Topic: How many of you have been Zhoutonged? - page 4. (Read 26392 times)

Most early adopters are geeks though. They won't have the know-how nor the guts to play the market with these huge sums of money and BTC to manipulate the market in a way which earns them money. I just can't see that happening to be honest.

AFAIK they couldn't withdraw that much, because there was a 1k USD withdraw limit. And they used the BTC weighted average price to determine how many BTC equals 1000$. It was only a couple of thousand max I think. Can't remember it that well, though. It's been a long time. (In Bitcoin time that is :p)

Whoever the manipulator is has at least $500k USD + 100k btc.  Which do you think is more likely: someone depositing $1M into MtGox to play in a highly risky market like this, or someone that got 200k btc back when they were $0.01 each = $2k investment, and are toying with the market willy-nilly?  I surmise the latter is more probable.

KnightMB is an obvious suspect, with a claimed 370k btc, and his apparent lack of morality in securing his bitcoins from his former employer leads me to believe he'd also be fine with jerking the market around for his own gain.

ohhh. that's very possible... I hear they withdrew 100k BTC.

I believe it's someone that picked up a shit-ton of coins when the Mt Gox hack happened.

Damn, I'm sorry to hear that. I don't think it's an early adapter, though. Most likely a person with deep pockets who entered the game months ago and is here only for his personal gains by speculating and manipulation. Too bad

Hi, my name is old_engineer, and I got liquidated yesterday at 3:1 leverage.  I saw the squeeze coming, and had enough margin available at Mt. Gox and on home wallet to drop this to 1.5:1, but couldn't move the funds from MtGox to bitcoinica due to daily limits, and the speed of the crash which kept me from transferring coins from my home wallet in time.

As my posts have probably made clear, I'm not a fan of leveraged trading, so what was I doing at bitcoinica?  Well, when Zhou announced he was having a one-day-only special with no spread (Jan 14th), I thought I'd lock up some of his cash using my long coins to reduce funds available to silly speculators, and then not close the position until this summer.  The long coins were just sitting there, not doing anything, and so I put the asterisk on the site by taking out a large long position using them as collateral.  And it backfired.  I lost 1400 btc + $2k USD, but I'm not too sore since I'm still up by a little bit ($1k) since I started trading in June, so I basically gave back most of my winnings.  Meh.

But what annoys me more than the loss of winnings is that I've been spending a lot of time daytrading to reduce volatility, catching spikes up and down, with the goal of creating a spread of less than 3% (the typical fee on VISA). Not only has it taken a lot of time, but because I've been setting my orders close to the current selling price, I'm left holding bitcoins whenever the price drops significantly (like now, when I bought all my coins at $6.5), and I sell out completely and am holding USD whenever there's a big rise.  This has obviously not been a good profit-making strategy, requiring both more time and with reduced profits in a bull market, but I've been intentionally doing it anyway.

And the big market maker (The Manipulator) pissed all over my efforts by slyly built up all bid walls and removing sell walls so that there were 4x as many buys as sells visible, intentionally driving the price up to $7 timed with the prime-time TV exposure, then initiated the sell-off with multiple 20k+ btc sells to $6.50, removing the bid walls, and adding huge sell walls. The result?  $6.5 to $4.8 and back to $6.9 in the span of 20 minutes.  Fuck.  Bitcoin can't be taken seriously for months after an event like that.

I know it's a rigged market, and I'm fine with that - the implementation of bitcoin or any new digital currency pretty much guarantees whale players -  but it's the intentional volatility to maximize his/her stake that chafes me.  Just because he can, doesn't mean he should.  One would hope that early adopters would be benevolent rather than malevolent with a fragile and precious new market, but alas, this just isn't not the case.  Why can't he just be satisfied with the the natural increase in value as usage expands, and nudge the market subtly whenever it gets too bullish or bearish?  There's no need to intentionally lead on the market, then shake market confidence with wild swings.  I think I'll take my coins and go home, at least for a while.

tl;dr: lost 1400 btc + $2k, pissed at manipulator roughly manipulating fragile market rather than caressing it tenderly

humm^^

try 5:1 - its high enough

New term, Kim Jong Unned (owned)

Amazing how stupid people are... 

Nice guys, nice.

So if I had more than the 4% maintenance in my account I wouldn't have been liquidated?

We always have maintenance. And it has never been changed.

thats what i thought too.  since when has this been the case?

There's 4% maintenance. Obviously we can't allow anyone to deplete funds and cause uncollectible debts.

I was force liquidated with funds still in my account, isn't the margin call meant to deplete your funds before you're force liquidated?

I have not been forcefully liquidated - but I cannot withdraw my funds from bitcoinica - does that count?

Add me to the list, $300.