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The supply of bitcoin increases only slowly towards its famous fixed limit and is now around 15m. The use of bitcoin as a means of payment is currently around $100m per month, or $1,200m a year. Were bitcoin just like ordinary money each bitcoin would be used around four times a year in making transactions. So we have 60m bitcoin payments supporting $1,200m worth of bitcoin transactions, which requires that each bitcoin is worth $20. There’s always a “but” with such analysis. And the “but” in this case is that bitcoin could be worth its current value, but it would have to see a 1000-fold increase in its use as a form of payment. “Of course that is possible; bitcoin currently supports only a tiny fraction of transactions,” the duo said. “But to assume so enormous an increase requires faith not only in the superior cost efficiency of the technology but also in the absence of any effective competition.” |
In my simple world view, I see most of the coins and this discussion like a rush to buy AOL chat stock with Myspacecoin on the horizon. I guess I'll hold off until the facebookcoin is coming into play and get on that train for a while.
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Arizona just passed a bill to make crypto currencies a way to pay taxes |
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Ethereum chief warns cryptocurrencies could ‘drop to near-zero at any time’
By Karen Friar Published: Feb 20, 2018 2:49 a.m. ET The co-founder of Ethereum has put out a stark warning for crypto fans: Don’t bet the farm on cyberassets, because prices could “drop to near-zero” at any moment. Vitalik Buterin took to Twitter over the weekend to caution people about digital currencies, which delivered blockbuster rises in 2017, before taking a beating at the start of this year. “Reminder: Cryptocurrencies are still a new and hyper-volatile asset class, and could drop to near-zero at any time. Don’t put in more money than you can afford to lose,” the Russian-Canadian programmer said in his post Saturday. “If you’re trying to figure out where to store your life savings, traditional assets are still your safest bet,” he said. Over the course of 2017, the price of No. 1 crypto asset bitcoin rose about 1,400%, according to CoinDesk. Ethereum-based ether tokens, ranked second among cryprocurrencies by market cap, added an eye-popping 9,000% or so from their starting price of around $10. But in mid-January, almost every one of the top 100 cryptocurrencies took a hammering after rumors of regulatory crackdowns spread fear among investors. Ethereum lost 20%, bitcoin dropped 18%, and ripple shed 30% of its value. Despite that history, most of the digital diehards were having none of Buterin’s warning. On Twitter, some said he was exaggerating the risk, while others vowed to keep plunging in, and the jokers just said “too late” — though some did thank the Ethereum pioneer. And back in December, the “Forbes 30 under 30” programmer fired off a tweetrant basically telling the crypto community to grow up. “Need to differentiate between getting hundreds of billions of dollars of digital paper wealth sloshing around and actually achieving something meaningful for society,” he said in his pre-holiday message of noncheer. Not that the crypto pioneer isn’t putting his digital money where his mouth is — in February, Buterin donated $2.4 million in ether to the SENS Research Foundation, a nonprofit for the treatment of age-related diseases. And do the 20-something “boy genius” of crypto’s words sound familiar? He has an unlikely bedfellow in the chief economist of asset-managing giant Vanguard, who has said he sees “a decent probability” that the price of bitcoin “goes to zero.” On Monday, bitcoin was holding above $11,000 with a rise of 3.5% to $11.133.48, while ether was up 3% at $953.49, according to CoinDesk. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/et...ime-2018-02-19 |
Hopefully by Near Zero he means
Bitcoin 11,500 Ethereum 950 Litecoin 250 |
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Coinbase: We will send data on 13,000 users to IRS
Bitcoin startup says if concerned, “seek legal advice from an attorney promptly.” CYRUS FARIVAR - 2/26/2018, 2:28 PM After over a year of legal wrangling, Coinbase has now formally notified its customers that it will be complying with a court order and handing over the user data for about 13,000 of its customers to the Internal Revenue Service. The company, which is one of the world's largest Bitcoin exchanges, sent out an email to the affected users on Friday, February 23. The case began back in November 2016 when the IRS went to a federal judge in San Francisco to enforce an initial order that would have required the company to hand over the data of all users who transacted on the site between 2013 and 2015 as part of a tax evasion investigation. Coinbase resisted the IRS’ request in court. But by November 2017, after a hearing, US Magistrate Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley narrowed the request to only cover 13,000 particular individuals. The San Francisco-based startup is now required to provide "taxpayer ID, name, birth date, address, and historical transaction records for certain higher-transacting customers during the 2013-2015 period." Coinbase reminded its users that it is “unable to provide legal or tax advice.” The company also noted, “If you have concerns about this, we encourage you to seek legal advice from an attorney promptly. Coinbase expects to produce the information covered by the court’s order within 21 days.” https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...-users-to-irs/ |
I've gone from 9 litecoins to 15 over the last month just buy selling them when they go up and buying them back when they go down. Not getting much price swing the last few days.
