So one thing I've noticed and have been logging for a while is the fact that there is huge disparity between prices on various exchanges. My first inclination was to create an arbitrage bot that would buy on one exchange, then transfer to another, and sell again. There are numerous problems with this approach, not the least of which is that you can only really transfer BTC between exchanges and not other currency.
My next thought was this: watch MtGox and assume that it drives the market price. Then buy/sell on another exchange, taking advantage of the fact that there is a delay.
Long story short, it's not as easy as this. However, there is definitely an opportunity for arbitrage here as for example currently BTCe is showing $65, while BitStamp is showing $61.
Are transaction fees small enough for that to work? $65 versus $61 is only about a 6% difference, and you need two transactions for each trip, so the fees would have to be under ~3%.
Don't forget to look at the bid/ask instead of just the last traded price. Big spreads lately might make it look like there's an arbitrage opportunity when there really isn't.
The reactions on r/bitcoin, are interesting and tragic. The title of the top thread with 515 comments: I think this subreddit should seriously consider having suicide hotline info posted
Bitcoin is not dead, it will come back. Technically, it won't even disappear.
Bitcoin has many fundamental uses as an exchange of value (note the vernacular) that is not done properly by anything else. It is the reason that markets like the Silk Road can exist. The "fundamental" flaw of bitcoin is that it is deflationary. This causes mass speculation, which causes instability.
It's instability means that it is not a good store of value. It is good for exchange of value under certain conditions (anonymous, distributed, trust required, cryptographic, etc.). Bitcoin is taking a hit right now because all of the speculators are cashing out (or panicking, or whatever). Most of the people who use bitcoin for it's fundamental strengths only hold on to bitcoin briefly. This is one of the (perhaps unintended) features of the commodity.
Bitcoin is not good for measuring value. You would never set a price in terms of bitcoin. You would set the price in terms of dollars or euros and then use a conversion to figure out what the price in bitcoins should be. This will probably always be the case for bitcoin transactions, because that's just how bitcoin is.
But as long as bitcoin does 'distributed, anonymous, and cryptographic' better than everybody else, it will be used for those strengths, and this will keep it alive. Bitcoin is not dead until there is something to replace it. A market crash does not count.
Can you describe the mechanisms in the bitcoin system which will drive down the investment-based and speculation-based trading and drive up the currency-based trading?
It seems to me that the exact opposite trend is more likely. The use of bitcoin as a currency will become increasingly swamped by speculative investments and the swings in value will only get larger and larger, not smaller.
Not only that, but MtGox handles over 80% of all bitcoin trade. No wonder it's plummeting; every currency would be greatly affected by something like that.
That site is pulling data from Mt.Gox, the largest exchange. Mt.Gox suspended trading a few hours ago, and has been showing a "last price" of $124.90 since. On other exchanges (where trading is not suspended), the price is currently hovering at $60-$65.
Mt.Gox reopens at 02:00 UTC. (This comment was written at approx 22:25 UTC, so when this comment is about 3.5 hours old. When that happens, I predict, all hell will break loose.
So I don't quite understand is the falling price because mtgox is down for maintenance (if so why does it have that effect, I don't run into the street and burn my cash just because the banks are closed on Sundays) or is that just a coincidence?
Imagine what it would be like if there were bank holidays, but they are not predictable in a calendar sense in advance like our holidays... and every bank has their own list of holidays. And also there are only five banks.
I think the price is falling because there's been a speculative bubble rising, and the speculators' confidence is a fickle thing. Maybe up until now, you were a speculator and you didn't think you needed to go anywhere else. Now Mt.Gox has frozen trading and they are also not processing withdrawals. Most people stop trading too.
So, it's a fire sale, because nobody knows if our bubble will blow itself back up again, or how long it's going to take for that to happen. If you were keeping 2/3 of your money at Mt.Gox and now you're afraid that it's utterly gone (at least you know you won't be trading it today), so you've only got 1/3 of what you had, and everyone in town says it's worth 1/7 what it was yesterday.
A few people would surely take the money and get rid of it.
> So I don't quite understand is the falling price because mtgox is down for maintenance
It had already dropped considerably (below $130, IIRC) from the ~$200 it had bounced back to from the earlier drop from $266 by the time MtGox shut down trading. The shutdown of trading at MtGox may have encouraged further decline across other markets, but it doesn't seem to be the original source of the decline.
> if so why does it have that effect, I don't run into the street and burn my cash just because the banks are closed on Sundays
OTOH, you might demand more dollars for goods (or just be less likely to accept them at all), or, on the other side, accept less good for dollars and be more eager to get rid of them if the main outlet for trading dollars for other currency shut down on a day that it would normally have been open (e.g., not a regular Sunday office closure) after a day of high volatility trading where the dollar had lost half its value before the trading was shutdown.
MtGox is not the only exchange, although it might seem that way sometimes. It would be like your bank is closed on Sunday, but there's still banks from the same branch open next door.
Because the blockchain is shared, the only thing that mtgox being down prevents you from doing is buying/selling with money stored on mtgox itself-- you can still move money from your personal wallet(s) (you're not keeping 100% of your BTC on mtgox, right?) to another exchange and sell it there.
You seem to have capitalized the name of the exchange incorrectly. It's not MtGox (like a mountain), it stands Magic The Gathering Online Exchange, a website where you can trade children's playing cards.
> it stands Magic The Gathering Online Exchange, a website where you can trade children's playing cards.
I'm not sure if you did it to drive the point or not, but Magic: The Gathering is by no means "for children". The average age of players is way over 18 in most areas.
(Slightly biased as someone who's been playing M:TG for over 18 years.)
While I'm not qualified to say, I certainly would predict so.
Many price-monitoring tools pull data from MtGox. For anyone using those tools, the price has been stable at $125 for the last few hours and will stay that way until the exchange reopens at whatever the price is then (currently around $65).
When that jump happens, I can only imagine a vast quantity of BTC will be sold and the price will crash.
Please. Bitcoin fanatics, come out and tell me that Bitcoin will change the world.
That there will come another rise, and this time it won't be a bubble.
Because I know you think these things, that you're true believers, and you think that an unregulated currency with a track record of insane volatility will replace our means of commerce somehow.
Here's the thing:
The majority of people that have Bitcoins now are the people that don't want to sell them. Ever.
The mainstream media watched you this time. It saw just how dysfunctional Bitcoin is.
Would you really care to wager money that Bitcoin will never rise in price again? Regardless of whether or not it will 'take over the world,' it's too soon to say what will happen to Bitcoin.
Wall Street didn't disappear because of the Great Depression, but I'll bet there were plenty of people right after the crash that were predicting doom and gloom.
| Bitcoin fanatics
You just come off as either an anti-Bitcoin fanatic or a troll.
| insane volatility
Do you really expect anything that is in its early stages to be stable? Nothing about Bitcoin is currently stable, and I don't exactly see people encouraging their grandmothers to use it for day-to-day transactions.
> Wall Street didn't disappear because of the Great Depression
A whole lot of government regulations affecting the Wall Street and other parts of the financial sector were put into place to prevent a recurrence of the crash of '29 and subsequent panics affecting the financial industry, which is one reason why Wall Street, the banks, etc., didn't disappear.
Why? Because it's _so obvious_ to people outside the Bitcoin fixation that Bitcoin is crippled. And here you are saying "You don't _know_ it's not going to rise in price again" as if that constitutes a useful argument in favor of Bitcoin.
You just _assume_ that Bitcoin is in its 'early' stages, that it's similar to Wall Street.
Nothing Bitcoin does solves the problem money presents in the first place: its misuse by the greedy.
"Fanatic" is usually a bad thing. It means that you are so invested in your extreme position that you are unwilling to listen to contradictory ideas/evidence.
| And here you are saying "You don't _know_ it's
| not going to rise in price again" as if that
| constitutes a useful argument in favor of
| Bitcoin.
