Was the Bitcoin Flock Just Sheared? | Hacker News Reader

Was the Bitcoin Flock Just Sheared?

streetwiseprofessor.com

17 pointsrrrrtttt17 comments

Can't read this on my phone. Hate it when sites think they're better than five years of smartphone development and their site is superior enough not to need zoom. Also wish there was a way to override the no-zoom tag; you'd think at least Mozilla's browser would feature that.

It's not much better on a desktop. The background interferes with the text color, making it very difficult to read without highlighting the text.

I gritted by teeth and tried to ignore it, but I just can't help myself: the past tense of shear is shorn.

There is more to this to diagnose a pump and dump. According to these criterias, the internet bubble of 2000 would have been recognized as a pump and dump too.

There are quite a few people who hold exactly that opinion. For instance, check out Alex Berenson's The Number: How the Drive for Quarterly Earnings Corrupted Wall Street and Corporate America, or read any "alternative" financial blog, and this line of reasoning might start to make at least some sense.

That is a seriously bad background

The price per BTC was set back by 1 week.

If you assume the absurd growth just before the peak is "normal". It took over a year to get back to the 2011 peak, after going down much more than the first, sudden collapse.

Why is this on the front page of HN? This is just uninformed ramblings with a reference to an article (Krugman) contain similarly uniformed ramblings.

It just seems lazily uniformed. I doubt he even bothered to actually investigate and corroborate his pump and dump claims, into instead of spreading FUD. If he did, one would think he would have mentioned the alleged DDOS'ing of the exchanges etc. which are widely speculated (even among the 'true believers') to be part of a market manipulation scheme.

But it has a cute title!

Sure, let's discuss things no one seems to be talking about.

How is pump-and-dump even possible in an ecosystem such as Bitcoin?

Pumping is easy, sure, just load heaps of cash into all exchanges, buy every single wall that is put up, price explodes. But how is the pump-and-dumper supposed to get her money out when she decides to dump? All exchanges have a hard limit on how much cash they can divulge on each given day.

This is an impossible scenario with Bitcoin, as it is today.

I think the more likely scenario is to cause panic to scoop up cheap bitcoins and then let them rise to new heights

> Pumping is easy, sure, just load heaps of cash into all exchanges, buy every single wall that is put up, price explodes.

That is NOT how the "pump" part of pump-and-dump works. You get gullible people to put their money into the asset.That way you still sell at a win well into the collapse.

I just checked a few things. There were 110 transactions between April 8 and today that were all larger than 200 BTC.

They include this bugger:

https://data.mtgox.com/api/1/BTCUSD/trades?since=13654550186...

In fact, transaction id 1365379200 converted 1000 BTC into USD, in a single massive sell order worth $180,000 USD.

Your baseline assumption is wrong. Someone cashed out on $180,000 USD during this event in a single transaction.

How hard is it to setup multiple accounts on Mt. Gox using Tor?

300 accounts would give you access to $3 Million USD. And Mt. Gox has a simple API that you could coordinate all of your accounts together.

According to Mt. Gox, users of Tor are subject to having to submit additional anti-money laundering documentation.

I am moving all my bitcoins into pogs. I understand pogs are back.

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