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Topic: What is your idea about fractional reserve practice at bitcoin exchanges? - page 3. (Read 3903 times)

legendary
Activity: 1456
Merit: 1018
HoneybadgerOfMoney.com Weed4bitcoin.com
I wouldn't touch these exchanges even with a ten foot pole. Too many manipulation can occur in these.

Of course not, but the question is what you can do to prevent them from creating too much volatility in market?

If one of the large Chinese exchanges are taking a market share of 15%, they can essentially sell millions of bitcoins on the whole market and push the price into single digits and crash people's confidence in bitcoin, and people can not do anything about it: The only thing you can do is to withdraw coins from the platform thus they will have a bitcoin bank run, but as most of the people on Chinese exchanges are speculators, I doubt they even want their bitcoin back if the price dropped to that low  Roll Eyes Besides, many people still don't want to withdraw bitcoin since it is too easy for them to lose it without proper IT knowledge, they regard the exchanges like a stock exchange, they trade there but never touch a bitcoin/stock

The main problem is that currently there is no regulation for bitcoin exchanges anywhere, and maybe there will never be


On further thoughts, another exchange might use the same trick to create fictional fiat money to buy lots of coins on their platform, and let the arbitrager to drain the bitcoins from the other exchange to make a bitcoin bank run for them... We need more exchanges

buyers and sellers create the volatility not the exchange in and of itself.  FWIW why is no regulation a problem - regulation doesn't solve the faults of fraud and incompetency that we see in the existing banking systems  - we need decentralized exchanges with a mechanism to use them in a centralized "liquid" manner - the ability to take 5000 usd and use it efficiently across X number of exchanges with just one account to be able to either buy 5000 worth of BTC or sell 5000 worth of BTC across them all.
legendary
Activity: 1988
Merit: 1012
Beyond Imagination
I wouldn't touch these exchanges even with a ten foot pole. Too many manipulation can occur in these.

Of course not, but the question is what you can do to prevent them from creating too much volatility in market?

If one of the large Chinese exchanges are taking a market share of 15%, they can essentially sell millions of bitcoins on the whole market and push the price into single digits and crash people's confidence in bitcoin, and people can not do anything about it: The only thing you can do is to withdraw coins from the platform thus they will have a bitcoin bank run, but as most of the people on Chinese exchanges are speculators, I doubt they even want their bitcoin back if the price dropped to that low  Roll Eyes Besides, many people still don't want to withdraw bitcoin since it is too easy for them to lose it without proper IT knowledge, they regard the exchanges like a stock exchange, they trade there but never touch a bitcoin/stock

The main problem is that currently there is no regulation for bitcoin exchanges anywhere, and maybe there will never be


On further thoughts, another exchange might use the same trick to create fictional fiat money to buy lots of coins on their platform, and let the arbitrager to drain the bitcoins from the other exchange to make a bitcoin bank run for them... We need more exchanges
legendary
Activity: 2156
Merit: 1018
Buzz App - Spin wheel, farm rewards
I think it's a terrible idea. If I wanted fractional reserve instability than I'd just buy USD, not bitcoin.

The exchanges are free to do whatever though, and people should vote with their wallets. But they must be responsible enough to at least tell everyone how they operate. 

legendary
Activity: 1302
Merit: 1008
Core dev leaves me neg feedback #abuse #political
only if fully disclosed to site users.  otherwise it could mean insolvency.
legendary
Activity: 1316
Merit: 1004
I don't like the idea.

As long as the exchange is not large enough to move the market, and bitcoins and fiat can flow freely in and out of the exchange, would it be profitable for the exchange to create imaginary buy/sell pressure?

Yes, when the price is high, the exchange sells leveraged coins to the market. When the price is low, they buy back or still sell leveraged coins. They makes lot of profit from trading in terms of fiat.
hero member
Activity: 560
Merit: 500
★777Coin.com★ Fun BTC Casino!
leverage and margin trading is destroying the Bitcoin price ...
full member
Activity: 215
Merit: 100
I don't like the idea.

As long as the exchange is not large enough to move the market, and bitcoins and fiat can flow freely in and out of the exchange, would it be profitable for the exchange to create imaginary buy/sell pressure?
legendary
Activity: 1372
Merit: 1000
--------------->¿?
I wouldn't touch these exchanges even with a ten foot pole. Too many manipulation can occur in these.
legendary
Activity: 1988
Merit: 1012
Beyond Imagination
This topic just get hot recently

After several Chinese exchanges opened the option to do leveraged trading, many doubted that they can essentially create many bitcoins out of thin air based on fractional reserve principal, then they could use those coins to short the market and squeeze out many traders to get real coins in their hand

Of course, they can also create fictional fiat money to push up the price by many folds using the same practice, most possibly MTGOX has already done that and that is the main reason the exchange rate fluctuated so dramatically before

So what is your opinion about this? Even if you auditing an exchange and make sure their cold storage contains 50K coins, it does not stop them from creating 500K coins sell pressure using a fractional reserve ratio of 10%
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