Topic: nrd525 Market Tracker - page 24. (Read 83024 times)

Active BFX USD Swaps are now down to ~510M $. Couldn´t this simply be related to the fact that
the margin positions of many people got liquidated due to the price action? After every margin call
the Active USD Swaps obviously have to go down. This could also explain why the price on Bitfinex
is holding up better than on other exchanges. Many people (e.g. Bitfinex themselves) are obviously
incentivized to prevent a cascade of margin calls and therefore "defend" certain price points
vehemently compared to other exchanges.

Currently Bitfinex is even trading at a premium to the Korean exchanges, which had double-digit
premiums to the price on Western exchanges in the past.

Things are pretty bearish.  Ripple has burst and is slightly below $1 (down from $3.30 ATH).  ETH is still holding up more than I'd expect ($1000 vs $1400 ATH).  The overal BTC dominance is holding at all-time-low of 34%.

It's a slow grind down bear market, which I think means we aren't at the bottom.  We need a fast move down and 100% bounce/retrace of the fast move (though obviously not of the entire bear market - that could take 1+ years).

We also still need to see the alt-coins collapse.  This might happen in waves of similar coins collapsing (eg. possible groupings: Ripple and Stellar, Ethereum type coins, bitcoin hard forks, privacy coins, ICO tokens, etc).

BFX USD Swap falls from $750 million to $660 million (of which $127 million is up for grabs, mostly at the FRR rate).  It's possible that Tether rumors are involved, or that someone is arbitraging the Tether rumors (BFX has a 2% premium now).

Woah!  I wonder if this will lead to BFX cracking down on unverified and/or US corporate accounts?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-30/crypto-exchange-bitfinex-tether-said-to-get-subpoenaed-by-cftc

It will be nice if the CFTC can verify whether or not Bitfinex's Tether are backed by USD. I wonder if they'll extend this action to the other exchanges using Tether?

BFX USD swap is down to around $750 million. So someone(s) (eg the suspected USD swap whale) took $250 million off the table.  I think they are working with Bitfinex to not crash USD swap rates too low (currently 0.04% and dropping).  Or they might be such a large whale that they are profit maximizing by restricting supply.  Also it might be Bitfinex's own money - in which case earnings should show up in the financial reporters released to investors - have they done one of those recently?

Anyways, I'm doing a lot of USD swap lending.

I'm strongly considering selling another half or so of my remaining Bitcoin.  

Bitcoin transaction costs continue to fall.  It fits the theory that the network was being spammed.  It might also help that we haven't had any good hard forks worth moving your coins for.

Korea premium down to 9% (GDAX) or 5% (Bitfinex).    4% price premium due to Tether controversy (auditor abandons work with Bitfinex).

I'm reading Origins of the Crash. It's good. Isn't as focussed on the dotcom bubble (and ideally the investor psychology) as I'd like but is still useful.

Notes
-Was the Telecom bubble bigger than the dotcom one?   Does everyone call it the dotcom bubble because they were more bubbly and the telecoms get downplayed?   (I lost money on Nortel Networks - Worldcom also crashed).

-The Telecoms might be like our cryptocurrencies (they sold bandwidth) - and the dotcoms like the ICOs. Or this might be more true of Ethereum than Bitcoin?

-Auditors are unreliable and may blatantly support fraud in exchange for large consulting fees. If Tether was audited, it might only be weak evidence that they aren't corrupt.  Though in the case of Tether the auditor fees might be too small to risk the fines.

-Wall Street supported the dotcom bubble because they made money from the IPOs and underwriting.  This time Wall Street hasn't been making significant money (though this is changing) from ICOs and crypto - so it is able to take a more critical (perhaps loosely neutral) stance.

-It's going to take a while for all the scams to collapse (dotcom bubble lasted 2-3 years).  Obvious scams are most likely to occur at the peak of the bubble (eg. BitConnect)

-The CEOs and management ran off with billions of dollars of stock options and payments, while driving their companies into bankruptcy.  We can see this is the ICOs when they give tokens to the founders.  It's harder to see in crypto currencies as you don't know who is selling (an interesting exception is Charlie Lee's statement that he sold his LTC).

-(Not from the book) The Internet revolution was a lot bigger than the blockchain one.  This is just my opinion, but I think that the Internet (not including the block chain) has perhaps a thousand more use cases than block chains.  Some of the block chain uses cases are very big (ex. store of wealth), but the Internet (minus the blockchain) is much bigger and as such the block chain bubble is likely to be much smaller than the dotcom one.

(Might post ideas here later)

-In both the DotCom bubble and the crypto bubble we have a lack of regulation.

-In both bubbles we have had a long period of economic growth. The stock market is at an ATH and there is a lot of excess capital trying to find returns.

...

Would anyone be interested  in starting a Google Doc or other method (reddit? or bitcointalk thread?) to compare the dotcom bubble to our current situation?

If a big screen is what you're after the Ledger Blue could be for you.

https://www.ledgerwallet.com/products/ledger-blue



The Ledger products also allow you to use Electrum as a front end so no worries about being in full control of fees and selecting which inputs to use if you want.

What's a good hardware wallet that lets you select your transaction fee?  KeepKey has a fixed fee.  (They say they'll change it, but might take a while).  Currently the transaction fees are so low that you can do < $1 transactions (at least last time I checked).

I'd like a hardware wallet with a big / readable screen - like the size of the KeepKey. I also have a Trezor, but I wish it was larger.

