Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 1029. (Read 2032266 times)

Did BTC just dip into the $400's?!?  Who could have guessed?

pr0n?

Don't get me wrong, it's not like I'm saying "This kind of market movement is impossible", that's certainly not the case. But at the moment, as Justus rightly points out, we're simply taking the "good" word of these people that these are real market forces playing out. And there's a more than plausible range of scenarios under which serious finagling could be taking place.

To put it another way, the idea that these exchanges are happily operating totally freely & under zero political pressure is the least plausible version of reality. How and to what extent that's manifesting, I do not know.

I'll remind everyone of an observation I've made in the past: the significant differences in price chart characteristics between fiat-holding exchanges and localbitcoins.com, specifically the extra high buy prices. This phenomenon is still with us, not entirely confined to the extant part of the volume range, and is so consistent over the long term that it cannot all be attributed to accidents. These buyers are either foolish, desperate, or both. These figures are much more believable as a cross section of what decisions real traders make when fully considering their actions. Note that the bottoms exhibited on the fiat-centralised exchanges don't really appear on localbitcoins, and in fact, the negative volatility is significantly dampened (i.e. significant skew towards price increases). Is this because traders are operating at mammal based decision making speeds, or is it just because these are actually all real trades with real money?

Where are the coins being sold coming from? Do they even exist?

Are your bitcoins in your Coinbase or Circle really sitting idle in cold storage, or are they being used to short the market?

With the current design of exchanges and web wallets, it's impossible to know.

Agreed, I've been thinking about the same general principle. Black market price is believably genuine market value compared to captured institutions that are so vulnerable to coercion. It's truly possible that everywhere will be like living in Argentina before we see genuine price discovery.

And is there really ten's of thousands of coins available in those ask walls? Who's actually doing the selling, and are they just selling to themselves at 0% commision? We have no idea the level of price manipulation taking place at the exchanges. And there's no real way to find out; even if you were willing to spend millions eating the ask-side all the way up to $800, the depth would melt away whether it really exists or not. Reality and deciet produce identical outcomes.

Bitcoin needs a new Silk Road.

As long as price discovery takes place on the exchanges, instead of via supply and demand for commerce, the banksters can play their tricks very easily.

The only killer app for Bitcoin is to enable commerce that would otherwise impossible, and that means the black market.

Note that the black market doesn't imply violent or destructive - it can be as ordinary and benign as operating a lemonade stand without a permit from the city, or participating in a ride sharing service without a taxi license.

Bitcoin needs to give people access to things they can't have without it. A safe and pleasant drug buying experience was a great start, but it's time to think bigger now.

Its well under half an ounce of gold.
Take advantage.

[tinfoil time]

Sometimes I imagine I'm a billionaire / head of investment of a major bank / king of the Jewish space lizards.

I'm morally bankrupt, command fantastic wealth, and not so completely comfortable in my position that I cannot even see the potential of Bitcoin at least. And perhaps its danger to my position.

Here's what I most certainly wouldn't do: transition from fiat wealth to crypto wealth in the obvious way (by buying, on a public market). At least one perspective of what personal wealth is is that it is a 'ranking' among humans. Why would I take the risk of decreasing my own ranking by increasing that of early crypto adopters.

Here's what I would maybe do:

1) Try to destroy crypto

2) Try to get a decent piece of crypto without rocking the previous balance (see paragraph above).

How? Buy coins directly from miners, at market price, and at the same time, "invest" some of those newly bought coins to keep market price low.

The difference between 1) and 2) is whether you plan to end up with a net loss (but a long term success, because crypto is dead), or a net gain. The amount of coins sold publically vs. those held distinguishes 1) from 2).

Not an entirely new thought, I know. As others have pointed out, this can only work for so long before public interest overwhelms any such manipulations.

Perhaps. In fact, I think so too. But I am not entirely sure about. At the very least, the above scenario is on my list of crypto investment risk factors. Not at the top, perhaps, but it's on there.

[/tinfoil]

It doesn't look like it to me, the market is now locked into a new long term downtrend ... by fair means or foul the banksters want cheap coinz ... and people seem to be willing to sell them ever lower. It appears to me to be some kind of algorithm that is designed to walk the market steadily lower, after each dump, new blocking sell walls spring up of a consistent size and interval above market to cap any bounce back rallies developing.

here's your golden opportunity to buy Bitcoin.

Nothing has changed about gold or BTC.  Buying BTC now likely entails an amount of short term risk.  Long term however it's hard to make a case for gold over crypto.  The current downtrend is simply the blow off from the last bubble coupled with the ASIC roll out.  BTC won't see an uptrend until we some some major ASIC manufactures go BK.

He said investing, not speculating

Central banks are 

It's 2014, who's still investing in gold? 

A lot more than you think. I believe someday you'll be quite sorry about your actions today.

I have to quote myself, because it was brilliantly written :

It is mind work. It consist of stretching out on the sofa, occasionally go to the screen and enter to_da_moon, sometimes endure deep despair, some euforia. That is how we build the future of money. It deserves to be rewarded, and quickly.

You know that's not what I mean,  , and nor is it what I say.

It looks to me like Baz is trying to put together a technical solution to the difficulty described in allowing retail to move in and out of the underlying asset. To make the collusion / bidding process manageable it of course has to be limited to vetted players. I'll take your word for it that he calls the bidders 'banks' but I've no doubt that any bringer of sufficient liquidity could get a seat.

Your apparent ungenerosity towards His Bazosity would carry more weight if you proposed a viable alternative. I happen to think that decentralisation and the market (several funds and fixes) will do much to keep the game straightish. There are very low barriers to entry in the buy-bitcoin-yourself market.

Anyway, he's gonna make us all rich n'est-ce pas?

You mean we've never seen price collusions on closed exchanges like this before? 

The way Barry's described the way it will work is a closed bidding.process amongst only banks. We hear report after report in the news about how banks have colluded numerous times in similar situations. 

I'm not sure why you have such a problem with this. Is it perhaps all the negative connotations with the word 'fix'? Perhaps there is another word that could be used for a periodic agreed trading price.

There will be a whole group of people who want to hold and (very occasionally) buy/sell bitcoin. The ones that don't want to or can't use exchanges directly and don't want to or can't be bothered with storage. They will be happy to pay their 1% for someone to manage all that and even insure it already. Whatever you think of that, it will be a legitimate service.

But that service will not be able to offer in/out, buy/sell to it's customers at what we would call "market". It simply can't work in practice: the price would change between the client's order and it's execution and that would freak out the client. No one needs or can handle the grief of every order being disputed and/or delayed or the liabilities that might follow.

So you have a daily (or twice daily) point where you try and work out a fair price and use that as the bench mark for the queued trades. You can't use a historical price because you would be played, so it has to be the next price point. Similarly, you can't just use a given exchange at a known time because that too would be easily played. So you use a basket of prices including major exchanges and major OTC brokers and make that your price point. You (perhaps mistakenly) call it the "fix".

Is it open to collusion? Obviously. But if done regularly or too brazenly then the client won't play any more and you'll be out of business. On average it'll probably be fair enough because of the tension between those that want a high price and a low price. Clients using this kind of fund don't really expect the last pip of value, they want expose and ease while they get on with the rest of their lives.

The market would handsomely reward your improved system...