Topic: Bitfinex - FRAUD, price manipulation, fake transactions - page 2. (Read 4931 times)

Are you kidding me or what?

It was you who first claimed that I was wasting your time, wasn't it? So what is it if not you being "ignorant, arrogant, and unable to argue" in the first place? To put it differently, what did you expect in return? I guess you should be more self-critical in this regard. Anyway, as I said, you make irrelevant points. You voice some trivialities about volatility, but this is as just irrelevant. How else should I call that but uninformative noise?


So do you confirm that with higher prices there should be a higher supply of bitcoins to the market?

@deisik

Debating usually involves responding to the other person's points.


If you can't do that I really don't see why I should carry on answering yours.

Being dismissive and rude of my perfectly valid points really doesn't win the argument. It just makes you look ignorant, arrogant, and unable to argue.

Perfect example

That was just to demonstrate how wrong you are (conceptually)

Oh, wait, wasn't I supposed to be wasting your time? Regardless, volatility itself is only a consequence (the blah blah blah part), so there is no way it can be the crux of it (whatever that might be). In fact, it is pretty inconsequential and uninformative on its own if we are looking for the true causes of it. It is these causes that actually matter. That's why you mostly make noise when you talk about it. Well, do you agree that at higher prices there is less supply? If you do, this is not what we should expect according to the basic market laws, right? We should expect that at higher prices the supply of bitcoins should expand, but does it really?

I think of it more as getting sidetracked.


The blah blah blah is the whole crux of the debate.


This is the problem, you fail to see that you are.


This is why we disagree. Bitcoin isn't special in the way it is affected by volatility. It follows the same principles as I outlined. (the blah blah blah)


That is as relevant to Bitcoin as any other market. The limited supply makes it naturally deflationary but has absolutely no impact on volatility. This can easily be seen by looking at what happened 2015 & 2016 when there was very little change in value as there were few fundamental reasons. Supply dynamics were not different at all in that time.


I talk about it because that was the premise of your original argument, remember?


This next bit we can agree on.


That's because it is no fun trying to debate someone who doesn't engage in my argument, beyond trying to nitpick side issues.

You may think of it as just being a side note

In respect to volatility being "a statistical measure of dispersion" and blah, blah, blah, you obviously fail to see that I'm not talking about volatility in general. This is boring, and it is boring not because it is boring on its own but because I'm talking about what makes Bitcoin volatility so special and particular. You see, it's a difference that makes the difference, and I'm talking specifically about the underlying causes that create this difference. Anyway, you talk about big money but where is that money exactly? What makes you think that it still sits in the orderbooks? We've seen the price surge massively recently, so it would be legit and reasonable to say that all this new money was spent on buying bitcoins, but do you have any evidence that it is still in the market and not gone elsewhere?

This


and this




higher price fluctuations = volatility

Hence the connection to me saying it doesn't


That is true of the next bit.

Then what's your point?

I don't see any connection to my claim. As I see it, it is pretty meaningless. Well, not so much meaningless as irrelevant to the matter discussed. Technically, you are wrong even in that since you obviously think that something is scarce just because it has limited supply. This is a wrong approach to scarcity because, for example, 21M bitcoins taken on their own are neither scarce nor abundant. Scarcity refers to the amount of something related to the number of people using it. And guess what, higher prices mean more people using bitcoins and hence bitcoins become more scarce since otherwise no higher prices are possible. As simple as that


This is not about volatility and some charts in general, this is about volatility of Bitcoin and its charts specifically

That's probably because you focus on the less important parts of the case I'm putting forward.


I didn't say at that price level. I said, "Price rising doesn’t make them any scarcer". From most of this reply I think you have misunderstood that phrase so let me try again. Something being scarce can be the cause of it increasing in price but something increasing in price cannot cause it to become scarce.


No, again because that is not what I claimed. What I said was price may well rise because of scarcity but a high price does not cause scarcity.


It means demand is exceeding supply and nothing more can be inferred.


In a nutshell, you haven't understood that I am disagreeing with your original statement:


Price growth doesn't cause greater fluctuations.




They can be very useful to make a simple point but become completely worthless if you then waste time arguing the intricacies of every difference.


Yes, correlation doesn't mean causation is not the same as correlation can't mean causation.

If you take a look at some charts you will be able to find many examples of where something has traded in a price range for a long period then a period of volatility has occurred and then it has settled down into a new price range much higher than the previous one and volatility has subsided again. Again I am disagreeing with your assertions that something must be more volatile at higher prices. This simply isn't the case. I did waste my time explaining to you what does cause volatility but you, of course, focused on disagreeing with everything else I said and completely missing the point.

I disagree with that

Price rising makes things more scarce at that price level specifically. Well, actually it may not work with things which have an unlimited supply, but it is certainly the case with things which are scarce on their own (like Bitcoin with its 21M supply of coins). Otherwise, there wouldn't a price rise in the first place. In general, your claim is in direct contradiction to basic market laws. In layman terms, if something goes up in price, it pretty much means either supply runs dry or demand is expanding, or both. Any of these means more scarcity. In a nutshell, no price rise without an increase in scarcity


We are getting straight into gory details

Which make these examples not very useful overall. In case of gold, more specifically, it is not actually gold value which is rising, it is the dollar value going down like it happened in 2009-2011 during the rounds of the so-called quantitative easing. Basically, gold value remains more or less the same over decades. In fact, it even goes down somewhat. Apart from that, we don't know whether it is people hoarding gold or some governments (like those of Russia and China). In other words, leave gold alone


O'really? I remember you were saying different things (something like correlation doesn't mean causation). Just take a look at the charts and you will see that the charts confirm my view. Whether it is a causal effect of higher prices is debatable, of course, but the correlation is certainly there

It doesn’t, I’m just trying to get to the underlying reasoning to your argument.

You started off by arguing:

The first bolded part I think is wrong. The phrase “higher price fluctuations“ I understand to mean volatility, I’ll get on to that in a bit. I started off by pointing that the reasoning you gave in the second bolded part is wrong. The word trade by its very definition involves to items being traded. Price rising doesn’t make them any scarcer. If limited Bitcoin supply is a factor it in no way limits the supply of dollars to buy them. So that is only a supply and demand driver for the price to further increase.
The use of the stock market analogy was only to make this point, we could equally use any type of market.


So, take Gold instead, it is king amongst metals. Does it scarcity become more at higher prices? Is it more volatile? Is it more likely to crash?
At higher prices it is possible that people may be more inclined to hoard it thus making gold that is available to buy scarcer and further driving the price higher. This makes a new price discovery at the higher price as new buyers become reluctant to pay ever increasing prices. The price settles down at the new value and volatility decreases. There is no link between high prices and volatility.

What is volatility and what causes it?

Volatility is a statistical measure of dispersion, the size of the range of values, so refers to size of the change of the value. So, the question boils down to what makes the value change. The value is the derived from the sum of what all market participants think it is. That is driven mainly by fundamentals and human emotions. Bitcoin is a young and uncertain market and is therefore going to be susceptible to much larger swings in value as new information is discovered and interpreted frequently. There is no correlation between higher prices and higher volatility.

This is not so much an argument

As a counterargument to your claim that Bitcoin is like any other regular stock market out there, which I can't agree with. Well, to be honest, I never thought of that, i.e. about Bitcoin price rising too fast, but why not? After all, I'm speaking about the rise and the fall, not so much about just the fall alone taken separately from the preceding rise. This is what volatility is all about, right? And if it makes my point clearer, then you're welcome. Really, if the price rises too fast, we could very well expect it to fall as fast, as simple as it gets

This is a very different argument, you are basically just saying it has gone up too fast. I would argue that the comparison with stocks here overlooks Metcalfe's law.

Fun chart - Comparison of current increase in BTC value compared to 2013 and 2014 bubbles:



Source article

I just spent ages searching for another chart comparing BTCUSD to previous stock market bubbles using price to Metcalfe value ratio but I cannot find it now. It also shows this is in early phase even before you consider the heard are only just starting to arrive.

Fun fact: There are estimated to be less than 5 million people in the world with a crypto wallet at the moment out of a world population of over 7 billion. This thing has miles to run.


Tether is a very small part of the story and the vast majority of fiat comes via other channels.

Which are these?

But it doesn't actually matter since the stock kings which you are likely to name have never made like 1000% profits within a single year (I mean after they have become the kings, obviously), so your whole point is not viable anyway. I refer to your comparison of stock markets to Bitcoin. Regarding your other points, especially the Tether part, this may well be only our wishful thinking (I'm on your side in this question, just in case). Also, I don't see easy ways to get fiat into the system, so there can be a shortage after all. Which is why Tether, by the way

I'm really not trying to catch you out but the analogy very much makes my argument.


There's a handful of kings. It makes no material difference.


There is no shortage.


I don't see Tether performs any function beyond the easy transmission of dollar-pegged value without using a bank.

I don't like much Marx either

But I have to agree with him on that matter (about practice being the ultimate judge). I see that you are hell-bent on trying to catch me with your stocks vs Bitcoin analogy, but, first, Bitcoin is the king while there are no kings among stocks. And, second, strictly speaking, there is no infinite supply of dollars to the Bitcoin market by any means as opposed to stock markets. This is what Tether likely tries to do, i.e. convert Bitcoin market into a sort of stock market but they will likely fail because they miss the king part. Anyway, we can only wait and see how it plays out eventually

No, they are both outsourcing to the same payment processing company.

Or is this freelance developer part of this great imaginary scam of yours as well?

http://montinglin.com/
http://montinglin.com/wire/

I prefer my Marx quotes from Groucho.




There we go. We have a different view on markets as I recall from our earlier discussion.

well, you are either a shill or part of the Bitfinex staff otherwise it's hard to understand why you try to defend a criminal company.

The bank account name is the same. The bank account numbers are different because one is for USD and the other for EURO  

I guess you have  bank accounts and you know very well that, the account numbers are different if you have many currencies  but the account name will be the same.

Cex.io and Bitfinex are using the same bank accounts (EUR and USD) .

According to Marx, practice is the criterion of truth

Regarding stock markets, here you miss another thing which I specifically mentioned. Stocks are bought with dollars or whatever, and there is never shortage of fiat currencies. Now imagine there is only one stock in the market, which is what Bitcoin is. With Bitcoin we have only 21M coins (well, somewhat less than that but you get the point). As I said, it is the limited supply of bitcoins which makes Bitcoin market very peculiar and different from other markets. That's the whole idea behind my point. Altcoins simply don't cut it since when Bitcoin surges like these days, altcoins go down. So they can be safely discarded. In other words, it is a monodrama, sort of

@deisik we could probably carry on this discussion all day and never come to agreement. I would argue that correlation doesn't equal causation. World stock markets are at ATHs and volatility has decreased. It doesn't really matter because anything could happen with Bitcoin. We're in an exciting period of the unknown. My best guess is there will be some violent pullbacks that will offer great entry points to the brave, but this bull has plenty of life left in it.