Topic: nrd525 Market Tracker - page 9. (Read 83129 times)

it's another bitconnect or plustoken, just more elaborately disguised. this is a pretty good deep dive into how it works. the tl;dr is that the whole system is designed to accrue massive wealth to richard heart. it's more insidious than a traditional ponzi (which would collapse anyway) because he is constantly extracting money from the pot.

Lists some of the places where you can lend USD and crypto.
https://loanscan.io

Hex Coin is very similar to a security, and with no use case it is likely to end up scamming people.

Learned that Blockfi has a withdrawal fee of 0.0025 BTC, after your first monthly free withdrawal.  They say it comes from the custodial service. Also withdrawals might take a day or so.  This is unfortunate as I like to break up transactions to reduce my risk.

Celsius Networks says automatic withdrawals without fees.  Their weird token just went from 3.5 cents to 13 cents (peak) and then back to 8 cents in the past two weeks, perhaps after the CEO did a livestream (Ask Me Anything).  Hmm.

Binance.us has the best fees I've found: 0.1%, no maker/taker distinction. The problem is that liquidity is still pretty bad. https://www.binance.us/en/fee/schedule

Auctions on Gemini are different from regular maker/taker exchanges. Gemini's ActiveTrader fees are just 0.35% taker and 0.25% maker, so definitely cheaper than Coinbase Pro.

I've been mulling over trying out Kraken for years. Now that Coinbase jacked their fees up, it's looking more and more likely that I'll try them out. Liquidity doesn't look half bad. It seems like the obvious choice over Gemini.

Fun 3 part BBC reality series on trading.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXno18pOHgo

What is the best exchange for US residents (small traders) with lower fees and a decent reputation?  I'm looking at Coinbase Pro and they increased their maker and taker fees to 0.5% (so a total of 1%).

Gemini's ActiveTrader program looks like it is 0.8% (what is an "auction fee"?).  Kraken looks the best at 0.42% total -- 0.16% Maker and 0.26% Taker.

The exchanges are presumably making super-profits, so why competition doesn't work at driving down fees to reasonable amounts is another case of the failures of capitalism.  

For the IRS/US, it looks like wash sales are still allowed in bitcoin (and other digital currencies).  So you can sell your bitcoins, get the capital loss, and rebuy the same day or even hour (or even next minute - though I'd suggest maybe waiting at least 1 minute).

I've read some concern that they'd change this rule. But would they do it retroactively?

I'm planning on using my unrealized capital losses to wipe out my short term capital gains (and maybe also some of my long term gains).

SP500 continues to set new records.  Meanwhile bitcoins are dumping (6800 low, currently 7100).  Guess who is bearish? Me!

Feeling bad about all those bitcoins I bought from $8000 to $11,000.


In weird US political news, I'm obsessed with PredictIt.org (and if you are a alt-righter who doesn't believe in polling and has too much money - please join today!) and Bloomberg is at a 11% chance of getting the Democratic nomination while polling at 1%-2%, Clinton (who hasn't declared) is at 6%, and Yang is at 6% (polling around 3%).

Of course if you want more money, you could try betting against these people. And notably betting against Clinton running. People are giving Clinton a 15%+ chance of running. I think it is closer to 1%.  (Unfortunately you can only bet $850 on this, so I've maxxed No).   I'm up around $350 of "free money" by betting No on every single candidate for the Democratic presidental nomination.  They kept on adding candidates and I kept on betting No until I got my initial investment returned ($850) and now an extra $350.

PredictIt has some very strange things happening due to the $850 bet limit on each market and the 5% withdrawal fee.  There is long shot bias as the people who take a 10 cent bet have 9 times the leverage of people taking the other side with 90 cents.  And there is sometimes a good return on bets that will take a long time to expire (say a 10%+ APR) due to the 5% withdrawal fee reducing liquidity.

So far PredictIt is a lot more successful than Augur. It'll be interesting if Augur ever matches it.  PredictIt is currently the best political gambling website in the world (outside of betting on UK politics). Betfair has only a fraction of the liquidity and markets, especially for non-UK politics.

that's not surprising tbh. people kept painting the president's comments about "blockchain" as a huge about-face on bitcoin and cryptocurrencies and free markets. i am/was extremely skeptical about that. if anything, china is becoming increasingly anti-market and the government is actively cracking down on existing crypto markets. 

you can tell because major chinese companies are jumping in line---weibo banning posts about "blockchain" or "crypto trading" and alipay blocking bitcoin/crypto transactions. if the government were about to become bitcoin friendly, this shit wouldn't be happening.

And the China ban is back on =)  Or they probably want to do some blockchain stuff while staying away for speculation and ICOs.
https://www.coindesk.com/china-is-poised-for-another-crypto-trading-crackdown-as-speculation-returns

They provide custodial services to lots of major exchanges, so yes. However their custody model entails multi-signature security so they aren't a single point of failure in exchange security breaches.


For exchanges, I see no problem here regarding decentralization. Using Bitgo is more secure than not using Bitgo.

As far as individuals go, I'd like to see people securing their own private keys.

When people say bitcoin is decentralized and you learn things like this:
https://www.coindesk.com/bitgo-says-its-now-processing-20-of-bitcoin-transactions

Why so many transactions? Perhaps they are doing a lot of exchange volume?  Or maybe people just don't care about the fees and aren't bothering to batch (or otherwise limit) their transactions.

To the extent that centralization can facilitate regulation and professionalization of services, it is probably bullish for bitcoins.  Especially so long as the hard core decentralizers don't get upset!  (I'm normally a huge fan of decentralization, but am here for the $$$ not the politics).

Same but people love their televisions. Most people I know still veg out in front of them every night. They just have all their internet services (Hulu, Prime, Netflix, etc.) plugged into their TV instead of PC.


Bitcoin uses a decentralized database to store the state of the blockchain, but it isn't exactly competing with centralized databases. It's competing with other forms of money, like gold for instance.


Fair enough but keep in mind, the greater fool's theory applies to all assets, not just Bitcoin. Who says dollars or gold will retain their value either?

I'm surprised the percent of households with TVs isn't in decline. I got rid of mine (and I'm in my forties)! 
https://www.tvtechnology.com/news/number-of-u-s-tv-homes-grows-to-120-6-million-says-nielsen

There is no major use case for bitcoin or the blockchain that warrants the current market cap.  A decentralized database isn't going to come close to the economic impact and usefulness of centralized databases (I'm a database developer).

I should modify my use case. Bitcoin is "Digital Gold for Gamblers and True Believers".  And to all of you true believers, my plan is to sell out at the top (well as close as possible) and for you to lose 99% of your invested money.

If Elliott Wave theory prevails, then that's a reasonable enough assumption. "What goes up must come down."

Here's an alternative theory though. What if Bitcoin adoption follows the adoption curves of other mass adopted technologies? Look at the way television penetrated 90% of society and then just plateaued forever after:



Could Bitcoin follow the same course?

What would price look like if Bitcoin were widely adopted as a currency and store of value, and everybody used it just like they do electricity or television?

why would you expect search trends to be booming already? public interest spikes during the parabolic mania phase of the bubble/bull cycle:



i don't think the market is anywhere near that point. in the above example, the $14k run is more comparable to the "take off" phase and the june-october correction was the "first selloff/bear trap".

the public hasn't really taken notice yet. and they hadn't taken notice after the initial "take off" in october-november 2015 either. the public is always late to the party---they are the late adopters, not the smart money or early adopters.

A long period of anything is bullish if you think bitcoin is always going to have another bull cycle and if you look at bitcoin's price history.  So you could take a period of stability, decline, or growth and say "look what happened in x months/years/weeks - we went up 100x!  =)

But one day bitcoin won't have another bull cycle. It should be more likely that bitcoin would go down 90%, than up by a factor of 10x (at least over the next 10-20 years).  Now I'm bullish enough to be gambling on "one more bubble", but at some point I might get suckered along with everyone (well 95% to 99%) else...

I see the rise to 13k/14k as being completely unsupported by search trends and thus actual public interest in bitcoin.  Of course some major event or set of projects could develop this public interest.  It isn't like google search trends affect future google search trends. I think there is more of a project development cycle where it takes a couple years for exchanges, lightning network, regulation, etfs, and other projects to develop (keeping people busy/inspired) and then launch (which might cause a bubble).

So the rally to $14K this year was just a bull trap?!


How do you quantify Google trends into price though?

I think present day search trends mimic what we were seeing in the autumn of 2016, and we all know what happened after that. Compare these two charts:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2016-01-01%202016-10-01&q=bitcoin
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=bitcoin

I have no idea where the price is going.  I'm slightly bearish short term (0-2 years), bullish long term (3+ years).  Google search trend points to $4500 and generally trumps other factors because it is quantifiable (or say a range of 3k-6k).  I've removed my bids, but am not selling. 

Good podcast.  Dollars are the safe haven, not bitcoin.  And other great points.
https://www.coindesk.com/podcast-josh-brown-on-why-bitcoin-is-like-the-1800s-railroad-boom