Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3195066
I browsed through the paper. Their main result, if I understood correctly, is that they found "considerable evidence that Tether is used to purchase Bitcoin following Tether authorization and a drop in Bitcoin price, and that this phenomenon has a sizable relation to future Bitcoin prices and other coins."
This result, if true, does not imply directly the conclusion ("rally caused by single whale").
First, it doesn't explain the original raise of the price before the fall (that followed with tether purchases). Second, these results can have, I think, alternative explanations. For example, Tether was used as a tool for shorting Bitcoin, hence it makes sense that it be sold after Bitcoin price drops.
I write this with knowing that perhaps my interpretation of the paper is wrong, since it relies heavily on professional jargon I'm not familiar with.
------------------------------- title: Is Bitcoin Really Un-Tethered?
Abstract: This paper investigates whether Tether, a digital currency pegged to the U.S.dollar, influenced Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency prices during the 2017 boom. Using algorithms to analyze blockchain data, we find that purchases with Tether are timed following market downturns and result in sizable increases in Bitcoin prices. The flow is attributable to one entity, clusters below round prices, induces asymmetric autocorrelations in Bitcoin, and suggests insufficient Tether reserves before month-ends. Rather than demand from cash investors, these patterns are most consistent with the supply-based hypothesis of unbacked digital money inflating cryptocurrency prices.
Can't find how did they determine, that Tether was not bought with cash, so this statement is basically baseless.
Further, given their outright lies about auditing and the recent admission that only 75% of tether is backed by cash or cash-like instruments, it looks a lot like a huge fraud to me.
Make your own mind up I guess, but if you're going to tell me "See, nobody actually knows!", then that's true. But we can analyse what looks likely, and what looks likely is that it's been issued out of thin air to prop up the market price of BTC and fleece market participants for the benefit of owners of the Tether corp and Bitfinex.
I guess we'll see more as the various lawsuits shake themselves out.
That is not enough to support claims of the paper.
If you have thorough refutation prepared, I suggest you publish. So far your argument appears to be "nuh uh"
The paper is quite filled with terms unclear to a non-finance 3rd party, but here is what I gathered from reading it diagonally and your explanation:
Their only argument about Tether in question not being cash backed is that it is infused exactly at the moments when Bitcoin goes down, and that is "not consistent" with what investors generally do.
Well, duh. Maybe it is not consistent with investing in, for example, falling Microsoft stock after some scandal reveals malpractice. But in case of cryptocurrencies, which historically have been very volatile, it makes quite a bit of sense to buy on a downward turn.
I don't see any reasoning in the paper, assigning probabilities to their expectations for investor behavior versus the reality of Tether trading conditioned on both hypothesis. And that assumption is the cornerstone of the claim. 80% of the paper for whatever reason is spent proving an obvious fact, that large Tether infusions are causing the rise of cryptocurrency prices.
That's because 'technical analysis' of an irrational market, for the purposes of projecting price movements, is worthless.
That's not the same as retrospectively examining things that have occurred in the past.
> in case of cryptocurrencies, which historically have been very volatile, it makes quite a bit of sense to buy on a downward turn.
But not in huge monolithic chunks.
Look, you live in denial if you want, but it's been pointed out so many times that tether is dodgy as all hell (and they've more or less admitted it themselves too). We'll find out sooner or later what's gone on.
In the mean time, try not to bankrupt yourself.
[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/tether-reverses-claim-of-1...
There was a near-run on Tether this May, though, and ironically that's what pumped Bitcoin from $5300 to $8000. When folks want to dump Tether, they generally cannot dump it directly into dollars. They have to dump to Bitcoin, move it off-exchange, and then sell the dollars on an exchange with fiat currency. That means that every Tether dump creates a run on Bitcoin, which pushes the price higher. If the arbitrage trade is interrupted (as it was in May, when Binance and Bitfinex both shut down withdrawals just as the run was beginning), then the price of Bitcoin remains permanently high, and instead of selling Bitcoin on other exchanges to compensate, people buy them to match the new price, the public forgets about the panic when withdrawals open 2 weeks later, and the price remains permanently high.
I wonder also if at some point Bitfinex can just make up Tether's reserve shortfall out of their profits. (Actually, they claim that they made up the shortfall already with their Tokinex IEO, which was also super sketchy, but even if they hadn't...) Coinbase reportedly made $1B in profit in 2017 and about $400-500M in 2018; Bitfinex is of similar size, so a couple years like that and their profits could probably plug the hole, if they don't get sued/regulated out of existence first.
Not sure where you got that from, but that's not true whatsoever; USDT/USD is a thing in a bunch of exchanges with really healthy volume. Other than a few months ago (perhaps the run you mentioned in May) there's normally no premium and the peg is down or up by perhaps 0.5% or so.
Maybe you are saying that because Binance, the largest exchange doesn't have a USDT/USD pair (they don't have any USD pair afaik), but you can easily withdraw USDT and sell them for USD directly in other exchanges.
You just gave a definition of fractional reserve banking.
If I have a house, I can't turn it into cash immediately. I may have a fraction of my net worth in cash. That's not the same thing as only having the small amount of cash and nothing else.
When Madoff collapsed, his investors were shocked. If Tether collapses, precisely zero people will be surprised.
When it's common knowledge that it's a scam, is it still a scam?
See this better Bloomberg article: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-04/lone-bitc...