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Goldman-backed startup Circle buys major crypto exchange Poloniex
Jemima Kelly, Anna Irrera 5 MIN READ LONDON/NEW YORK (Reuters) - Goldman Sachs-backed cryptocurrency startup Circle has acquired digital token exchange Poloniex, Circle said on Monday, as it aims to cement its position as one of the leading players in the booming market. Neither of the Boston-based companies disclosed the value of the deal that gives Circle control of a marketplace it said sometimes has daily volumes of more than $2 billion, with around 70 different digital currencies and tokens traded. Fortune magazine said the deal was worth $400 million, citing a person familiar with the matter. “We’ve been really impressed with what they have been able to pull off,” Circle co-founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire said. “They defined what originally people thought of as ‘altcoin’ exchanges,” he told Reuters. The term altcoin describes newer cryptocurrencies than the more established bitcoin and ether. Circle operates an app-based peer-to-peer payment network using blockchain, the technology which first emerged as the system underpinning cryptocurrency bitcoin. It is also one of the leading players in the over-the-counter market for bitcoin trading, and is soon launching a retail-focused app for buying cryptocurrencies, Circle Invest. One of the best-funded blockchain startups, its investors include Goldman Sachs Group Inc and Baidu Inc. Circle’s founders said they had discussed the acquisition with all of their investors, as well as with regulators, and that the deal was closed on Friday. The value of cryptocurrencies - as well as the number - has ballooned since the start of 2017, when they were worth around $17 billion, according to trade website Coinmarketcap, with their total value topping $800 billion in January before slipping to around $450 billion now. There are now more than 1,500 digital currencies and tokens, Coinmarketcap said. REGULATORY SCRUTINY Poloniex is well-known among cryptocurrency investors because it offers trading on a wide range of digital coins, several of which have been issued through online fundraisers known as “initial coin offerings” (ICOs). Regulators across the world have been intensifying their scrutiny of ICOs and cryptocurrency exchanges. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in July warned that some of the coins issued in ICOs could be considered securities, meaning trading them would have to comply with federal securities laws. “We intend to continue playing a leadership role when it comes to national and global regulatory frameworks for this space,” Circle co-founder Sean Neville told Reuters. ”That includes meeting with the SEC as well as obtaining all relevant licensing required for us to support our customers.” Regulators are also keeping an eye on the anti-money laundering and know-your-customer (KYC) practices of cryptocurrency exchanges. A Reuters investigation published in September showed that Poloniex had allowed some customers to trade cryptocurrencies and withdraw up to $2,000 worth of digital coins a day by providing only a name, an email address and a country. Allaire said Poloniex had instituted full KYC checks for new customers, but he could not confirm the exchange had the identities of all existing clients. “I’m not sure that 100 percent of prior clients have gone through all their identity verification requests. I know they have a huge backlog of clients in their KYC queues,” he said. “But obviously now that we operate the company we’re going to ensure that the business is compliant in every way it needs to be.” The exchange is not allowed to accept New York residents because it lacks a state license to operate a cryptocurrency exchange, but the Reuters investigation found two New York residents who had claimed that they lived elsewhere and were able to trade on Poloniex. “Clearly, people can get around things like IP (internet protocol) restrictions, and other restrictions, and people do it all the time. People evade geo-blocking mechanisms, and it’s difficult to fully police. So it’s possible that some people have snuck through that, and that’s obviously something we take very seriously,” Allaire said. Circle said that in the coming years, it expected to grow the Poloniex exchange out to include other non-crypto assets, such as physical goods and financial products such as derivatives. “We look forward to bringing Circle’s experience to increase the scalability and reliability of our platform and operations,” Poloniex said in a statement on its website. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-c...-idUSKCN1GA1N4 |
Have you guys seen Bean Cash? If you stake it the returns are excellent. It's ~ 4% a month.
