Topic: nrd525 Market Tracker - page 12. (Read 83123 times)

More evidence that bitcoin is hard to trace. Downside: regulatory risk.
https://www.coindesk.com/cybercriminals-selling-hacked-fiat-money-for-bitcoin-at-10-of-its-value

If they are doing 50% or less Loan To Value (and they say 20% to 50%), that means the loans are only half the size of the borrowed money.  In one way this is the opposite of margin trading on an exchange where you can get a 3:1 Loan to Value ratio (Bitfinex) or more - so presumably less risky.  On the other hand, this means their rates should a be a LOT lower.  For instance, if you have to give them $100 in Bitcoin as collateral to borrow $50 in USD - you are losing the interest rate on the $100 in Bitcoin (6% = $6) and paying say 12% on the USD = so your total cost of borrowing is actually 24%.  This falls to 16% (2*2%+12%) for amounts greater than 10 BTC (as the opportunity cost falls, or 19% if you include the opportunity cost of not lending on Celsius Network)

(Unless they pay interest on your collateral? which i doubt)

https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/32006/zac-prince-interview

Interview of BlockFi founder with some hard hitting questions.  Has some good answers, but I'm not sure on some things (like will the venture capitalists really eat up the losses instead of socializing them?  And how effective is subsidizing btc lending rates when there has almost never been a good market for lending btc, other than the hard fork period or the occasional spike in rates?  For that matter, ETH rates at Bifinex have regularly been below 1% APR.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRvIen9bdbQ

Interesting review of Blockfi, Celsius Network, and a couple other alternatives.
https://medium.com/@7uring/lending-bitcoin-for-dolphins-ca9e4b224ade

Signed up for BlockFi but three issues
1.  Annoying noise that the "support bot" makes. Seriously what exchanges use sounds?
2.  Bug that didn't let me use "_" as a special character in my password.
3. Tried to deposit bitcoins and they only provide a QR code. That isn't going to work on desktop.  Hmm - on second attempt it does show an alphanumeric code. Weird.

Is their development team idiots?  Did they not do any testing?  Might be worth staying away from them.  Unsure.

It looks like Celsius Network and Blockfi are the two competing services that let US residents lend out BTC and several other currencies.

Blockfi's 6.2% rate for up to 10 BTC (and then only 2.2% after it!), addmittedly subsidized by their venture capital investors, might be a good deal while the subsidy lasts.

https://blockfi.com/rates/

Celsius Network's rate is 3.75% (I think), and slightly more if you are willing to take their token (not available or at least not sellable in the US).

The history of bitcoin lending has been fraught with fraud.  The first wave was ponzis and lending on this forum to people who systematically scammed or failed to pay back the money. By contrast the websites where you lend USD to people seem to be doing ok (does anyone know?).  The lack of collateral and proof of identity was a big problem.  Then you had a wave of very early lending for speculators, first at Bitcoinica and then more spectaculary at Bitfinex where the USD rates went as high as 1%/day in 2013.  BTC rates would spike at times (notably during the bitcoin cash fork), but were generally relatively low (with a general trend to 2% APR or even less).

The two major losses to lenders of USD and cryptos (that I'm aware of) were the 36% Bitfinex haircut in 2016 (which ended up being anywhere from 0% to 30% depending on whether you held the IOU tokens), and the more recent Poloniex 16.2% haircut to all loaners that was caused by CLAM plumetting (talk about unexpected risk).

There is also general exchange / project risk where you can be attacked by hackers, scammers, or a bad business model.  If you move coins from a hardware wallet to an exchange or project to lend them, then this risk matters. If some of your coins are sitting on the exchange already - then this risk won't be increased by lending them (so you'll only have the risk of a lender haircut).

Both of these projects are new, so it is hard to judge the quality of their team and their security methods.

Maybe the BitLicense regulations don't cover lending services. They don't appear to be dealing in securities so they might be in the clear.

The odd thing is the Bitfinex connection, which appears to be confirmed as of a couple weeks ago. Bitfinex is already embroiled in a legal battle over offering services to New York persons and is liable to close such accounts at any time. Celsius even publicly lists their headquarters address in NYC!


In Elliott Wave terms, it's not a complete triangle. I'm guessing it will morph into another pattern. Bitcoin often forms 3-swing corrections (called ABC or WXY in Elliott Wave) where the 3rd swing is a higher low. That may be what happened here with that last dip to $9,300.

For most major cryptos the rates are only 4%. What are the risks?  How is their collateral secured?   For starters, they are based in NY which boggles my mind. How is the state not banning them?
https://celsius.network/

They offer slightly higher rates if you take payment in their token (the fact that they are offering tokens in NY state is a risk).

Also they are working with Bitfinex (among others), so that could add to risk.

I miss the good old days when I got 10%+ apr lending out funds.

...

Looks like Bitcoin is in a bearish downward sloping triangle. Have we ever broken to the upside on a triangle like this???  Search trends are bearish. I'm leaning bearish but not selling (also trying to not trade on time frames under a year).

...

I'm wondering if the UK Conservative party is going to split.  Fascinating to watch and globally there is a rise of populist parties of the the left, center and the right - and the decline of the establishment ones.  If the trend gets a lot bigger, we could see a centrist party emerge in the US (more like 2024 than 2020 though).

Equity markets are very bullish. Bond markets are saying recession.