Who said I was arguing in favor of Bitcoin? I'm arguing that your position is too extreme, and derived from emotion rather than anything else.
| You just _assume_ that Bitcoin is in its
| 'early' stages, that it's similar to Wall
| Street.
All you're really doing here is redirecting. You're turning my statements into claims/assumptions without any discussions or supporting evidence. I'm now "assuming" that Bitcoin is in its early stages, but you have not said why you think that it isn't. I'm now "assuming" that Bitcoin is similar to Wall Street, but you're not saying why they are different.
If Bitcoin is not in the 'early' stages as a currency, then what would you define as it's early stages? All you're really doing is
Nothing Bitcoin does solves the problem money presents in the first place: its misuse by the greedy.
Sure. I took the rhetorical tack of agreeing with the label because I'm firm enough in my conviction that I don't care if someone writes me off as a fanatic.
I'm actually tired of listening to contradictory ideas/evidence about Bitcoin. It gets pretty repetitive and it never gets very convincing.
I'm curious as to whether you've purchased anything with Bitcoin? Or transferred money to someone in a different country using Bitcoin?
The first time I sent Bitcoin directly from my wallet, to someone else's I was amazed at how quickly, and easily it was done - and blown away by the fact that it had been done in a decentralized manner.
I think all Bitcoin users (as opposed to speculators) are highly annoyed by the volatility, but keep in mind, by and large, none of the transactional users of BitCoin care whether the nominal value of a Bitcoin is $1, $100, or $10,000. All we want is for it to be stable so we don't have to keep sweeping our local currency in/out of Bitcoin as we use it.
I'm really curious as to where you are coming from, both personally and professionaly, when you utter single word sentences like, "You lost."
Your writing style makes most of the people who read you think you're just petty and looking for an opportunity to kick people who are down. Frankly I think the same. This kind of playground attitude rarely occupies the mind of good men.
If you've really been lamenting people's excitement over bitcoins as long as you say you have, I feel sorry for you and maybe you deserve this token of happiness. Fruitless as it is, you make it seem like you don't have much else.
I'd be interested in hearing your case for Bitcoin being fundamentally flawed. Honestly, I can only guess what you mean. Is is because it is deflationary? Is it because there are more speculators in the market than actual users? Is there some other, technical flaw, perhaps?
As somewhat frequent Bitcoin user - the recent volatility combined with lag in the MtGox exchange (in the United States) - has made it next to impossible to use Bitcoin as a medium of exchange, without a lot of back-and-forth refunds/top ups to make up for the rapidly changing value.
If I send you 2 Bitcoins expecting they will be $200 USD when they get to you, but when you transfer them back to USD, they are only worth $150 - then I still need to send you another $50 in bitcoins.
I can live with 10-20% volatility in currency a year, or even a month - but within a particular transaction? It makes the currency unusable.
One thing that no bitcoin user I've talked to who uses it as a currency mentions, is the nominal value. They would be quite happy (more happy) with a $1 USD BC that never, ever, changed its value.
There are a lot of reasons, I think. Here's a quick approach to it, though.
>Is it because there are more speculators in the market than actual users?
It's because you can't _stop_ that from being true.
Bitcoins are a form of money. Money has no intrinsic value--it's what you can do with it that matters, right? _Real_ money has commodities exchanges to track staples of production.
But we treat it with intrinsic value and we can do interesting things with it when we do. It occupies this nebulous space between inherently valuable and worthless.
The part where it's almost valuable by itself is what leads to greed, which is what leads to speculators.
So: Bitcoin doesn't solve the __real problem of money__ (because... is there really a good solution?), it just tries to pretend that decentralized and electronic money is better.
"Take no pride in your confession that you too are biased; do not glory in your self-awareness of your flaws. This is akin to the principle of not taking pride in confessing your ignorance; for if your ignorance is a source of pride to you, you may become loathe to relinquish your ignorance when evidence comes knocking. Likewise with our flaws—we should not gloat over how self-aware we are for confessing them; the occasion for rejoicing is when we have a little less to confess."
This has prompted some amount of introspection on my part, though probably not in the direction you intended.
I don't even view it as a flaw. Which is probably what _makes_ me not a nice person.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not cruel--I don't intend to hurt people. I just don't really mind if people feel stepped on because someone said something they didn't like.
I mean, I'm laughing that drivebyacc thinks his hands are any less mud-covered than mine. But I also look at that mud-slinging bit and think--well, I pushed him into revealing that he's playing at being an investment banker with Bitcoin, which is exactly what prevents Bitcoin from being a suitable replacement for the money we already have.
And I emphasized the gloating bit because it's a little true and I'm not angry and it gave that guy a bit of a shove. I think the emotion I feel about Bitcoin is similar to this XKCD: http://xkcd.com/194/
Bitcoins.
They don't work.
Now can we, as a technical culture, move on to something that will?
Up until about two weeks ago - Bitcoin has worked really well. I want to put $USD 2000 in the pocket of somebody I've never met, and neither of us want to use credit cards, or paypal, or pay fee's, or pay currency exchange.
He gives me a hex string, "1LnLfnc3nU3fYAY3DfuPsmqJqFAuRb4p9U".
Presuming, that Bitcoins are trading at $40 USD/ i type at the linux prompt, "bc sendtoaddress 1LnLfnc3nU3fYAY3DfuPsmqJqFAuRb4p9U 50"
15 minutes later, after three confirmations, he sells those 50 bitcoins at his exchange, and he now has $USD 2000.
That's the way it's been working just fine for the last 18+ months, until the recent couple weeks of increased volatility.
I don't see anything inherent in the currency that suggests we will have 10+% volatility every 15 minutes for the for seeable future. Doubling every month, of halving every month is fine, users of the currency can adjust for 2%/day volatility.
That's about the only problem I see with BitCoin as a currency right now. Let's check back in six months and see if we're still seeing the +/- 10% swings per day.
Straw man army. Which bitcoin enthusiast said that "winning" requires "replacing our means of commerce" or "changing the world" or even "never having insane volatility"?
I consider myself a bitcoin enthusiast, and I have never made any of those arguments, and I don't consider myself to have "lost." If the value of bitcoin goes to zero and stays there, I don't consider myself to have "lost." It's still an awesome idea that interests me from computer science and economic/political perspectives, and everything we've seen happen in the bitcoin economy is to me a cool proof of concept.
I don't understand why the "anti-bitcoin fanatics" are so vehement in their criticism of bitcoin enthusiasts. You seem to deriving much more excitement from the recent bitcoin price drops than I ever did from its price increases. Honestly, I just think the decentralized transaction log based on proof-of-work is a really cool idea, and the hypothesis that there could be a trustworthy means of making and verifying transactions without a government or central authority controlling the thing being transacted is compelling. I would think that even if I just read the white paper and there had never been a single bitcoin transaction in real life. The fact that there is a high-profile bitcoin economy is just icing on the cake.
The anti-bitcoin fanatics have carefully constructed their position to ensure that they can interpret literally any event as evidence that bitcoin is stupid or doomed or a scam. Is the price rising? That's obviously market irrationality and pure speculation. Is the price falling? That's clearly the market correcting itself. Is a certain exchange doing well and gaining a good reputation? That's an evil monopoly that goes against the decentralized goal of bitcoin. Is a certain exchange experience technical difficulties? Then that's just a bunch of incompetent amateurs, or worse, malicious scammers trying to distort the market. Is there a lack of people actually buying useful things with bitcoin? That's clear evidence that there is no real bitcoin economy. Is a business supporting bitcoin payments? Well that's still crap, since they're tying the price to the USD exchange price, or using credit cards, or the business owner is just some bitcoin shill, etc.
My name is Danjuma Sule, one of the sons of major Gen Gumel Danjuma Sule, The late Nigeria's former minister of mines and power in the regime of the late former Nigeria's military Head of state, Gen Sanni Abacha. When my father died he left me an inheritance of 13002422.34343422 bitcoins. Unfortunately bitcoin exchanges are not yet set up in Nigerian currency and I am in need of a young techno wizard with a bank account denominated in US dollars to assist me in gaining access to my inheritance.