Relevant quotes:
> One entity on the cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex appears capable of sending the price of Bitcoin higher when it falls below certain thresholds, according to University of Texas Professor John Griffin and Ohio State University’s Amin Shams. Griffin and Shams, who have updated a paper they first published in 2018, say the transactions rely on Tether, a widely used digital token that is meant to hold its value at $1.
> “Our results suggest instead of thousands of investors moving the price of Bitcoin, it’s just one large one,” Griffin said in an interview. “Years from now, people will be surprised to learn investors handed over billions to people they didn’t know and who faced little oversight.”
> “This pattern is only present in periods following printing of Tether, driven by a single large account holder, and not observed by other exchanges,” they wrote in their new peer-reviewed paper, set to be published in a forthcoming Journal of Finance.
> “Simulations show that these patterns are highly unlikely to be due to chance. This one large player or entity either exhibited clairvoyant market timing or exerted an extremely large price impact on Bitcoin that is not observed in aggregate flows from other smaller traders.”
But it seems that the new one is "set to be published in a forthcoming Journal of Finance". So it's not published yet.
I find it impossible to have a discussion based on Bloomberg article, as good as it my be.
IMO this is a thread worth reading on this topic: https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/dj2jro/the_large...
Some people used to think/want that Bitcoin was going to take over all other forms of money. I don't think many people still believe that. In that sense it's just like other forms of property that can be stolen.
I tried to get some info on their page and about the fifth sentence is:
> In the unlikely case of a black swan event, the system will employ Emergency Shutdown, a last resort to guarantee the stable price.
Hmm, I didn't wasted my time reading any further.
https://intercoin.org/economics.pdf
In order for that to happen, it has to be trading on multiple exchanges and for it to fail, all the exchanges’ stop-loss orders must fail at once.
Nothing can be pegged with absolute certainty, though, unless you liquidate everyone’s position before the peg breaks. Look at how Soros broke the Bank of England.
(And yes, that is a shortcoming of cash. Which is why we've invented other ways to store value, and approximately nobody stores their money in random holes on other people's property.)
I never claimed the contrary.
The prudent thing to do is to use Bitcoin for its intended purpose: electronic cash. Convert from fiat to crypto as needed, not as a store of value.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/business/safe-deposit-box...
Look at Shamir Secret Sharing and consider hiding the keys in multiple locations that only you would know. You would need N of them from any of N x 3 friends and 1 of them from you.
Remembering where you stored one key is easier than remembering the seed phrase or whatever.
For good measure, watch the beginning of The Bourne Identity.
The rest is strictly optional
If you are worried about forgetting even the location you stored the backup key, you might want to have an additional safeguard, that if you don’t “phone home” for a year, then afterwards you announce on a public platform that you are OK, then the machine storing one of the Shamir keys (the one which only you know) will also copy it to an account that anyone can open using your biometrics.
That means, to steal your money, they have to kidnap you for a year, then go get N of your friends to give up your keys and also use your body to fake your biometrics and somehow get you to publicly announce you are OK (this last requirement would be well known to everyone around you, so if you forgot, anyone could tell you the personal key recovery procedure).
The biometrics must include M of N things that remain stable over years, like your eyes, cardiac pattern etc.
Yes...I do currently have 0.75 BTC in a locked wallet where I forgot the password and it's totally frustrating.
If you want cryptocurrencies to succeed, you need to make them widespread as a form of payment. I already lament Steam and Stripe removing Bitcoin support because of the rampant speculating, let's not do more of that.
This! It's unfortunate that the most well known cryptocurrency failed to grasp this and refused to prioritize scaling so that it could accommodate demand.
At the end of the day, if a cryptocurrency can't be used like cash, it has nothing to offer over existing solutions.
Instead, all effort is going into a building a flawed second layer that is theoretically unsound and a usability nightmare.
Fortunately for people who disagree, there are hundreds of crypto projects that think this is possible. Including straight up copies of Bitcoin like Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV.
And basically every project that tries to claim different is just ignoring the problem and trying to pump their own price.
Everything in cryptocurrencies is a scam.
It's usable for sure, but that doesn't mean billions of people can (nor want) to use it now. I'm using it just fine.
> But companies and organizations routinely transfer millions and billions between normal banks
Just like companies have direct lightning channels between each other, they can send billions of they please.
Note that not all channels are public, so you won't find all in searches. I'm only saying that you shouldn't be worried about lightning liquidity if you can directly connect to your counterparty - as you can directly transact with that party without relying on any liquidity from anyone else.
There are many apps already and things are just now getting started: https://www.lapps.co/
Scaling Lightning is an unsolved problem. It relies on finding solution to problems people have tried to solve for decades with no success.
Sure, it kind of sort of works for small network sizes. It will die a fiery death the second it attempts to become popular with no known way out of the mess.
Once a channel is funded, it can stay open for as long as it needs to. I can have a payment channel open with my local coffeeshop and we can transact dozens of times; only the final bill has to be broadcast to the bitcoin blockchain.
Well connected LN nodes can be connected to hundreds of other nodes and route transactions accordingly.
In the short time LN has been available, there are over 10,000 nodes and growing; the network capacity is almost $8 million USD: https://1ml.com/statistics
Like any low-value transaction using bitcoin, like the proverbial cup of coffee, it’s not necessary to wait for even one confirmation before doing anything.
Plain vanilla lightning uses a UTXO (that’s what a bitcoin on the blockchain is, an unspent transaction) to open a channel. But you don’t have to wait 10 minutes for at least 1 confirmation before using the payment channel.
I’ve received multiple LN transactions with various LN apps and it’s always been instant.
Once the payment channel is opened, it stays open as long as it needs to. But the killer feature is being able to transact without requiring the underlying bitcoin blockchain; it’s only required once the parties decide to close the channel.
Same thing with multi hop payments.
There are many enhancements being worked on, like loop-in, loop-out and submarine swaps, which handle providing liquidity to enable transactions and the ability to make swaps between chains, like being able to “swap” between bitcoin and light coin if that was desired.
There’s also work happening to enable one on-chain UTXO to fund multiple payment channels in one go.
So tens of thousands of transactions can take place without touching the underlying blockchain.
So there’s no lag when it comes to opening or closing a payment channel.
There are no scalability issues; we’ll have more LN nodes than Bitcoin full nodes (about 55,000 worldwide) by this time next year and it’ll be fine.
That describes every single existing payment platform in the world today except Bitcoin.
> There are no scalability issues.
Except a 4tx/sec cap on opening and closing channels.
To be clear, you can send and receive bitcoin without the fees or latency of the bitcoin blockchain until you close the channel. And depending on the use case, that could be weeks or months in the future.
And even when opening or closing a payment channel, you don’t have to wait for the blockchain to confirm that transaction.
> Except a 4tx/sec cap on opening and closing channels.
No such cap exists.
Here’s a great video—“10 Myths about Bitcoin's Lightning Network debunked by a Developer”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obRs-WpJ05M
I'm not sure why you are saying all efforts go into a flawed second layer?
a) Dozens of teams are working on other efforts.
b) Many do not consider lightning flawed.
I'm too young to have experienced this. But I've seen countless of clips and interviews of people claiming they would never use the internet because they can send post and use a telephone instead. "Computers are for geeks", etc.
> New use cases manifested immediately all the time. Nobody ever said “we implemented this world wide network thing, now we are looking for use cases”, there were, and are, always more use cases to choose from than resources to implement them.
It took a dotcom bubble to find the use cases we actually use today. Would you have not said the exact same thing back then about the internet?
You said it yourself - you're too young to actually know a lot about that, but you use it to bolster your arguments anyway.
Many people were saying this, Paul Krugman (one of the leading economists) went as far as comparing the internet to the fax machine:
"The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in 'Metcalfe's law'–which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants–becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's."
> You said it yourself - you're too young to actually know a lot about that, but you use it to bolster your arguments anyway.
I'm too young to live through it, but luckily I studied it in university :-) Many people claim to know many things about history prior to their birth. I guess I'm one of these people.
And he caught a bunch of shit for it, even at the time. You keep trying to conflate critics of Bitcoin, many of whom have technical & finance backgrounds, with the largely non-technical crowd that didn't understand the web back in the 90s.
> I'm too young to live through it, but luckily I studied it in university :-)
What's the name of this "history of the internet" course(s) you took? The most historical context I ever got consisted of maybe a few intro paragraphs on Arpanet in my networking 101 class.
People today are as illiterate about economics as they were about the Internet back in the 90s. Just look around and see how many people know what Austrian econ is.
They studied the impact on a few big media inventions (printing press, TV and the internet) on (western) culture. It seems you don't believe I had this in University? You can find some information here: https://docplayer.nl/2209094-Studiegids-2013-2014-communicat...
The subject is called "Mediageschiedenis" and you can find it on page 37. This document is unfortunately in Dutch.
I was working back then, in 2003. The view on the ground was that SV had blown its head, but the rest of the world was just getting on with it. In fact most of the tech industry didn't even notice or care.
If you want to talk about whether web-based commerce was looking feasible, well even that was healthy enough - amazon was there and people were using it more and more, though clearly it wasn't as big as it is today.
So no, there was no feeling that 'the internet' wasn't going to be such a huge thing. There was a pessimism about some aspects of web commerce.
But I guess that's not as catchy a tagline as "It's like the early internet!"
The dotcom bubble was then precisely a symptom of the Internet's runaway success: Everyone wanted to use it, massive amounts of money were being made with it, and so everyone thought they could make money with it as well. As a result, even the stupidest ideas got funding.
When the bubble burst, it caused a significant economical upset. It did not have any really noticeable effect on the Internet itself, its usage, and the availability of most of the services that were actually in use. I don't think anybody remembers a time where Internet usage "dipped" from its massive momentum since the mid-90s, because the dip was largely economic.
Bitcoin is not.
The internet wasn't actively anti-efficient, making itself less efficient the more people wanted to use it haha.
> I'm not sure why you are saying all efforts go into a flawed second layer?
Because Bitcoin is fundamentally incapable of processing more than a laughable number of transactions, barely enough for a small town let alone the world?
> a) Dozens of teams are working on other efforts.
With nothing to show for it that isn't either (a) an objective scam or (b) not true to the fundamentally unachievable objectives underpinning "Bitcoin"
> b) Many do not consider lightning flawed.
Many people are wrong.
I don't know much about LN and actually I'm quite sceptical about it. However I have tried it now couple of times with different wallets and it seems to work very fluently from user perspective. And saying this as a very old bitcoin user, so I'm used to sending bitcoin payments a lot, LN payments don't seem to differ that much from usability perspective. You scan the QR code/invoice and press send.
Then of course there's the features people actually want like dispute resolution, the ability to charge back, and so on.
Even if only a couple of thousand people could use it, as long as it is useful to them it has a niche. It might not be enough to justify insane valuations, of course, but that's another discussion entirely.
Not to mention the low-income folks are most likely to have smartphones and therefore access to online banking with Ally or Schwab, which require $0 minimum balances and refund all ATM fees. You need a phone to use BTC, which means those same people can access Ally or Schwab and be objectively better off.
This is again a social problem in need of a social solution.
Postal banking is a great way to solve the access problem where it exists, too, like is done in the UK, and was in the US until the 1970s.
Sorry, this talking point is debunked, unless there's something I'm missing here.
As to "it's not even bitcoin" you're flat wrong. Holding a valid Bitcoin transaction is definitely Bitcoin, and with Lightning you always do. This is why it can't be done without bitcoin.
And from a FOSS development perspective, bitcoin is the only project in the *cryptos" space I consider serious. I wouldn't base a project of mine on any of the other chains, and I think I've earned my graybeard enough in FOSS to make that judgement.
[Disclaimer, I work on Lightning standards and one implementation, since 2015]
It's kind of a straw man to talk about opening LN channels for 7.5 billion people, as if that's something to be concerned about today. Not every man, woman and child has a cell phone or computer right now, so that's not really a concern in 2019.
Dispute resolution is built into the protocol: it's a two-way channel; both parties have to agree that the transaction in question took place and either party can close the channel if they wish.
And because LN is under heavy development, there are all kinds of new features being developed, like watchtowers that can monitor the channel on your behalf, etc.
You don't need chargeback if you can claim your money and close the channel if thing you want to happen isn't happening, right?
Yes, other cryptocurrencies (such as Ethereum) can create LN as a layer-2 feature.
No, you can't do this with dollars; since there's no cryptocurrency representation of USD with the required blockchain and scripting/smart contracts language required for LN—at least not yet.
And if the other person disagrees? Crypto falls down at the boundary between humans and the Blockchain every time.
You have nodes running on smartphones now; as soon as you launch a LN app, the channel is opened. There are billions of smartphones out there, so the 70 years you quoted is not a thing.
You have to report gold transactions, too, after all.
Why would you spend bitcoin if you didn't have to if you believed it’s going to be a lot more valuable 5 or 10 years from now?
Famously, a guy spent 10,000 BTC to buy two pizzas during the early days; that’s over $94 million USD at today's prices.
LN will be the standard for micropayments in a year or two.
There’s a large portion of the population who have no compelling reason to use Bitcoin.
I think it depends a lot on the audience.
I think we're still a long way away from general purpose adoption however.
Bitcoin isn't a solution to this problem because regions afflicted with non-functional banking systems have very little options for converting or spending bitcoin.
1,000 sats is worth about 10 cents USD but $14 Jamaican dollars.
It’s down 93% in value in the last two years so it has held its value worse than the Turkish lira and only slightly better than the bolivar and the egg salad sandwich I left on the windowsill back in the summer of 2017. Its transaction fees are only low because nobody’s using it. Supply constraints in transaction count were just kicked down the road, there’s no way on earth it would ever be able to match visas current transaction throughput of 50,000tx/sec.
It could easily process 20-30x more transactions than Bitcoin do, with the exact same fees. So the "only cheaper because it's not used" is just wrong.
So a cryptocurrency can only be useful if it matches the throughout of VISA? Sounds like a lazy way to dismiss it. I would for example consider it great if we could match PayPal for example.
Which in numbers would be blocks of around 100MB for PayPal's average volume last time I checked. And Bitcoin Cash is around that with 32MB.
Of course there's still ways to go, with the main bottleneck being block propagation (so blocks don't split the network or cause too much centralization due to orphan rates). Of which there are improvements being worked on.
Funny how you cherry-pick the value drop from the top. There's no denying they're too volatile, but you should try to be more objective.
I’m not necessarily cherry picking it for the top to make it look dramatic but that’s when volume peaked so more people bought in at that point than any other in the history of the currency. It’s the number that’s relevant to the largest group of people.
I’m picking this because these things can’t be true for it to be a solution to the stated problem: helping the Venezuelans.
How would you like the dollar bills you have in your pocket to hold a completely random value tomorrow?
A friend from Argentina was lamenting to me that's not very much after new currency controls were imposed through December.
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/argentina-el...
On Monday, the Central Bank of the Republic of Argentina moved to limit the amount of dollars that can be purchased to stanch large outflows of foreign reserves from the country and keep the peso steady, according to Al Jazeera. Dollar purchases are now restricted to $200 per month via bank accounts and $100 per month in cash until December. It's a huge cut from the $10,000 limit and currency controls imposed in September to protect the economy following the August primary election, where a surprise sweep by Fernandez sent Argentina's stocks, bonds, and currency sliding.
After the primaries, the price of dollars started ballooning and the government (which was clearly set to lose in the national elections), set a price for purchasing USD and a USD 10,000 per month limit.
So what the Argentinian people did was as follows: get paid in ARS, buy as many USD as you can afford at the official (lower) price, then go to the black market and sell at a higher price, which netted them more ARS than they had at first. Repeat until you reach the USD10000 limit.
They call this "hacer puré" (make mashed potatoes), and caused the unofficial price to go even further up. This scheme is basically "free money" for the people at the cost of the federal reserves, but it's nothing new for the Argentinian economy (the 90s were crazy). After the national elections, the government cut back on the limit down to USD 200 per month, rendering the scheme unusable (for now).