Everybody everywhere seems to be predicting the same thing: recession. Makes me wonder if the equity markets are really at the top yet.

It seems like too many people are short or hedged for downside and the direction of max pain is still up. The crash will come after euphoria, when the market least expects it. Right now we're still climbing the wall of worry, which could mean a couple more years of bull market. That would be a good thing for Bitcoin.

This guy is forecasting a recession.  Pretty technical video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7zEXiqiiqA

I'd be interested to see people on the other side doing a similar level of analysis and saying things are going great.

how well has that indicator performed in the past? any update on willy woo's NVT signal?

the chart is tough to read right now. these two guys have been pretty accurate in the past several months and are both bearish:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.52220767
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.52084317

This just hit an all-time low of 5 (since staring in Feb 2018).
https://alternative.me/crypto/fear-and-greed-index/

Bullish Factors

• Global economy at peak of bull cycle
• Global (long term and also short term) interest rates at historical (50-60 year) lows
• Lightning Network will allow low transaction fees
• Transaction fees are around $0.50-$1 (room to grow)
• Bitcoin market share at 69%
• Bitcoin ecosystem is healthy - no talks of additional forks, no new controversial splits in the community
• US / China trade war (currency part of it, not the actual impact on global economy)
• Republicans are unlikely to overly-regulate crypto currency and are likely to hold a majority at least in the Senate post 2020
• Use case for speculation is solid.  Bitcoin is digital gold for gamblers.
• More ways to speculate on bitcoin (CME, CBOE, additional futures)
• 2020 Halvening (May 2020)
• ETF hasn't happenned yet, but seems likely in the next 1-5 years
• At 11.7k now, we are very bullish uptrend from 3.2k bottom

Bearish Factors

• Global recession is coming (ex. US unemployment rate of 3.6% hasn't been sustained since 1960 or before without a recession)
• Low rates fuel bubbles (property, crypto, stock, art, etc)
• Lightning's volume is insignificant
• Google Search Trends are lagging price (and lower than in the 2017 bull market)
• NVT signal turned bearish, and the other 5-7 times it did this we got at least a 50% plunge
• IRS increased interested in collecting capital gains
• We might have exited the bear market prematurely (inadequate damage to ICOs, altcoins, self-fulfilling prophecy of another bull market is too good to be true)
• No major use cases for bitcoin other than speculation (transactions, remittances, the nonsense about being your own bank -- all not that useful)
• Centralized stablecoins (or even just USD payment systems) are better suited for beating credit cards
• Blockchain is falsely equated to the internet as a revolution in something - not true!
• Lack of premiums in non-US exchanges (ex. in the past we had China premiums in 2013 and Korea in 2017)

Indeterminate Factors (risk?)

• Mt Gox bankruptcy returns some of the coins
• Regulators haven't taken a strong position on ICOs
• Satoshi identity(ies) is not known. Potentially owns 1 million btc.
• Unresolved situation for small transactions where you are responsible for capital gains if they buy coffee
• Unregulated stable coins like Tether (could be scams, regulatory crackdown -- ex. research papers on correlation between printing new Tethers and price increase in bitcoin)
• Facebook Libra coin
• https://alternative.me/crypto/fear-and-greed-index/  (doesn't seem so useful longterm, needs more data)
• GBTC premium - https://crypto.neotechdevs.com/GBTC.jsp?chart=year#charts
• Hacks, scams, ponzis

Also, bitcoin dominance isn't going to 90%.  I'd be very happy with 80%.

Starting around 20 minutes, Willy Woo is arguing that NVT Signal isn't as valuable because there are more bitcoins held on exchanges. But his second graph (Bitcoin Supply) shows the opposite is true over the past year (I saw this myself and then Tone Vays points it out at 28 minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsPPcVL32sI

He might be in a long position and biased.  Or maybe the exchanges where bitcoins are being held aren't in his Bitcoin Supply chart.

But whether or not the Bitcoin Supply is decreasing if more bitcoins are on exchanges or being traded in non-blockchain methods, the decline in the NVT signal would be gradual. Instead we're seeing it peaking at normal levels, and rapidly falling. 

So I don't buy his argument. What do other people think about the NVT Signal?  Does it still matter?  What are other analysts saying?

I found 4.6 clams in an old wallet from 2014!  A couple months ago they were worth $17 each, but now only $3.50.  Very strange that they are one of the few alt-coins to have exceeded their January 2018 peak (of course with a low market cap anything is possible!).

I learned that 1) downloading the entire clam blockchain is not worth it (even with the 3 GB boostrap.dat file it looked like it would take 80 hours, running one of my cpu cores at 100%).

2) You can send transactions without synching with the chain.  This applies to other cryptos as well. The only risk is that you have to be sure that you have the coins to send.

I didn't find a lightweight clam wallet that runs on desktop.

I think he is referring to another of his indicators, as this NVT one has peaked at 142 since 2012.  And he's got a highlighted range of 40-70 on it as being "normal".  So on this indicator we've declined from around 112 to 66.

Interesting. How do you read that indicator exactly? When I look at Willy Woo's explanation, he says 150+ is overbought and 45- is oversold. Has this been revised or is this a different derivative indicator? It looks like we're currently at 66.

I'm looking at his Twitter and having trouble deciphering his sentiment at the moment too.

BTC market share at 67.8% on Coinmarketcap - a new local high since April 2017.

Bounced off 12k (11.8k now).