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Gotta post the bad and the good:
thisisbillgates[S] 7006 points an hour agox3 The main feature of crypto currencies is their anonymity. I don't think this is a good thing. The Governments ability to find money laundering and tax evasion and terrorist funding is a good thing. Right now crypto currencies are used for buying fentanyl and other drugs so it is a rare technology that has caused deaths in a fairly direct way. I think the speculative wave around ICOs and crypto currencies is super risky for those who go long. |
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Hopefully folks are doing ok.
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This thread has really lost its burst.
I had some money in crypto. I dumped most of it over a month ago when everything started trending downward. I wish I could go back in time about a year and invest in it then. I was too late to the party to make any money, but at least I broke even. |
I sold my etherium about a month and a half ago and regretted it for a week but it was clearly a good move seeing what the prices are doing now. Made a nice profit too. Crypto is just way too volatile and even if it spiked, I can just wait that out and buy on the next crash if I wanted back in.
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I've been buying and selling Litecoin on the highs and lows without adding money and turned 7 LC into 15.something, but right now im in to it at 202 and it's at 164.
Muust beee patient |
Florida news:
Department of Citrus employee arrested when caught mining for cryptocurrency, agents say — A Department of Citrus employee was arrested after he used state computers to produce virtual currency for himself, according to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Matthew McDermott, 51, of Davenport was the information technology manager for the Florida Department of Citrus, the agency that oversees the state’s citrus industry. According to FDLE agents, he used several computers in the Department of Citrus to mine for virtual currency, which include bitcoin and litecoin. "A mining pool, or team, is used to solve mathematical equations in an effort to mine the virtual currency and win a reward," the FDLE said. "The pool combines its resources to help offset costs." Mining for cryptocurrency requires extensive computing power. Utility bills for the department jumped by more than 40 percent between October 2017 and January 2017, at a cost of about $825, according to the inspector general for the citrus agency. http://www.tampabay.com/news/publics...-say_166345974 |
BossChief said this would be at 100k by now, what gives?
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Ouch
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Mt Gox attorney selling off funds is causing the dip. Once that can get liquidated I expect 10k again easy. We'll see 20k bitcoin again someday, I almost guarantee it
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Accumulating the past month. Paid of my school loans in December.
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Anyone jump out any tall buildings as of yet?
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When the big boys are out of the game and the little boys are investing, you know it's a sham. |
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This has been amazing to watch.
Plenty of people still long on this. |
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Maybe a lesson not to take financial advice from someone called Taco John who posts 100 times a day on a football message board and proclaims himself a "crypto-genius". |
Timbeeeeeeeer
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Luckily, I sold half my holdings on January 12th when it was 1258 per coin and then pulled my original investment out when it got down to 933 on feb 2.