Source: I live next to Argentina
Just last week a friend of mine from another country was suppose to send me a few hundred bucks. He could have sent it 'traditionally' but he would have been harassed about why he was sending money abroad and wasted considerable time and effort going to a physical bank branch. Instead in under a minute he sent me some Ethereum and we both were able to confirm the transaction near immediately. I'm now able to use that in the way I see fit directly within a Chrome extension within the browser I'm typing this on. I can take this money and start earning interest higher than any bank will give me within a few minutes. And this is just the beginning of cutting out middleman and processes that feel as cumbersome as sending a letter vs an email.
> Oh wait, now it's $310
> Damn, now it's $200
The other downside, as you mention, is that the only main use for Eth is speculating on experimental lending platforms.
https://makerdao.com/en/whitepaper#overview-of-the-dai-stabl...
Yes, they did. I'm aware that Dai is not well pegged to the dollar, but then I'm not a crypto-fan.
If the ETH/USD price goes down, so does the capitalization ratio of CDPs. If a CDP goes low enough, users have to either repay their DAI debt (removing DAI supply from market) or rebalance by depositing additional ETH collateral. Otherwise, their position will be liquidated (which means the CDP owner loses their collateral) and their ETH collateral is put up for public sale for DAI on-chain. The DAI used to pay at these sales is destroyed. This creates an incentive for people to burn DAI to acquire ETH below market price (thus creating demand for DAI).
Also in general I advise you to ask clarifying questions rather than post scoffy dismissals if you know that your understanding might be incomplete.
Have you heard of options like TransferWise or OFX? They offer immediate transfers, lower transaction fees than ETH or BTC, etc. Using crypto in this manner is wholly unnecessary.
> I can take this money and start earning interest higher than any bank will give me within a few minutes
Earning interest? Are you talking about "HODLing"? ETH has dropped by nearly 90% since its peak less than 2 years ago. There's massive risk in holding ETH/BTC. You don't get to cherry-pick dates and claim that it's better than holding in a bank—it's not. BTC/ETH are 0-sum games, so on average nobody earns a dime of interest.
Also the ETH transaction fee is literally a few cents.
He's talking about "DeFi" ("distributed finance") - the current craze in the Ethereum world. Various groups are offering significant interest rates for loaning out your Eth. It's hard to see how it's not another speculation bubble waiting to burst.
I would argue it is actually negative sum as billions of dollars worth is newly minted every year and a lot of that inevitability has to be sold to pay the miners electricity bills. I'm honestly shocked they haven't collapsed due to the never ending supply side pressure requiring billions of dollars worth of capital inflow every year.
[1] https://medium.com/@k_schellinger/understanding-bitcoins-21-...
Citation needed. At the time of this post, a <5m transfer is $0.004. That's not a typo. $0.031 for <2m.
Plus, I don't want to defend the banking industry, but there is often two reason why transferring money is a bit cumbersome with banks: Scam and terrorism/money laundring.
The first thing is, the average Joe cannot help himself but get scammed. Because of this banks have to try to check has much has possible that you are doing what you think you are doing and make you jump through some hoop. Because had the end of the day, its probably the bank that will have to pay for your idiocy. They have insurance but insurance are not free. Crypto-currency usually don't care about this, if you send BTC to one address, you send BTC to one address, and if it was a scam, you have no way to get anything back. Being able to transfer money at just the click of a button also has its problem, lets be honest.
And terrorism / money-laundering. There is a lot of regulation about it, none that crypto-currency care about. You could be sending BTC to Daesh, nobody can stop you. Banks have to stop you. Just like they have to check that the money you are sending / receiving is legitimate and not from some illegal operation. That is why international money transfer takes more time and cost a lot more.
Now granted, a lot of banks are still awful at preventing scam even though they are extremely cumbersome to use. Just like a lot don't want to be bother with the whole money-laundering process and will try to discourage you to do anything that would require them to follow the process. And yes, some of them abuse their dominance to put ludicrous fess, etc. But the fact is that crypto-currencies live in a dream world where they don't have to put up with the rules that banks do. And that is why they will either never see widespread use, or they will have to find a way to comply with country regulation, which will need the third party that they tried so hard to remove.
I one has dollars and wants to pay for something using Euro or anything else, one will need to convert it which will include fees.
Cryptocurrency is an unjust financial scheme but IMO it's less unjust than any other financial scheme of our modern time such as those found on Wall Street or the Silicon Valley startup funnel with all the hype-driven unicorn startups which allowed a select few crooks to extract billions of dollars from the economy whilst providing no value in return.
So long as the current international fiat system (the giant pyramid scheme that it is) is allowed to continue, cryptocurrency will thrive. Fiat money will flow towards any financial scheme which is less fickle than itself; and unfortunately, at this stage in history, even speculative cryptocurrencies which can handle only 4 transactions per second seem to fit that description.
That one is a plus. Money is a transactional tool, speculation and storing value do not add to its main value.
As an aside, everybody that I know that ever brought some crypto coin did it for speculation. The more likely explanation is that I'm looking at the wrong country, but if speculation suddenly stoped being a main use of BTC, I would start to seriously look at it.
It turns out that making a currency behave "gold-like" carried with it the disadvantages to the gold standard that induced so many countries to move away from it.
In practice when people say "store of value" they mean "speculative vehicle that will make me rich".
That is the real problem that's causing volatility and making cryptocurrencies worse at it's intense purpose: as money.
To decide whether a currency is successful, one should look exclusively at its use as a means of exchange, ignoring any use as a storage of value or speculation target.
(1) Ideally, I of course live in a society that doesn't consider it acceptable to let people starve to death and has a secondary system for routing food from supply to necessity without demanding I exchange stored value for that food, lest I die because I have no measurable stored value. I'm using a simple model here, and we can probably move the particulars around to find something that a society doesn't provide which is considered valuable enough that people store up private wealth to acquire it (and lacking the ability to do so, would resort to burning the system down).
(2) There is probably an interesting question in whether such privatized de-risking against the future is actually a societal benefit (because of the risk that it becomes simple hoarding). Is that risk why you have discounted value-store as a societal benefit?
It's worth noting that people tend to like to do this anyway, even when the currency is already pretty stable - because a house you can rap your knuckles against feels like a more secure store of value than numbers in a bank.
But it's less useful than a currency where the observed exchange of value between two parties implies that most other parties agree value was exchanged. If you give me 2 BTC today but tomorrow the value of BTC has fallen by 90%, it's almost as if we never exchanged value in the first place. It's certainly not as helpful to me as if you give me $18,500 dollars today and I can spend them tomorrow.
Failure of a currency to act as a store of value damages its utility as a means of exchange, because the amount of value exchanged is imprecise over time.
Well, that thing in your bank account is not money, but a complex derivative of it, with different risk and depreciation profiles.
Anyway, some money that you can easily receive from the other side of the world, immediate convert into local currency, and move away without seeing any of it again would be very useful, provide a lot of value, and wouldn't require any value stability if it was created at the moment your peer started the transaction and destroyed as you finished it. Ditto for something you could send very small amounts over the net.
It satisfies the three basic functions for all practical purposes. In fact, it does so better than BTC (in the sense that there is no FDIC-equivalent to protect me if theft, fraud, or collapse of some holding institution tracking my BTC wallets for me divorces me from my BTC).
Dumping worthless paper currency is a form of speculation that the value won't unexpectedly rise before the goods purchased with it are consumed.
When people have confidence that the money they receive in exchange for their time will be able to transport that labor into the future, then they will demand to hold a balance in that money. That is why the money has value.
The "store of value" proposition of Bitcoin is that it can't be printed by a central bank, so you can be sure that your holdings relative to the size of the money supply cannot be diluted.
Except that's not true. The block reward consists of newly created coins of which there are 1800 per day. Currently, that is a 3.7% annual inflation rate in supply, which is far more than the 2% target most central banks from developed countries have. In value terms, at a price of $9300 per coin, that is $16.7M that need to flow into the Bitcoin eco system each day for it to remain stable.
But "store of value" also means something beyond just money supply, namely stable buying power. And that is not something that Bitcoin has ever offered on account of being more volatile than a micro cap biotech penny stock. Bitcoin may very well be one of the worst stores of values imaginable.
At which point, the behaviour of the entire system can be expected to radically change.
"2%" is target for the growth in the ratio of money supply to product supply, not the money supply itself.
BTC could be wildly above or below 3.7% (+/- deflation due to destruction) based on the growth of the GDP of the BTC-financed economy.
In short, those two metrics are just not comparable types. BTC has no "target" inflation. At best, you could measure BTC's observed inflation.
So instead of exporting energy directly via tanker, they would export indirectly down the wire.
The main technical challenges have to do with scaling issues. Facebook's recent proposal for Libra is interesting in the sense that it proposes some workable solutions for these. If you ignore the permissive vs. permission-less fundamentalism by some in this space as well as the political controversy, they actually did a fine job technically moving things forward with a better contract language than solidity and a loosely permissive and potentially long term permissionless system not unlike Ripple and Stellar.
Also, Ethereum is on a slow path to sharding and proof of stake. Sadly, that means it's currently unusuable for anything that requires scaling numbers of transactions/users. That in turn means most of what is currently running on it is a bad joke in terms of scalability. Most of the serious things associated with it happen on so-called side chains. This is just a fancy name for a convoluted and centralized database. Also it means anything building on the current version is going to face repeated disruptive forks in the network. That makes anything depending on Ethereum a proof of concept at best. That's the vast majority of (at this point mostly failed) ICOs on this platform.
IMHO a few things will happen in the next few years.
1) several of the currently well funded startups will start producing working products with actual users and revenue (the non speculative variety). Given the level of funding these companies received they would have a long runway for getting there and no rush to hit the market until several years from now earliest. In terms of tech startups, this would actually be relatively fast.
2) Most of the early startups in this space will fail. I expect a dotcom style consolidation phase where all of the BS, scams, etc. will fade away or be abandoned. This will take some time and be chaotic and generate a lot of negative news.
3) Several fin tech companies and banks are already integrating blockchains into their technology stack and the transaction volume depending on this will hit an exponential growth curve a few years from now. Most of this stuff is operating under the radar currently but are doing the right things from a technical point of view to make this scale. These will be mostly using permissive blockchains based on Ripple, Stellar, Libra, or similar.
4) Central banks outside the US and EU may start using blockchains because it makes sense. E.g. China has some plans here and and has an obvious opportunity to establish themselves as the digital currency of choice in most of South America, Asia, and Africa (basically anywhere with a weak, inflation challenged currency, and a lack of widely used banking products). Libra was after this opportunity as well.
5) Most of the utopian stuff in this space is IMHO doomed because it doesn't solve a problem people have other than fulfilling some political/idealistic agenda. That means I expect most of the financial success to be in permissive rather than permission-less systems. Legislators are pretty much going to require this for anything serious and most institutions with access to money are not going to want to come anywhere near the scams, criminals, and money launderers currently trading bitcoin. Bitcoin as such may survive as a convoluted alternative to owning gold (which is it's only use today).
6) The US and EU will take their sweet time adjusting their legislation. Short term we can expect nothing more than platitudes from ignorant politicians and very little in terms of any coherent/meaningful new laws in this space. The status quo is that most of the parliament members across nations lack the knowledge to have a coherent point of view. IMHO china is going lead by example here because they don't have this problem and have a clear incentive/goal. Then the west will catch up, eventually.
Bitcoin in this is a material asset, like a house to flip in an underappreciated/subsidized market.
This was especially true after the US state dept. started using the big credit card corps as a means to impose their will politically.
OTOH, this: "will be surprised to learn investors handed over billions to people they didn’t know and who faced little oversight"
will surprise nobody. It's exactly the reason why BTC was created
edit: I see the paper now https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3195066
"First, following periods of negative Bitcoin return, Tether flows from Bitfinex to Poloniex and Bittrex, and in exchange, Bitcoin is sent back to Bitfinex. Second, when there are positive net hourly flows from Bitfinex to Poloniex and Bittrex, Bitcoin prices move up over the next three hours, resulting in predictably high Bitcoin returns. The price impact is present after periods of negative returns and periods following the printing of Tether, that is, when there is likely an oversupply of Tether in the system. This phenomenon strongly suggests that the price effect is driven by Tether issuances"
I don't see if the researchers checked to see whether the wallets used were exchange wallets, and what happens to the coins exchanged. It could easily be bot actions that purchase altcoins when bitcoin is going down (poloniex having more altcoins than bitfinex), or just plain arbitrage bots. Is this evidence considered solid? It seems flimsy
"The series of $1,000 days that brought BTC to a record above $19,600 could have been the work of one entity"
I'm very skeptical. It is certainly possible that a single entity may have encouraged the rally. But there is no way that a single entity actually moved the markets this much. The amount of cash required would be significant.
During this time, there were shops in Korean cities advertising cryptocurrency sales in their store windows. This was not entirely the work of a single whale.
If the ecosystem has decided one exchange is the lead price, then they manipulate the price without needing the underlying assets.
Furthermore, bitcoin is one of the only markets I've seen which rewards "whales" instead of punishing them, because in most markets moving the market you will lose money to slippage. The market price will retract after you bump it. In bitcoin markets if you move out the price no-one is trading the 'fundamentals' so it just stays at the new price. Instead of losing money to slippage you gain money from it.
Magic internet money indeed!
By the latter I mean that most tradeable instruments are based in some sort of value external to the trading. Stocks have income streams and assets. Commodities have use value. Currencies have national economies (plus central banks who will defend the price). But I'm having trouble thinking of what a Bitcoin fundamental could be.
One might say it's the collective belief its fans, I guess. But given that Coinbase now supports 30 instruments, it seems like the supply of digital currencies is potentially infinite. Which suggests the fundamental value will tend toward zero.
Okay, but I think there's a big difference between:
A) Some whale committed bottomless resources to keep bidding up an asset whenever it fell in price, leading to a much higher price over six months, vs
B) Some whale caused a one-day surge in price of the asset, which got the asset attention, which had numerous cascading effects over the next six months, including greater attention for the asset, which led to a bigger, deeper reserve of demand for it.
It feels like a stretch to refer to B) as "one whale causing the entire rally", as there is a more complex network of effects at play.
But I think any other description is more of a stretch. If (B) is correct it’s a speculative bubble, which happened in response to the whale’s activity, and wouldn’t have happened if not for the whale.
That's what I dispute. If that one-time spike was enough to set off that kind of activity, then it was probably going to happen eventually, and the whale, at most, hastened it.
And yes, it gets kind of tricky, because most of us, including me, are comfortable saying, "This jerk tossing his lit cigarette caused this massive fire", even if the whole place was a tinderbox just waiting to turn into a blaze from anyone's single spark.
But the point is, when people write these articles, they're promoting the narrative that this single whale is the major determinant of the price. I dispute that narrative, just as I dispute that one cigarette-jerk's ability to determine how many forest fires there will be.
That's not slippage. Slippage is when you get filled at a higher (or lower) price than you were expecting. Prices moving up when an asset is bought is normal on traditional exchanges as well.
But with BTC being a speculative asset, since there was already an excess of demand (price increase), and the excitement of the rising prices drives more demand, by buying up coins you drive up the price even further faster. It's a classic pump-and-dump or market-cornering model. The bubble will burst eventually, unless fundamentals grow enough to cover the speculation.
A bit strange how tether tokens are printed into existence to save the day for the other cryptos.
Bingo. For those curious, here is a very thorough history of Tether and how it's use brought chaos to the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem. It was used as a money printer to prop up an insolvent (and criminal) exchange while creating insane volatility in the markets. It is still alive today and continues to be a massive liability for the entire industry.
It only took one or two of these smart people to identify a weakness in the system, and then they raked in I’m sure millions from it.
* No one seems to have read the full paper * Is the title misleading? Discussion seems to indicate that this study only addresses the end of year Surge and not the year long surge through 2017.
It was not a single whale. It had all the hallmarks of bubble like tulip mania or Internet stocks in 1999.
I for one am sure people are being paid to hype up or report on BTC so that the people paying for those "news" reports can profit from the increased price.
