nrd525 Market Tracker

[nrd525]

Small arbitrage opportunity between GDAX and Bitfinex. BFX at a 1.4% premium.  Unfortunately I was moving my money to BFX at a -1 to 0% premium to do USD lending. Should have waited.

[nrd525]

What's a good hardware wallet that lets you select your transaction fee?  KeepKey has a fixed fee.  (They say they'll change it, but might take a while).  Currently the transaction fees are so low that you can do < $1 transactions (at least last time I checked).

I'd like a hardware wallet with a big / readable screen - like the size of the KeepKey. I also have a Trezor, but I wish it was larger.

[TheQuin]

If a big screen is what you're after the Ledger Blue could be for you.

https://www.ledgerwallet.com/products/ledger-blue

COLOR TOUCHSCREEN
The Blue embeds a color display and a large capacitive touchscreen with anti scratch glass, encased in a strong cover.

3.5 inch display
Full color, 320x480 pixels
LED-backlit

The Ledger products also allow you to use Electrum as a front end so no worries about being in full control of fees and selecting which inputs to use if you want.

[nrd525]

I'm reading Origins of the Crash. It's good. Isn't as focussed on the dotcom bubble (and ideally the investor psychology) as I'd like but is still useful.

Notes
-Was the Telecom bubble bigger than the dotcom one?   Does everyone call it the dotcom bubble because they were more bubbly and the telecoms get downplayed?   (I lost money on Nortel Networks - Worldcom also crashed).

-The Telecoms might be like our cryptocurrencies (they sold bandwidth) - and the dotcoms like the ICOs. Or this might be more true of Ethereum than Bitcoin?

-Auditors are unreliable and may blatantly support fraud in exchange for large consulting fees. If Tether was audited, it might only be weak evidence that they aren't corrupt.  Though in the case of Tether the auditor fees might be too small to risk the fines.

-Wall Street supported the dotcom bubble because they made money from the IPOs and underwriting.  This time Wall Street hasn't been making significant money (though this is changing) from ICOs and crypto - so it is able to take a more critical (perhaps loosely neutral) stance.

-It's going to take a while for all the scams to collapse (dotcom bubble lasted 2-3 years).  Obvious scams are most likely to occur at the peak of the bubble (eg. BitConnect)

-The CEOs and management ran off with billions of dollars of stock options and payments, while driving their companies into bankruptcy.  We can see this is the ICOs when they give tokens to the founders.  It's harder to see in crypto currencies as you don't know who is selling (an interesting exception is Charlie Lee's statement that he sold his LTC).

-(Not from the book) The Internet revolution was a lot bigger than the blockchain one.  This is just my opinion, but I think that the Internet (not including the block chain) has perhaps a thousand more use cases than block chains.  Some of the block chain uses cases are very big (ex. store of wealth), but the Internet (minus the blockchain) is much bigger and as such the block chain bubble is likely to be much smaller than the dotcom one.

(Might post ideas here later)

-In both the DotCom bubble and the crypto bubble we have a lack of regulation.

-In both bubbles we have had a long period of economic growth. The stock market is at an ATH and there is a lot of excess capital trying to find returns.

...

Would anyone be interested  in starting a Google Doc or other method (reddit? or bitcointalk thread?) to compare the dotcom bubble to our current situation?

[nrd525]

Korea premium down to 9% (GDAX) or 5% (Bitfinex).    4% price premium due to Tether controversy (auditor abandons work with Bitfinex).

[nrd525]

BFX USD swap is down to around $750 million. So someone(s) (eg the suspected USD swap whale) took $250 million off the table.  I think they are working with Bitfinex to not crash USD swap rates too low (currently 0.04% and dropping).  Or they might be such a large whale that they are profit maximizing by restricting supply.  Also it might be Bitfinex's own money - in which case earnings should show up in the financial reporters released to investors - have they done one of those recently?

Anyways, I'm doing a lot of USD swap lending.

I'm strongly considering selling another half or so of my remaining Bitcoin.  

Bitcoin transaction costs continue to fall.  It fits the theory that the network was being spammed.  It might also help that we haven't had any good hard forks worth moving your coins for.

[nrd525]

Woah!  I wonder if this will lead to BFX cracking down on unverified and/or US corporate accounts?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-30/crypto-exchange-bitfinex-tether-said-to-get-subpoenaed-by-cftc

It will be nice if the CFTC can verify whether or not Bitfinex's Tether are backed by USD. I wonder if they'll extend this action to the other exchanges using Tether?

[nrd525]

Things are pretty bearish.  Ripple has burst and is slightly below $1 (down from $3.30 ATH).  ETH is still holding up more than I'd expect ($1000 vs $1400 ATH).  The overal BTC dominance is holding at all-time-low of 34%.

It's a slow grind down bear market, which I think means we aren't at the bottom.  We need a fast move down and 100% bounce/retrace of the fast move (though obviously not of the entire bear market - that could take 1+ years).

We also still need to see the alt-coins collapse.  This might happen in waves of similar coins collapsing (eg. possible groupings: Ripple and Stellar, Ethereum type coins, bitcoin hard forks, privacy coins, ICO tokens, etc).

BFX USD Swap falls from $750 million to $660 million (of which $127 million is up for grabs, mostly at the FRR rate).  It's possible that Tether rumors are involved, or that someone is arbitraging the Tether rumors (BFX has a 2% premium now).

[Samarkand]

...

BFX USD Swap falls from $750 million to $660 million (of which $127 million is up for grabs, mostly at the FRR rate).  It's possible that Tether rumors are involved, or that someone is arbitraging the Tether rumors (BFX has a 2% premium now).