Small arbitrage opportunity between GDAX and Bitfinex. BFX at a 1.4% premium.  Unfortunately I was moving my money to BFX at a -1 to 0% premium to do USD lending. Should have waited.

Good article on Lightning Network:
https://blog.bitmex.com/the-lightning-network/

The reason that traders are still using Bitfinex and other Tether exchanges could be due to the lack
of alternatives. The exchanges in question are the only exchanges with fiat pairs for sketchy altcoins
(e.g. Bitfinex has a USD trading pair for every coin/token that they list). If Tether would suddenly be
removed from the cryptocurrency scene for some reason only BTC and ETH trading pairs would be left
for traders. There definitely is a need for a stable-coin of some kind that allows for easier arbitrage
between exchanges, the circumvention of the need of a bank account for the altcoin exchanges and so on.

Besides, it is nice that Tether always saves us BTC holders when the price threatens to fall
too fast.

Korea premium down to 12%.  Probably see a gradual fall as people figure out how to arbitrage.  I heard somebody on Whale Club talking about working with Korean students, as each Korean citizen has a small limt of money they can move into USD.

Is Bitfinex really holding customer funds in USD in a bank? Or just in their internal system? If it is a bank, is it cut off from the other banks (eg. no USD transfers)?  Otherwise why would they have to use Tether in the first place?

I also wonder if Bitfinex could be generating a large amount of USD from its own profits - and what role that would play (in theory it'd be a good source of real USD - though they have to get it out of Tethers or get it from USD that is deposited on the site).  Where is that money stored?


...

http://www.tetherreport.com/
This is interesting. But I'm worried that smart people can do a lot of misleading with statistics.

Ex.  I've got a data set that "proves" that the city of Philadelphia did a new property assessment to fix years of neglect they actually made things worse.  That they assessed $50k houses at $100k if they are in low income neighborhoods, and they assessed $150k houses in high income neighborhoods at $100k  -- thus transferring tens of millions of dollars annually from poor people to the middle class - but I haven't released the results because I think there is a problem with the data set.  I've got p < 0.00001 for a lot of the statistics too.

I think the fundamental question (and an assumption by Tether critics) is that Bitfinex has still lost its relationships with banks - but Bitfinex says otherwise.

...

I'd be interested in seeing some market based responses to the Tether issue.  For instance, USD lending rates on Bitfinex are low considering they were hacked in 2016 and the supposed Tether risk.  Traders are still using Bitfinex and other Tether exchanges. Though traders do some very stupid things (see ICOs, alt-coins, MtGox).  It'd be interesting to see some escrowed bets on Fairlay.

My understanding on this is it is due to the way Bitfinex treats USD and USDT as the same thing in customer accounts. They only need to hold enough Tether to maintain a hot wallet for withdrawals and with their relationship with Tether it is quick and easy for them to top it up whenever needed. So in effect, they hold customer funds in USD bank accounts as the cold wallet for Tethers. The omiexplorer seems to be down at the moment but I think their address is one of the most active.

Tether data:
https://wallet.tether.to/transparency

Tether rich list
https://wallet.tether.to/richlist
Amazing to see Bitfinex only has $30 million in their top address.  Compare to $400+ million for Binance and Bittrex.

Is Bitfinex not the big user of Tether that everyone has thought?

Korea premium still at 18%.  Probably won't see the bottom until this goes to zero. I'd call it a necessary but not sufficient cause (eg. we'd need other causes as well, but it is unlikely to happen without the premium going to zero).

Bitfinex dropped as low as 9200 and GDAX bounced off 9005.

BitConnect was already showing signs of nearing collapse. The sheer size of the ponzi caused the future roadmap to get out of control crazy (the ICO, ATMs, etc).  It's likely that the btc bear market contributed to their collapse.  Not sure if the collapse is having a major impact on the markets.  In theory, there are hundreds of millions (possibly a billion) in dollars that are scammed.  It's also a lot of people who are hopefully (as they are ill suited for it) going to swear off investing in crypto currency and tell all their friends that crypto is a scam (less fortunate - but it could stop a lot of people from investing unwisely).  And there should be a round of major media stories about BitConnect.

You might hear arguments like 2018 is different from 2014. But 2014 was different from 2011 (eg vast improvements in projects and public awareness).  So we're still going down.

Sold 0.5 BTC at 11720 GDAX. 

Now sold 2.1 BTC total in 2017.

As we drop sharply (but not as sharply as a flash crash) to $10700(ish) BTC and barely bounce this might be a strong indicator of the long term bear market.  Now we just need to break 10k on Bitcoin and for the alt-coins to drop another 20% (for the semi-serious alts) to 50% (for the more marginal alts).

Market sentiment isn't that bearish. Which means the bear market, if we are in one, has only started and has a lot further to go.

If you use a VPN, I've heard  that you can sell Bitcoin Diamond on Okex (and also Super BTC).  Though they are down about 50% from the peak.  Normally you could wait for a good pump as both coins are new and relatively under-pumped (I cannot believe I'm saying this!).  However in a serious bear market, all the super sketchy pump coins are going to zero (or near enough zero).

Is Lightning Network not going to be that useful?  If most people are using Bitcoin to store wealth - they don't need hot wallets.  Our primary use case is sending all our bitcoin (hard forks), or sending most of it (buying/selling on exchanges - moving to hardware wallets).   As such payment channels aren't useful.  We need bigger blocks (or to convert into altcoins and use them to increase the block size).

For most of the world, we have capital gains tax - which makes paying for coffee with Bitcoin very complicated.