I’ve turned the rest of the profit that I’ve kept in GDAX from 8.5 ether coins to 11.27 currently hoping I can make that 14 or 15 and that it will recover to 7-900 by July. |
Buying some ethereum tokens for $240
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Going heavy in NEO
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<blockquote class="imgur-embed-pub" lang="en" data-id="l4AYbAE"><a href="//imgur.com/l4AYbAE">Cryptocurrency market in a nutshell.</a></blockquote><script async src="//s.imgur.com/min/embed.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
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Wex.nz Then click tokens You can buy the tokens , its pretty risky but eventually the tokens convert to the coin |
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Who wants my bitcoin before they burn them? Rofl. Im very depressed after Nova just destroyed my Jhawks.
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$20 worth of LTC says Taco is prepared to off himself. BEP soon to follow.
http://www.coindaily.co/2018/04/06/g...ptocurrencies/ |
I think I'm going to invest $20,000 and start trading in used Applebee's gift cards. I'm pretty sure they will hit a $4 trillion market cap by 2021.
Surest way to make an easy million bucks. I just have to HODL. |
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Had my coins up to about 13.5 and then missed on a trade and didn’t realize it for a couple days which brought me back down to almost where I started when I posted this. Still almost 12 Ethereums worth of straight profit. Not bad. Hopefully it keeps riding the momentum all the way back to 1500. |
Once BTC gets up to 10k and Eth to $900 I'll be rich again. When it goes down to $5800 I'll be poor again.
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Looks like the good times might be over?
http://ih.advfn.com/p.php?pid=nmona&article=77514506 The Likely End of Pump and Dump Schemes Bitcoin Global News (BGN) May 24, 2018 -- ADVFN Crypto NewsWire -- It just might finally be true that the “Wild West” of Crypto is coming to an end. Bloomberg, Coin Telegraph, as well as other news outlets, reported today that the U.S. Department of Justice has officially launched an investigation into the price manipulation of Bitcoin and Ethereum. Many of us might be saying that it’s been a long time coming. It’s true that the only ones who should be afraid are those who have been skirting the rules including people who have been joining “Pump and Dump” groups on Telegram and other apps like Discord. The first outlet to break the news about the investigation was Bloomberg, which cited four specific critics who chose to remain nameless, though they made sure to state that they believe that skirting the law is a normal state of the Crypto market. It should be made clear that the investigation is meant to be wider reaching than simply looking into “Pump and Dump” groups. Reports state that it will look into just about any activities that could affect market prices, in theory. Prime examples of this include spoofing or activities like creating bots to fill the exchanges with orders that aren’t even real. “Pump and Dump” groups may be thought of as connected to this because of what Bloomberg’s report says about anything that fraudulently influences market movement being investigated. The Justice Department is working with the Commodity Futures Trading Commissionon this, whom some of you already know as the employer of Chris Giancarlo, who serves as its chairman and doesn’t blindly stand against Cryptocurrencies. The two organizations will use past examples of fraudulent activities in markets like the futures and equities markets, in their current efforts. The only difference will be that everything will be considered, of course, in the decentralized and often anonymous context of the Blockchain world. Bloomberg even suggested that the investigation could be wider than only Bitcoin and Ethereum and the CFTC as well as the Department of Justice could be keeping further details close, on purpose. All in all, it seems like concrete regulations could finally be coming. Still, overall, it’s logical to wonder how much they can actually do. The CFTC reportedly cannot yet fully regulate crypto markets but what it can do is enact sanctions against digital currencies if it proves fraud in any way. If you are a Crypto investor as of now, as this all moves forward, now just might be as good a time as any to HODL. By: BGN Editorial Staff |
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I love this thread. You can literally see some people changing their lives positively and creating generational wealth.
