undefined | Better HN

0 pointsnlperguiy8y ago0 comments

Main source of instability is price manipulation by big players and market inefficiency (not easy enough to arbitrage between exchanges). It would be interesting to see them do the same thing if BTC market cap is in couple of trillions.

For example, if you're on any exchange that lists the total amount of orders in BTC, you can easily catch when the manipulation starts by seeing out of the ordinary sums (triple the amount of usual) for open positions.

Not to mention insane bot activity that is equivalent to a DDOS attack on the exchange.

During the last several hours of IOTA pump, exchanges, even the IOTA tangle were, and still are unstable.

0 comments

6 comments · 2 top-level

gruez8y ago· 3 in thread

>not easy enough to arbitrage between exchanges

doesn't tether fix this?

nlperguiyOP8y ago

for arbitrage you want to move all currencies, not just one.

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/#markets

for example, bitcoin is now huge on bithumb, I'd buy it at bitstamp and sell it for 10% more, and repeat. given the slow transaction times, huge fees, large mempool, this is impossible to do.

exchanges also ban you for trying to do arbitrage too, so there's a risk of losing all the funds.

celticninja8y ago

Exchanges don't ban users for exploiting arbitrage, every trade is money to the exchange and it benefits them to enable arbitrage to take place. No idea where you pulled that claim from.

It's also not impossible to trade via bitstamp and bitthumb, sure it may take an hour or so to get your btc from bitstamp to bitthumb but that's not the bottleneck. Once you sell on bitthumb for USD you need to get that USD back to bitstamp. So you have to get it from a Korean Bank to your own account and then to bitstamps European bank account. Best case scenario that route takes 5-10 working days so the BTC network taking an hour or so to confirm is the least if your problems.

1 more reply

empath758y ago

They've printed a billion dollars worth of tether in the past few months with nothing backing it. They fixed something anyway.

Epenthesis8y ago· 1 in thread

Right, but given that that's true today, what makes BTC a store of value?

Or should I be parsing the phrase to mean "It's not anything today, but in the long term, once the market cap is large enough, it'll be a store of value"?

(I'm not being snarky; I'm legitimately confused by what people mean by the phrase.)

ForHackernews8y ago

> I'm not being snarky; I'm legitimately confused by what people mean by the phrase.

I am being snarky: They mean "you better hurry up and buy some bitcoin quick, so I can have some new bagholders"

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse