[DATA]Exchanges: their way of using a fractional-reserve and generate inflation

[gbianchi]

 Could you let me to translate this topic in Turkish ?

People must be aware.... thanks for the help !

[nachoig]

DO NOT HOLD YOUR BTC ON THIRD PARTY EXCHANGES – BE YOUR OWN BANK

Just a challenge to help the discuss: DO NOT HOLD YOUR FIAT MONEY ON THIRD PARTY BANKS - BE YOUR OWN BANK.

[gbianchi]

DO NOT HOLD YOUR BTC ON THIRD PARTY EXCHANGES – BE YOUR OWN BANK

Just a challenge to help the discuss: DO NOT HOLD YOUR FIAT MONEY ON THIRD PARTY BANKS - BE YOUR OWN BANK.

true, but with fiat money, you're pretty much forced to use banks.

The power of bitcoin really frees us from this, we just have to learn to use this power.

[Kprawn]

Could it in theory mean, that IF someone or a group of people suddenly withdraw HUGE amounts of BTC from these exchanges.... they {the exchange} have to invent a way to hide this by saying they were hacked and then stalling the process of getting those BTC back from wherever they had it invested in?

Or they declare in public that they were hacked, and thus decreasing the amount of "virtual" coins they should have had. {Example : They claim they have 300 000 BTC on the private book, but in reality they only have 200 000 BTC ... so when they say they got hacked for 100 000 BTC, they bring the totals from the virtual coins back to the real amount of coins they SHOULD have had} If that make sense?

A few whales could acctually bring down these exchanges, if they cared to take the risk.

Thank you for the explanation, it brings things into the picture for me now.

Can a p2p exchange bring a solution to this? {Please explain, how it would be possible to run a p2p exchange in a real world scenario} Will you distribute the "private book" onto a public ledger like the blockchain for more transparency?  

[acquafredda]

Could it in theory mean, that IF someone or a group of people suddenly withdraw HUGE amounts of BTC from these exchanges.... they {the exchange} have to invent a way to hide this by saying they were hacked and then stalling the process of getting those BTC back from wherever they had it invested in?

we could try it. But, personally, my btc are all offline so I can't help.
But I think that they will have troubles.
For example BTER had a max BTC withdrawal of 50BTC. What if I had to take 51BTC?

The same goes for Bitstamp. They say that for large amount you need to contact them.

It's the same with banks: Say I have one million dollar in a bank account the moment I go to withdraw they will be more than surprised.
They will send me to the director who will eventually finds excuse about that.

Do you understand what I mean?
 

[kodeon.CEO]

I guess fundamental thing with the original post is that exchanges just make money from fee's for providing a service. Banks make money with other peoples money, they have different business models, although banks do have fees as a revenue stream also. Bitstamp probably just holds peoples Bitcoins in cold storage and makes backups. If Bitstamp was to start using other peoples Bitcoins to do things, then that could be illegal potentially (I'm not a legal expert but that's an educated guess). Which in turn would hold them liable.

Then again coinbase might be a different story as they are not just any exchange according to them, as it does function slightly more like a bank account and who knows what they are up to.

[nachoig]

DO NOT HOLD YOUR BTC ON THIRD PARTY EXCHANGES – BE YOUR OWN BANK

Just a challenge to help the discuss: DO NOT HOLD YOUR FIAT MONEY ON THIRD PARTY BANKS - BE YOUR OWN BANK.

true, but with fiat money, you're pretty much forced to use banks.

The power of bitcoin really frees us from this, we just have to learn to use this power.

Well, in the case of fiat, it depends. There are a lot of things which you can do without using eletronic forms (since I started to learning about Bitcoin, I stopped to use my debit card and started to paying with paper money instead). But if you receive an eletronic transfer, you can just withdraw ASAP. Of course, if everybody do this, the banks goes to bankruptcy. Also, fractional reserves is the motive why I think it's not possible to a country to have currency boards in nowadays.

But what I want to demonstrate is the cultural factor. I think people keeps their money in exchanges because they think their (fiat) money should stay at banks. The people think an exchange is like a  bank.

And I'd like to call the attention to which can be another common practice: people still can put their money on wallets which they can't truly control their money instead of a traditional exchange. I can't say they are using the fraction reserve-scheme, but I would put an yellow flag on this, specially on some web wallets. You can find some of these wallets listed at Choose you wallet page at Bitcoin.org ( https://bitcoin.org/en/choose-your-wallet ). But there is a problem of being your own bank which needs to be covered at some point of the discussion: physical security of your private keys.