Especially those that invested in Ethereum around $10. Good God. What an epic ride this has been. |
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Bitcoin price plunges after cryptocurrency exchange is hacked
Security fears rise as South Korea’s Coincheck loses about £28m of virtual currency There has been a sharp drop in the price of bitcoin and other virtual currencies after South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Coinrail was hacked over the weekend. A tweet from Coinrail confirming the cyber-attack sent the price of bitcoin tumbling 10% on Sunday to two-month lows. The world’s best-known cryptocurrency lost $500 (£372) in an hour, dropping to $6,627 on the Luxembourg exchange Bitstamp, while most other digital currencies also recorded large losses. The latest attack highlights the lack of security and weak regulation of global cryptocurrency markets. Coinrail later said in a statement on its website that its system was hit by “cyber intrusion” on Sunday, causing a loss for about 30% of the coins traded on the exchange. It did not quantify the value, but the local Yonhap news agency estimated that about 40bn won (£27.8m) worth of virtual coins was stolen. Coinrail said: “Seventy percent of total coin and token reserves have been confirmed to be safely stored and moved to a cold wallet [not connected to the internet]. Two-thirds of stolen cryptocurrencies were withdrawn or frozen in partnership with related exchanges and coin companies. For the rest, we are looking into it with an investigative agency, related exchanges and coin developers.” Police have begun an investigation, according to the Korea Herald, which cited a spokesperson as saying: “We secured the access history of Coinrail servers and we are in the process of analysing them.” Bitcoin was trading at about $6,750 on Monday afternoon – down from an all-time peak of almost $20,000 in the week before Christmas. In February, it fell to $5,900. South Korea is one of the world’s major cryptocurrency trading centres, and is home to one of the busiest virtual coin exchanges, Bithumb. There have been a series of thefts from cryptocurrency exchanges in recent months. Japan’s Coincheck was hacked in January, with more than $500m-worth of digital currency stolen. It started reimbursing customers in March, but faces two class-action lawsuits. In December, the South Korean exchange Youbit shut down and filed for bankruptcy after being hacked twice. Naeem Aslam at online trading platform ThinkMarkets said: “The question is: is there any limit to these hacks? After every few months, we are seeing the same pattern emerging. This is the result of loose regulatory control and regulators must step in to protect the consumers. Anyone who wants to do anything with exchanges should be forced to adopt high-grade security and regular security upgrades.” The Wall Street Journal (£) reported on Friday that US regulators were investigating potential price manipulation at four major cryptocurrency exchanges. The investigation comes six months after CME Group launched bitcoin futures. Coinbase, Bitstamp, itBit and Kraken have been asked to share trading data related to the futures contracts. Analysts said bitcoin volatility was fading, after the price increased threefold between mid-November and mid-December. David Jones, the chief market strategist at trading platform Capital.com, said this was driven by increased publicity as bitcoin went from being a niche IT interest to becoming mainstream, but added that the hype has now gone. He noted that Facebook and Google had banned cryptocurrency adverts. “Plenty of latecomers to the cryptocurrency rally have had their fingers burnt, have taken their losses (or are still sitting on them) and have vowed never to return,” Jones said. “Activity amongst the wider public has slowed. Arguably, the introduction of a listed futures contract for bitcoin has also calmed the wilder market moves.” https://www.theguardian.com/technolo...orea-coincheck |
Good, **** them assholes for wrecking the hardware market.