It is on this basis I am seeking for assistance. Your percentage is negotiable. Please note; your age and profession doesn't really matter in this transaction. Waiting for your immediate response and bank account specifics.
>The bitcoin fanatics have carefully constructed their position to ensure that they can interpret literally any event as evidence that bitcoin is not stupid and not doomed and not a scam.
>Bitcoin fanatics, come out and tell me that Bitcoin will change the world.
I am no Bitcoin fanatic, just an interested observer, but imho it already has.
It has provided the first viable model for a decentralized p2p [currency|medium of exchange|payment system|something as yet uncategorizable] embedded in the Internet, rather than operated by a third party.
The first iteration is imperfect, but subsequent versions that fix its problems are already being worked on. Some are scams, some are honest but flawed attempts at a better Bitcion, and eventually I expect a more sophisticated Bitcoin 2.0 to emerge.
Imho, Bitcoin represents an inflection point. It may not make it to the promised land, but one of its descendents may.
>You lost.
There is no finish line. This game never ends. And Bitcoin's success does not necessarily mean the end of government currencies. I fully expect they will co-exist for a long time.
Less emotional investment from both sides, less fixation on price/exchange rate, and more focus on the underlying ideas, technology, and their ramifications, both positive and negative, please.
The problem I have is that it is still going to be money, and it will still be subject to money's flaws.
Meet the new investment bankers, same as the old ones.
Ask yourself: if we had a global currency backed by the UN that was regulated a la NASDAQ (remember that guy complaining that mtgox was, essentially, unregulated), would that truly be less preferable to Bitcoin or similar?
Official things have a purpose. Someone, some entity to be accountable provides more of an indication of our affirmed agreement.
>would that truly be less preferable to Bitcoin or similar?
No idea without more detail on what that would look like.
But the ultimate goal of BTC and hopefully its forks and descendants is to replace that centralized (corruptible) human authority with a decentralized, transparent, fair, robust and reliable system instead.
It's not there yet, and may ultimately be impossible, formerly undecidable even, but it's opened a new avenue for research and experimentation that has never been possible before.
Whether Bitcoin itself succeeds or fails, that alone is a huge win imho.
I can understand that difference in opinion, even as I'm firmly convinced it will be ultimately impossible.
Money is, in some sense, a contract between people; or perhaps a better way of saying it is that it's within the public concern. So there _must_ be some human authority backing it.
There is a fair amount of literature in the field of economics on effective,self regulating and contracting groups that don't require a third party human authority to enforce contracts. In fact, the 2009 Nobel Laureate for Econ was actually in said field.
Many of the solutions aren't perfect, but neither are the human authority alternatives. The question to ask is, on the margin, is having a human authority more efficient than the self-regulating alternatives?
I too watched the bubble mania in disbelief. But this wasn't the first time. In 2011 there was also an agressive bubble up to $30, with plenty of media attention. 6 months later the price was down to $3.
The bitcoin fanatics should have "lost" back then. But instead bitcoin kept on chugging and expanded its user base.
The same will happen this time. The speculators will move on but the group of people with a genuine interest in using bitcoin will have grown.
... Are you going to hell-ban me if I say no? I know HN has this odd focus on being polite, but I've found that a good honest brawl does more to express what people are thinking than timid conversation over tea.
I mean, I'm done in this topic, if that'll satisfy you.
"honest brawl"? All you've done is act like a child and troll people. No where in any of your baiting replies in the last two weeks have you expressed a coherent or relevant thought to any discussion. Just you call Bitcoins and their users stupid and then today gloating like a petulant child.
I think the speculators lost. Those of us who actually use bitcoins for transactions simply got a bit of free money out of the rise and knew to hold off until the exchange came back to reasonable levels. I still like bitcoin for what its good for and think that its real uses will keep it around for some time, whether the mainstream adopts it or not.