This position being facilitated either by direct action or, more frequently, by enthusiastic prompting from a "blockchain consultant" acquaintance who offered to walk them through setting up a wallet (or even a miner / mining contract) and show them how to use it. You know, "just to see how it works."
Now that their curiosity has been elevated to, as Bitcoiners love to quip, actual "skin in the game" (both in terms of time/material investment and reputational commitment), they are biased to repeat the pro-bitcoin messaging points they've been spoonfed by what they believe to be a helpful, fashionably libertarian insider geek contact, but is in effect merely this generation's reboot of the garden variety penny stock shill.
It's really a textbook study in how to manipulate markets -- and yes, it was probably one entity doing it. Now who that entity is may be a matter of speculation, but it's likely bitfinex/tether, which are really the same company run by the same people.
Opposed to say Bitmex, which rolled out a braintrashing overengineered differential update protocol, so hard to scratch that we just opted out of its implementation. I believe that was inspired by bare fix/fast, with all strings attached (pun intended).
Paolo Ardoino (CTO) basically pushes code every day: https://github.com/prdn
Want to know more?
[0] https://imgur.com/a/D5NrGok
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/15/researchers-finds-that-one...
Anyway it's neither here nor there what the research says to be honest; there's major, wealthy players that see (saw?) an opportunity in crypto, pumped up the price (if it happened via Tether then it was via freely generated, pre-mined coins), then gradually cashed out again but in real dollars this time from the somewhat lagging "plebs" who wanted to follow the upwards rollercoaster.
It is way worse than penny stocks, and it is unfair to penny stocks to compare them to crypto currencies.
Nice strawman though!
It's like saying I would dilute the value of the US dollar by printing billions of my own "fork dollar".
Sure, the limit of Bitcoin Core is still set at 21M, but that limit is quite arbitrary and in time maybe more malleable than people currently believe.
People hold their bitcoin, because they don't know where else to put it right now. With low interest rates everybody is apparently doing well.
If the market crashes, some people are worried, or have some assets outside of bitcoin which they have to offset.
They will start to dump their bitcoin, but where is lower bound? There are no hard assets backing it like a stock.
Maybe it's a few "believers", "whales" and exchanges who value bitcoin no matter what. But what is their total buying power? If there is a strong devaluation, those people or companies would be the ones who were hit the hardest, so how much can they afford to put aside for preppin up Bitcoin?
Keep in mind BTC is deflationary by nature and was the result of the last financial crisis/recession.
However, the ascent from $500 upward, which mostly happened in the entirety of 2017, was clearly caused by free money on the streets in the early ICO craze. That drove people into cryptos, mostly Ethereum as an on-ramp to ICOs, but subsequently also Bitcoin and all the others.
ICO mania really started in April, and the ETH/BTC ratio rose to its ATH in June/July. This drove a ton of hype into cryptocurrencies, and naturally every single crypto rose spectacularly. BTC would have never gotten to 10k if it wasn't for the ICO mania of Summer 2017, IMO.
If tether was truly under attack it would trade for under $1 against trusted stablecoins like USDC, but it hasn’t yet. This has happened before, but it isn’t today.
Crypto traders simply don’t care, they appreciate USDT because it’s sketchy. Something that is more regulated would make them less likely to use it.
Which it arguably is anyway with at least 95% of reported exchange trade volumes being fabricated.
You’re assuming efficient markets. (Also, Bitfinex has admitted in court filings that Tether isn’t fully backed.)
I have capital, have spent my career trading securities and think Tether is a scam. But I’m not going to short it, for a variety of reasons, one big one being the main places it trades are controlled by Bitfinex.
Yes, I understand the "problems" with Tether, but it has objectively succeeded in holding up its market price of ~$1 USD for more than a couple years now, so it has functionally served its purpose to its customers needing to make short-term exchanges. To a great degree the fact that the black box's inputs and outputs work is all that really matters, not what's inside the black box.
Might it implode one day? Maybe -- that's life in a financial anarchy. But that should be part of your model. For example, minimizing the time you hold USDT and using it purely as a medium to facilitate other transactions reduces your risk.
I'm sure there are many reasons this wouldn't work, but it's fun to think about.
You realize this doesn't actually transfer any energy, right? Assuming you're not joking, all you've done is calculate the world's most expensive sha256.
https://twitter.com/XFaure/status/1187329974723891200
This subthread in particular:
You could also just...not compute trillions of random sha256 hashes.
To give you an idea of the scale of the problem that such an enterprise would be dealing with: the ISS has a cooling capacity of less than 100kW and current mining infrastructure has a power consumption in the order of gigawatts. This energy ends up as waste heat that needs to be dumped into space at the same rate. So for every gigawatt, there is 10000 times the cooling capacity of the so-far largest human-made object in space required.
I suppose Solar panels in space can be arranged such that that it's always solar noon, and it's never cloudy. So more efficient at collecting than on the ground, in theory.
I've always been curious how well this works in other markets, especially the smaller cryptocurrency alt coin markets.
If you still think Bitcoin is a fad or toy, just wait until summer 2020 when the supply shock makes 2017 look like a blip.
The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is an independent agency of the US government created in 1974, that regulates futures and option markets. The Commodities Exchange Act ("CEA"), 7 U.S.C. § 1 et seq., prohibits fraudulent conduct in the trading of futures contracts.
and all the people who went cryptocurrency crazy late 2017 were just lying about throwing their money in?
it was absolute mob greed that drove the price up