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Though I was looking at gpu's on amazon last night, the 1080 and 580 cards are coming down in price quite a bit. Don't know if it's permanent but much better than it has been since these **** sticks started in. |
Hackers Stole Over $20 Million From Misconfigured Ethereum Clients
By Catalin Cimpanu A group of hackers has stolen over $20 million worth of Ethereum from Ethereum-based apps and mining rigs, Chinese cyber-security firm Qihoo 360 Netlab reported today. The cause of these thefts is Ethereum software applications that have been configured to expose an RPC interface on port 8545. The purpose of this interface is to provide access to a programmatic API that an approved third-party service or app can query and interact or retrieve data from the original Ethereum-based service —such as a miner or wallet application that users or companies have set up for mining or managing funds. Because of its role, this RPC interface grants access to some pretty sensitive functions, allowing a third-party app the ability to retrieve private keys, move funds, or retrieve the owner's personal details. As such, this interface comes disabled by default in most apps, and is usually accompanied by a warning from the original app's developers not to turn it on unless properly secured by an access control list (ACL), a firewall, or other authentication systems. Almost all Ethereum-based software comes with an RPC interface nowadays, and in most cases, even when turned on, they are appropriately configured to listen to requests only via the local interface (127.0.0.1), meaning from apps running on the same machine as the original mining/wallet app that exposes the RPC interface. But across the years, developers have been known to tinker with their Ethereum apps, sometimes without knowing what they are doing. This isn't a new issue. Months after its launch, the Ethereum Project sent out an official security advisory to warn that some of the users of the geth Ethereum mining software were running mining rigs with this interface open to remote connections, allowing attackers to steal their funds. But despite the warning from the official Ethereum devs, users have continued to misconfigure their Ethereum clients across the years, and many have reported losing funds out of the blue, but which were later traced back to exposed RPC interfaces. Scans for these ports have been silently going on for years but with cryptocurrency prices growing to record heights in 2017, multiple threat groups have joined the fold in search for easy money left exposed online. One of the hugest spikes in scan activity was recorded last year, in November, when a threat actor started a massive scan of the entire Internet looking for Ethereum JSON RPC endpoints. Those scans were successful, as that threat actor soon identified that a version of the Electrum wallet app was shipping with its JSON RPC enabled by default, allowing anyone access to users' funds if somebody knew where to look. In May 2018, Satori —one of today's biggest IoT botnets— also started scanning for Ethereum miners that were left accidentally left exposed online. Those attacks targeted devices running on port 3333, but for most of these applications, their default RPC interface resides on port 8545. According to security experts from Qihoo 360 Netlab, at least one threat actor started mass-scans for port 8545, looking for Ethereum software left exposed online. Those scans started in March, this year, and at that time, the attacker had made only around 3.96234 Ether (~$2,000-$3,000). Revisiting that research today, the Netlab team says scans for port 8545 never stopped, but intensified as multiple groups joined the scanning activity, with one group alone being more successful than most, after managing to siphon over $20 million worth of Ether funds from exposed applications. "If you have honeypot running on port 8545, you should be able to see the requests in the payload, which has the wallet addresses," the Netlab team says. "And there are quite a few IPs scanning heavily on this port now." With a slew of tools to automate port 8545 scanning and hacking available on GitHub, intentionally opening your miner or wallet app service on port 8545 is financial suicide. Nonetheless, with over $20 million stolen in the last few months just by one group, there are apparently lots of users who can't be bothered with reading their app's documentation before setting up an Ethereum wallet or mining rig. Scans for port 8545 are only expected to go up, as this group's success will surely attract more threat actors looking for a quick buck. Owners of Ethereum wallets and mining rigs are advised to review their Ethereum node's settings and make sure they're not exposing the RPC interface to external connections. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/new...ereum-clients/ |
Bitcoin is being propped up and manipulated or else it would be $100
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Is this due to people buying machines for mining? If so, I have a moderately interesting story about it. |
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I honestly had no idea Rodman was still alive.