Active BFX USD Swaps are now down to ~510M $. Couldn´t this simply be related to the fact that
the margin positions of many people got liquidated due to the price action? After every margin call
the Active USD Swaps obviously have to go down. This could also explain why the price on Bitfinex
is holding up better than on other exchanges. Many people (e.g. Bitfinex themselves) are obviously
incentivized to prevent a cascade of margin calls and therefore "defend" certain price points
vehemently compared to other exchanges.

Currently Bitfinex is even trading at a premium to the Korean exchanges, which had double-digit
premiums to the price on Western exchanges in the past.

[nrd525]

Not only are the Active USD swaps falling, but the inactive ones are falling too.  Someone has removed $200+ million from the lending market.

Korean premium has fallen vs everything, and is now a negative premium.

I was watching the charts at 1am - 5 am EST, thinking about how we could see a crash down to $7500 within the next 24 hours. Well that proved half-right.  Instead of the flash crash, we had a slower grind down.  And then had a fast recovery.  Apparently this is very bullish (possible trend reversal).  At a minimum, we didn't crash down towards $5k or less.

GDAX bounced off 7540 which is amazing considering several people were predicting that (Tone Vays and others).  Though Bitfinex bounced off 7960.   That wide spread is now down to 1%.

I'm so bearish I might be selling, if my BTC wasn't locked up being lent out (0.06%/day - not bad).  I'm also thinking about shorting alt-coins, but that generally hasn't worked for me...  What are the best alt-coins to short that have margin trading on BFX?  I'm guessing the better it is to short long term, the more likely it is to pump - so that is always risky.  At some point the pump and dump groups are going to call it quits or transform into shorters (dump and pump?).

They'v got ETH, ETH classic, LTC, Zcash, Monero, Ripple, Dash, Iota, EOS, Santiment, OmiseGo, BitcoinCash, NEO, ETP, Eldoo and Bitcoin Gold.

[nrd525]

You can short Ripple on BFX for 0.04% APR (plus the much larger trading fees).  Someone is actually trying to lend out 4 million XRP at 0.0001%/day (1/36th of the FRR rate).  And I already had a low opinion of XRP investors

[nrd525]

Sold half my ETH (eg. 0.7 ETH) at $870.
Sold the other half at $900.

[nrd525]

Tempted to move money back to GDAX, to try and arbitrage the BFX/GDAX difference.  Currently the premium is down to 0.25% - and it's been spiking to 2-4%.

Also looks like BTC rates are spiking on Poloniex to 0.35%+/day.

[Samarkand]

...
Also looks like BTC rates are spiking on Poloniex to 0.35%+/day.

I intend to start using Poloniex again (even though the rates are already back to lower levels).

I don´t know if you have read it already, but apparently they are being bought
by Circle:
https://modernconsensus.com/2018/02/02/circle-set-acquire-poloniex/

Circle has raised nearly 200M $ in venture capital and is well connected
to the relevant regulatory entities (e.g. they were the very first company
to get one of the BitLicenses from NY back in the day).

[nrd525]

Sold half my ETH (eg. 0.7 ETH) at $870.
Sold the other half at $900.

I sold the bottom =)

I've been watching far too much "technical analysis".  They may have called the dip to $7500, but the lack of fundamental analysis means they are missing the bigger story and are unable to advise on whether we'll dip/bear market to $5000, $3000, or even $1000-$1300.

It's pretty simple. We had this massive run-up the past 15 months. We have only fallen to the level of late November.  We could easily fall to September ($5000) or several months before.

Search trends are down. Lightning Network is unproven (and doesn't fix much if people don't want to do transactions in a violatile asset and calculate their capital gains every time they do a transaction).  

ICO bubble is still on.  Are there any good websites that track the total market cap of ICOs?  I found one announcing new ICOs, but they had 10+/day - probably a lot of minor ones that are insignificant.

Altcoin bubble is still on.

It's going to be challenging to burst these two bubbles as there is relatively little shorting of altcoins and none for ICOs.  Also a lot of the new people who go in during the past six months will still have made money even if their ICOs or alticoins fall 70%.

Korea is 6% below GDAX/BFX (who are tied).

[nrd525]

Does anyone do fundamentals analysis of bitcoin and/or other cryptos on YouTube? 

Ideally rational people who don't think bitcoin will replace fiat.

[Toxic2040]

Does anyone do fundamentals analysis of bitcoin and/or other cryptos on YouTube? 

Ideally rational people who don't think bitcoin will replace fiat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-C4zLSlBaMs

Some interesting points imho.

[nrd525]

This seems like huge news for Ripple, until you read the punchline. It doesn't use the XRP token!
https://www.coindesk.com/santander-uk-ripple-payment-app/

[nrd525]

Does anyone do fundamentals analysis of bitcoin and/or other cryptos on YouTube? 

Ideally rational people who don't think bitcoin will replace fiat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-C4zLSlBaMs

Some interesting points imho.

He loves crypto currency and Elliot Waves.  Also he is on Steemit (a well disguised pyramid scheme).  "We're going to have one of the most bullish markets in the world".  Invests in wacky altcoins.  Thinks that bitcoin is falling due to FUD - not because it went up unsustainably by 10x in a year.  Hmm...  Smart guy, but he bought the hype.

[nrd525]

We tested 7.8-7.9k again (and BFX set a new recent low).

I'm starting to short a variety of alt-coins.  So far a small amount of XRP, Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold, and LTC.  Currently vs the USD, so if my short position goes bad - I'll more than make up for it with my BTC holdings (unless they pump 10x).  I might sell some more BTC too.