wallet for Tethers. The omiexplorer seems to be down at the moment but I think their address is one of the most active.

[nrd525]

Is Bitfinex really holding customer funds in USD in a bank? Or just in their internal system? If it is a bank, is it cut off from the other banks (eg. no USD transfers)?  Otherwise why would they have to use Tether in the first place?

I also wonder if Bitfinex could be generating a large amount of USD from its own profits - and what role that would play (in theory it'd be a good source of real USD - though they have to get it out of Tethers or get it from USD that is deposited on the site).  Where is that money stored?


...

http://www.tetherreport.com/
This is interesting. But I'm worried that smart people can do a lot of misleading with statistics.

Ex.  I've got a data set that "proves" that the city of Philadelphia did a new property assessment to fix years of neglect they actually made things worse.  That they assessed $50k houses at $100k if they are in low income neighborhoods, and they assessed $150k houses in high income neighborhoods at $100k  -- thus transferring tens of millions of dollars annually from poor people to the middle class - but I haven't released the results because I think there is a problem with the data set.  I've got p < 0.00001 for a lot of the statistics too.

I think the fundamental question (and an assumption by Tether critics) is that Bitfinex has still lost its relationships with banks - but Bitfinex says otherwise.

...

I'd be interested in seeing some market based responses to the Tether issue.  For instance, USD lending rates on Bitfinex are low considering they were hacked in 2016 and the supposed Tether risk.  Traders are still using Bitfinex and other Tether exchanges. Though traders do some very stupid things (see ICOs, alt-coins, MtGox).  It'd be interesting to see some escrowed bets on Fairlay.

[nrd525]

Korea premium down to 12%.  Probably see a gradual fall as people figure out how to arbitrage.  I heard somebody on Whale Club talking about working with Korean students, as each Korean citizen has a small limt of money they can move into USD.

[Samarkand]

...

I'd be interested in seeing some market based responses to the Tether issue.  For instance, USD lending rates on Bitfinex are low considering they were hacked in 2016 and the supposed Tether risk.  Traders are still using Bitfinex and other Tether exchanges. Though traders do some very stupid things (see ICOs, alt-coins, MtGox).  It'd be interesting to see some escrowed bets on Fairlay.

The reason that traders are still using Bitfinex and other Tether exchanges could be due to the lack
of alternatives. The exchanges in question are the only exchanges with fiat pairs for sketchy altcoins
(e.g. Bitfinex has a USD trading pair for every coin/token that they list). If Tether would suddenly be
removed from the cryptocurrency scene for some reason only BTC and ETH trading pairs would be left
for traders. There definitely is a need for a stable-coin of some kind that allows for easier arbitrage
between exchanges, the circumvention of the need of a bank account for the altcoin exchanges and so on.

Besides, it is nice that Tether always saves us BTC holders when the price threatens to fall
too fast.

[nrd525]

Good article on Lightning Network:
https://blog.bitmex.com/the-lightning-network/