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============================================== Bitcoin prices have been manipulated, study says by Nathaniel Meyersohn @CNNMoneyInvest June 13, 2018: 10:59 AM ET http://money.cnn.com/2018/06/13/inve...pto/index.html Bitcoin's remarkable run last year may have been smoke and mirrors. Tether, another digital currency tied to the US dollar, was used to artificially inflate bitcoin prices, according a study released Wednesday by the University of Texas. John Griffin, a finance professor at the university, and graduate student Amin Shams analyzed blockchain purchases and discovered that major Tether buys were timed to follow market downturns and helped stabilize bitcoin's floor. "These patterns cannot be explained by investor demand," they said in the study. Griffin and Shams have also recently found that the VIX, Wall Street's volatility index, was being manipulated. A lawsuit filed in March cited their research to claim traders manipulated the value of VIX options and futures by making bets on the S&P 500 before VIX settlement auctions. The price of bitcoin dropped 1% on Wednesday to around $6,485, according to CoinDesk. Bitcoin's slump drove down other cryptocurrencies, including ripple, litecoin, and ethereum. Bitcoin continued reeling days after a massive hack in South Korea. On Monday, South Korea's Coinrail said that it had been hacked and about 30% of its virtual currencies were stolen. South Korea is one of the biggest markets for crypto trading in the world. Related: Crypto hacks: Is your bitcoin investment safe? Over the past month, bitcoin has lost 25% of its value. Retail buyers flooded the market late last year, lifting bitcoin to above $19,000 in December. But it has fallen in recent months due to fears of stricter regulations and an absence of institutional investors coming in, said Jason Yanowitz, co-founder of blockchain advisory firm BlockWorks Group. —CNNMoney's Daniel Shane contributed to this story. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...-boost-bitcoin Cryptocurrencies Tether Used to Manipulate Price of Bitcoin During 2017 Peak: New Study By Matt Robinson and Matthew Leising June 13, 2018, 2:02 AM MST Updated on June 13, 2018, 5:26 AM MST Tether, one of the most-traded cryptocurrencies, shows a pattern of being spent on Bitcoin at pivotal moments, helping to drive the world’s first digital asset to a record price in December, according to research by a University of Texas professor known for flagging suspicious activity in the VIX benchmark. “Tether seems to be used both to stabilize and manipulate Bitcoin prices,” finance professor John Griffin and co-author Amin Shams wrote in a paper released Wednesday. Questions about Tether and Bitfinex have dogged the cryptocurrency world since last year, when Bitfinex lost banking relationships yet continued to operate. The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission subpoenaed both firms in December, seeking proof that Tether is backed by a reserve of U.S. dollars, as it claims. Tether and Bitfinex haven’t been accused of wrongdoing. “Bitfinex nor Tether is, or has ever, engaged in any sort of market or price manipulation,” Bitfinex Chief Executive Officer JL van der Velde said in an emailed statement. “Tether issuances cannot be used to prop up the price of Bitcoin or any other coin/token on Bitfinex.” Read more: Bitfinex said to find Caribbean bank after Wells Fargo exit Griffin and Shams -- in a paper titled “Is Bitcoin Really Un-Tethered?” -- set out to understand how the 2.5 billion Tether coins in existence have flowed through markets. While little public information exists about how Tether is created, it generally trades for around $1 because each coin is supposed to be backed by $1 of fiat money in a bank. The currency, which started trading in 2015, is pitched as a stable alternative to Bitcoin’s volatility, acting as a haven for crypto investors. The data analyzed by the academics includes Bitcoin’s meteoric rise to a record high of almost $20,000 last December, before it crashed this year. It fell 1.4 percent Wednesday to $6,441.17, according to price data compiled by Bloomberg. The analysis showed a pattern of Bitcoin price support, Griffin said. First, Tethers are created by the parent company Tether Ltd., often in large chunks such as 200 million. Almost all new coins then move to Bitfinex, he said. When Bitcoin prices drop soon after the issuance, Tethers at Bitfinex and other exchanges are used to buy Bitcoin “in a coordinated way that drives the price,” Griffin said in an interview. “I’ve looked at a lot of markets,” he said. “If there’s fraud or manipulation in a market it can leave tracks in the data. The tracks in the data here are very consistent with a manipulation hypothesis.” Griffin’s paper describes several patterns uncovered in a yearlong period. First it found that flows weren’t symmetric. When Bitcoin’s price fell, purchases with Tether tended to increase, helping to reverse the decline. But during times when Bitcoin rose, Griffin said he didn’t see the reverse occur. That’s “suggestive of Tether being