Have you even tried transfering money around with bitcoins? It's amazing. Absolutely amazing. The price of bitcoins is irrelevant and uninteresting compared to the way it facilitates transactions. It is incredible technology, potentially the most disruptive technology ever invented. And if anything the recent press will ultimately make more people aware of bitcoin, and perhaps lower prices will convince more people to try it out.
The problem is that bitcoin is now dominated, at least it seems to me, by speculative investment. And that's not what currency is about. People value currency not because it appreciates but because it is stable. Runaway inflation and deflation are both bad for monetary systems, but here we have people imagining that deflation is fan-fucking-tastic for bitcoin.
And that's telling, because it indicates that bitcoin isn't a medium of exchange, it's an investment denominated in dollars. People are talking about the "price" of bitcoin more than anything these days, but that's not why people choose a medium of exchange. Bitcoins shouldn't be exciting, they should be boring, and dependable. As boring and dependable as a dollar bill.
SatoshiDice and the controversy surrounding it has pretty well emphasized that Bitcoin is not going to be as widespread a currency as some of the true believers want it to be. It has a niche use in SR and other semi/illegal things, but it's really useful only as long as the price remains stable (in fact, during highly volatile periods like this, most of the smart SR merchants pack up shop until the BTC-USD rate has stabilized).
However, the blockchain inherently limits BTC from being able to be used in the same way that, say, Paypal is right now, just because of it's inability to deal with a high volume of transactions, not to mention the confirmation time. And efforts to mitigate this through 3rd parties removes the distributed semianonymous merits, thus leading to a position where you're better off just using PayPal or a credit card anyways.
I don't know if I'm more annoyed by your smug attitude (and the attitude that many others here have regarding Bitcoin), or if I just feel sorry for you that you have to be this smug and condescending about having been "right" that it is in a slump.
Well, he has probably been careful to ensure that he can't lose according to his rules. If the USD to bitcoin exchange rate doubled every week for the rest of his life, he can easily maintain the claim that it will still eventually crash. If the exchange rate does crash, then he can say he was right. I can make the same claim about the US dollar. Without a time frame and price in the hypothesis, saying "it is doomed to crash" or "it is doomed to failure" is not a falsifiable statement.
If I were a bigger ass, I'd just write "umad bro" and walk away. That would be about at your level, seeing as you pretty much just said "I'm mad because people thought Bitcoin had a brighter future."
Not sure if you're mad at those of us that made a ton of money from holding and selling. Or are mad at those of us that wanted to trade with them. Or are you just mad at the silly people claiming Bitcoins would rule the world? Either way, you seem very mad over something that is worthy of no anger... unless you feel personally spurned by not having bought/sold as others?
I think you're mistaking my emotion here. I'm not angry at all.
I'm actually a fair deal uglier than what you think: I'm openly gloating. I have been gawking at this whole process unabashedly. I'm going "I am so right!"
I'd feel bad about it, but the whole thing is just so... _hilarious_.
I guess I don't think you understand how it works. Not everyone "lost". I can sell now at $64 and still have made a profit. A very, very, very small one compared to $266 a few days ago. There are plenty of people holding BTC that expected a "course correction" and every, single, time Mt.Gox hits lag and downtime, the price plummets. An artificial suspension on trading, at the exchange that does the huge bulk percent of trades... caused a huge slump in price?! Color me shocked. You totally saw the future on that one. I hope you're enjoying your delusional laughter.
You remind me of my friend who runs around yelling "You could have had real money". She means well, unlike you, and even she let up after I withdrew $5k in profit. I don't know why you think I'm being defensive, other than my efforts to dissuade you from being an ignorant smug ass - I assume the smug ass part isn't going away.
My next thought was this: watch MtGox and assume that it drives the market price. Then buy/sell on another exchange, taking advantage of the fact that there is a delay.
Long story short, it's not as easy as this. However, there is definitely an opportunity for arbitrage here as for example currently BTCe is showing $65, while BitStamp is showing $61.