Topic: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion - page 13663. (Read 26714974 times)

I read through the Tether manipulation paper. IMO it made two convincing points:

#1 Someone has a habit of doing this:
 - Issuing new USDT
 - Within days, moving that USDT to BitFinex, Bittrex, and/or Poloniex
 - Using that USDT to buy crypto (seemingly a portfolio of BTC & others). They especially like to buy crypto when the price is just below whole numbers.
 - Moving the resulting crypto back to BitFinex
 - Rarely or never selling the crypto for USDT again
 
The authors argue that this is Tether/BitFinex themselves, and I think that this is in fact the most likely explanation. But the authors didn't address the alternative possibility of this being a particularly ham-fisted whale who is a close partner of Tether.

#2 Due to end-of-month trading, Tether has probably always been trading with USD deposited with them (fractional-reserve), though at least until March 2017, USDT was probably not complete monopoly money, since they did go to the effort of achieving an end-of-month USD balance.

The authors also tried to argue some other points which I didn't find convincing.

---

I took the paper's data at face value. There were several points where I thought that they could be cherry-picking data, but it's too difficult to check this sort of thing. Cherry-picking / confirmation bias is especially easy to do with block-chain analysis. And I know for a fact that their method of grouping block-chain transactions is not robust in general, though it probably was sufficient for what they did here.

I've thought for a long time that USDT is almost certainly a scam, and this paper makes me think so even more. Though I was actually a little surprised that this provides evidence (via the end-of-month trading) that USDT ever had any real USD.

The paper estimates that if you removed the USDT issuance events which the paper's authors regard as most likely to be BTC price manipulation, the BTC price would be $4100 as of March 31. But that's based on a whole pile of assumptions; I wouldn't give it much credence. I think that the collapse of USDT will be mostly limited to the obvious direct effects (ie. some exchanges would have major troubles, there'd be many people stuck with worthless USDT, etc.), and there would not somehow be a natural "rollback" of any gains which monopoly-money USDT may have driven. Also, the paper makes clear that all major crypto was affected, often much more than BTC, so this isn't any sort of argument against BTC in particular.

Bob touting the merits of Lightning Network. Get ready for another leg down.

Good news
https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-index-fund-is-open-for-investment-61217606f1ef

6k is bottom. Gonna just go out on a limb and say we won’t see sub 6k coins.



Some buy volume coming in.

Hit the edge of the descending wedge

Update.  https://i.imgur.com/xRIRPLv.png

Still has major support levels.  HODL

Analysis here. http://blockchainshowdown.blogspot.com/2018/06/btc-usd-june-14-2018.html

This bounce will be fun to watch. It would be the 3rd. But a lot of people don't like to watch it macro and don't see the over-sold triggers all over the place.

People don't seem to understand that miners can and will mine at a loss.  The only real limit is that it be cheaper than other forms of money laundering.

since 19k $
its not the dip

Someone said:

Be greedy when others are fearful!

Buy Buy Buy Bitcoin.

Remember lightning network is just the same as your credit card, atm, visa mastercard network

a faster payment system on top of the banks

keep it simple and decentralized no worries

NEWS FOR YOU     ITS YOUR DATE       

QUICK list 12288 is finisht GOOD LUCK   WO's

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In other news, shorters take the blame.

https://www.marketwatch.com/Story/heres-why-bitcoin-is-fallingand-it-isnt-just-the-coinrail-exchange-hack-2018-06-13

It's about choices, IMO.  

Much of the ideals we early bitcoiners have lauded are not something that all of humanity can share without there being a tremendous amount of personal responsibility.  Probably an unreasonable amount.

For example:  Banks.

Hang around here and you will read many saying GET RID OF 'EM.   But the fact is we will always need them.  At least some people will.  And layer 2 lets us build the services that the new "banks" will use to offer us value for letting them put their paws on our money.  Here is something we are hearing said a lot recently: "Custodial services".  Not everyone has the ability or desire to do the sort of opsec to safeguard deep amounts of value in crypto.  And even the more savvy like (dare i say) many of us would benefit from a nice liquid place to lock up some liquid money for spending and moving around.

Layer 1 plus layer 2 gives me the option to be responsible for the mass of my wealth privately, while directing some of it into channels that may look a little like banks... or perhaps less distributed.

Lightning gives us a choice.    I like that.

More FUD. Academics. Perfect timing.

Bitcoin's 2017 Rise Was Market Manipulation By Tether: Study
https://www.investopedia.com/news/bitcoins-2017-rise-was-market-manipulation-tether-study/

Thanks for taking the time to try and help me understand

Its awesome! Who else made $$ shorting all the way down?



Welcome!!

Am out of fiat now, bought every time it went under 8k..

No.

https://ip.bitcointalk.org/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fimagizer.imageshack.us%2Fa%2Fimg924%2F9413%2FhvRJYv.png&t=589&c=o6VL0oo1z__l6g


Just one year ago...
We´re doing fine. Who was not really expecting to come down again after 20K?

I have thought enough about this to have some things to say. I'll add more later if I can think of more.

The bitcoin blockchain is an immutable eternal database. You can store something in there and be confident that that information will be stored forever. That is crazy useful. Property titles, ownership tokens, other blockchains will offer this of course, but bitcoin will always be the most ideal place.

Also we can always just not increase the block size, ever, until we feel like miners are more than fairly compensated through transaction fees and all models predict that a modest increase in block size will still reatain adequate network security. In fact we can base our decisions about when to increase the block size on no consideration other than security. I personally feel that everything else is secondary.

Also I don't think there is a world where lightning gets to the point where it isn't unjustifiably cumbersome for large transactions. Nation states that want to use bitcoin as an alternative to SWIFT will probably find the blockchain it's self to be the place to do something like that. So there will still always be a marginal demand for on chain transactions.