used to protect Bitcoin prices during downturns,” he wrote. Price Thresholds He zeroed in on 87 of the largest purchases of Bitcoin with Tether from March 2017 to March 2018. In the cases examined, new Tether had been issued within the prior three days, and Bitcoin’s price had fallen in the prior hour. What followed were increases in Bitcoin’s price -- and those gains added up. Even though the 87 examples account for less than 1 percent of the time period examined, they amounted to about 50 percent of Bitcoin’s compounded return over that year. In comparison, 10,000 simulations Griffin and Shams ran demonstrated “that this behavior never occurs randomly,” they wrote. Griffin said one of the most notable trends he saw in the data was when Bitcoin traded near certain price thresholds, denominated in $500 increments. Bitcoin purchases with Tether “strongly increase just below multiples of 500. This pattern is only present in periods following printing of Tether and not observed by other exchanges,” he wrote in the paper. To other investors, it gives the impression of a “price floor,” providing a signal for them to buy as well. “If it was random behavior you wouldn’t see it cluster around the thresholds,” he said in the interview. “It indicates it’s a conscious strategy to provide price support.” VIX Study Tether and Bitfinex share a management team, including van der Velde. Little is known about how the businesses cooperate or stay separate. Griffin said his research found “barely any flows moving back to the initial Tether printing node.” His observations come as the global cryptocurrency market faces mounting scrutiny from U.S. authorities. The Justice Department is said to be conducting a criminal probe into whether traders are using a variety of techniques to manipulate Bitcoin and other digital assets. One of the lead enforcers at the Securities and Exchange Commission told members of Congress last month that initial coin offerings, or ICOs, are now among the “greatest threats” to mom-and-pop investors and that the agency has dozens of active investigations. ICOs are a new form of raising money where startups sell digital tokens to investors much like a company sells shares to investors. Read more about the University of Texas VIX research Griffin has pointed to alleged funny business in financial markets before. Last month, Bloomberg reported that the SEC and CFTC opened investigations into allegations that Cboe Global Markets Inc.’s widely used VIX benchmark is being manipulated, people familiar with the matter said at the time. Griffin’s 2017 paper, written with a grad student, caught traders’ attention for spotlighting potential manipulation of the VIX. The Cboe has called his conclusions incorrect. His latest research topic has similar wide-ranging implications, he said. “The hype in cryptocurrency isn’t just 20-year-olds buying Bitcoin in their garage -- that’s part of it -- but there are big players moving the market and having a huge price impact,” Griffin said. — With assistance by Will Mathis |
No thanks. I prefer CA$H
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So am I going to lose it all or what
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Hanging onto buttcoins is asking for problems
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I was approached with an investment opportunity to buy into a company that is going to go "mining" for bitcoins. Apparently, there are relatively few ways to generate more bitcoins, and this is one of them. It gets harder and harder, however, to performj/solve the complex algorithms necessary to "mine" more bitcoins, so you need significant infrastructure and computing power. Without going into too many details, these guys had it pretty well thought out. They had a site that formerly supported alot of computers for some big company, so it was already had the right HVAC and floorspace configuration etc. It was also supplied by cheap hydropower, as electricity is one of the biggest overheads you can have when you're doing this kind of thing, given the consumption by the mainframes. The concept was they would generate bitcoins, then spit them out to the investors pro rata as they were mined. Waaaay too many moving pieces for me so I'm out. Risk all around. Execution risk, price risk of the bitcoins, regulatory risk. Noooo thanks. Sounded like a grand slam or strikeout scenario. Not for me. |
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That's enough of a red flag to laugh about the long term viability of them. Nevermind the 1 buttcoin you just accepted for expensive merchandise is now worth half in 30 days. |
So ****ing happy I sold 90% of my holdings in February when the first round of dips was happening. Sold at around half of the all time high but still made a huge profit. Crypto is just too big of a dumbass roller coaster to me
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Bump. It’s been too long. And man, Bosschief was on fire in this thread. |
What are the current prices?
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Ethereum 535 |
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