[olcaytu2005]

I translated this topic in turkish.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=959385.0

[fatguyyyyy]

most of the big exchanges are SCAM .. use localbitcoins or anonymous small bitcoin exchanges

[cellard]

How can you generate inflation in a limited supply?
also thoughts on Gemini??

[Kprawn]

Could it in theory mean, that IF someone or a group of people suddenly withdraw HUGE amounts of BTC from these exchanges.... they {the exchange} have to invent a way to hide this by saying they were hacked and then stalling the process of getting those BTC back from wherever they had it invested in?

we could try it. But, personally, my btc are all offline so I can't help.
But I think that they will have troubles.
For example BTER had a max BTC withdrawal of 50BTC. What if I had to take 51BTC?

The same goes for Bitstamp. They say that for large amount you need to contact them.

It's the same with banks: Say I have one million dollar in a bank account the moment I go to withdraw they will be more than surprised.
They will send me to the director who will eventually finds excuse about that.

Do you understand what I mean?
 

Well, the limitation on withdraws should be the first red flag.... if you only deposited your coins with then to trade, they should have the full amount availlable. Banks does need to have a fractional reserve, because they re-invest your deposited money, to enable them to pay out interest and sponsor sport events. 

I have never tried to withdraw $1 000 000 from a bank, so I would not know how it works. 

I just wonder how these exchanges use your BTC? Do they sell it for fiat and then play around on the stock exchange with the fiat currency?

[gbianchi]

How can you generate inflation in a limited supply?

I try to explain it in the first post...

[acquafredda]

Could it in theory mean, that IF someone or a group of people suddenly withdraw HUGE amounts of BTC from these exchanges.... they {the exchange} have to invent a way to hide this by saying they were hacked and then stalling the process of getting those BTC back from wherever they had it invested in?

we could try it. But, personally, my btc are all offline so I can't help.
But I think that they will have troubles.
For example BTER had a max BTC withdrawal of 50BTC. What if I had to take 51BTC?

The same goes for Bitstamp. They say that for large amount you need to contact them.

It's the same with banks: Say I have one million dollar in a bank account the moment I go to withdraw they will be more than surprised.
They will send me to the director who will eventually finds excuse about that.

Do you understand what I mean?
 

Well, the limitation on withdraws should be the first red flag.... if you only deposited your coins with then to trade, they should have the full amount availlable. Banks does need to have a fractional reserve, because they re-invest your deposited money, to enable them to pay out interest and sponsor sport events.  

I have never tried to withdraw $1 000 000 from a bank, so I would not know how it works.  

I just wonder how these exchanges use your BTC? Do they sell it for fiat and then play around on the stock exchange with the fiat currency?

That is what we would like to know.
The million dollar example is an extreme one.
Once I went to withdraw 3500€ at the post office and they blamed on me that I didn't warn them in advance (!!!).
There were my only money at the time and I needed them for University stuff.

Even "your" money is not "your" money in this crazy world.

Fiat money has the problem that it carries intrinsic debt from the very beginning: when you accept 100$ dollar there's a debt included on that note that someone needs to repay. And usually who repays it it's poor people working like slaves more than 8 hours a day while bankers become fat.

That's why I loved bitcoin. We could start here something that destroys this world of greed from the very basis. But are we all on the same ship?
I don't think so.

[coinut]

was thinking if the exchange is charging a fee to trade the trading fee would be worthless if they were making the "bitcoins" on there own private blockchain.

although any no fee exchanges they would be likely to be carrying out banker tricks.

[Joohansson]

DO NOT HOLD YOUR BTC ON THIRD PARTY EXCHANGES – BE YOUR OWN BANK :- really it is an golden rule.

I lost bitcoins in MtGox when it went down. I will never trust an exchange ever again for sure, even if everyone says it´s legit. I trust myself.

[rememberme]

Nice explanation

[picolo]

DO NOT HOLD YOUR BTC ON THIRD PARTY EXCHANGES – BE YOUR OWN BANK :- really it is an golden rule.

I lost bitcoins in MtGox when it went down. I will never trust an exchange ever again for sure, even if everyone says it´s legit. I trust myself.

The key is never to trust them for a lot.

[acquafredda]

I understand scalpers, traders and so on, they will argue that it's thank to them the BTC value got so high.

I don't buy that explanation I do think that we are giving value to BTC.

Time will speak.

[gbianchi]

Nice explanation

thanks !

[koelen3]

Really like your thoughts!
Never thought of this before but if they decide to use this multiplier technique , they will do that on main blockchain and what if people are holding their so called virtual btc on exchange in form of alt and then decide to go back to btc but not withdraw , they can see their balance on main blockchain right? so that cann't be possible