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Re: Bitcoin on the rise

Posted: Mon Jan 28, 2019 5:44 pm
by bryan
GPUs are mostly for alt-coins, where ASICs may not yet be economical/available. GPUs for Bitcoin haven't been profitable since something like 2014*? However, Bitcoin price was and still is highly correlated with all other major alt-coin prices (main difference being it has a significantly larger market cap; so a little slower to rise/fall).

[*] It depends on capital+electricity costs, obviously. It depends even more on the miners appetite for risk and their expectation for future price movements. Many miners have been extremely, extremely happy to speculate on future price increases. If they were a big enough operation, they might have sold futures (before CME/CBOE BTC futures came online) instead of just hodling their coins. However, even the largest "mining company", Bitmain, held more (dollar value of) crypto than cash.

It's evident that mining efforts will follow the coin prices.

From what I recall, NVDA/AMD were seen as dumb (by me, or others in the crypto/gaming world) for not capitalizing on crypto-currency mining boom from 2014-2017, a period of time where many new graphics cards were being bought solely for mining. Things got red-hot in 2017 with the increasing prices. I'm not sure, but I think the CEOs placed some bets on crypto during this time that are still playing out (i.e. they weren't smart enough in the run-up, and they were probably not smart enough during this last crescendo and peak to hold steady in their inaction). In 2018, NVDA actually beat estimates, despite their share price tanking; analysts seemed to have over-estimated the effect of the crypto crash, although it it was clearly the reason for the share price crash. Maybe analysts then over-corrected so that now NVDA is missing estimates (though the "news" points to "China")? If not for machine learning, compute demand in the past few years, I think NVDA would be in serious doo-doo right now (unfortunately for them, machine learning ASICs are becoming more and more available).

That's my read on it, though I haven't really been plugged in that much in the last couple years.

Re: Bitcoin on the rise

Posted: Mon Jan 28, 2019 6:25 pm
by George the original one
NVDA is missing their own estimates because, in my opinion, they got too greedy & priced themselves out of the market with the 2080 series of GPUs.

Re: Bitcoin on the rise

Posted: Mon Feb 04, 2019 5:45 pm
by Jason

Re: Bitcoin on the rise

Posted: Mon Feb 04, 2019 9:23 pm
by EdithKeeler
My friend and I were talking about the bitcoin password loss. When they liquidate the company and sell the equipment they'll find it taped to the bottom of his phone....

And then there's this other cryptocurrency story today:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2 ... b756bddabf

Re: Bitcoin on the rise

Posted: Tue Feb 05, 2019 7:56 am
by Jason
They mention how it is an issue when there is no regulation. Yet, if I'm not mistaken, Bernie Madoff was "regulated." So I'm not sure what it means as the technology is way beyond me.

Re: Bitcoin on the rise

Posted: Tue Feb 05, 2019 8:13 am
by jacob
Regulation would be one way to "solve" it, but I suspect the actual problem is that the people running this novel transaction system have a) less experience running exchanges overall; and b) have as little experience as anyone else (in particular the SEC) with completely new "bugs" such as a terminal loss of access to the "vault" because the CEO got run over by a bus.

Finance regulation is always playing catch-up to the point where you're "guilty" unless you can reasonably justify your innocence because the laws simply haven't been made yet. It's a sketchy form of legal enforcement but I suppose that's the price to pay for fast innovation insofar some control is desired. And some control IS desired.

Similar childhood diseases were seen with P2P-lending. It didn't really fit into the regular way of doing business and so "mistakes were made".

Re: Bitcoin on the rise

Posted: Tue Feb 05, 2019 8:22 am
by Jason
Question:

When the Bitcoin boom started, I was not comfortable with it as I did not understand it. So I purchased CME stock, the platform that handles the trades. It's done ok but that's not the point. Is this a Canadian issue? Meaning, I thought there was at least a middle-man to conduct the trades.

Re: Bitcoin on the rise

Posted: Tue Feb 05, 2019 8:41 am
by jacob
Canadian? Not sure exactly what you're asking ...

The CME (NASDAQ:CME) is the physical facility + the computer infrastructure that facilitates the trades and acts as the clearing mechanism (where the money goes, who has the stock, etc.). To trade on it, you would need to buy a seat or lease it. Seats are bought by professional traders, firms, and brokers. If you can't afford your own seat, you'd interact via someone who actually owns a seat, typically a broker (like IB, robinhood, or whatever). That broker, in turn, would take their own fee on top of what the CME charges.

That's just the bird's eye view. For stocks, there are multiple institutions along the way and each take or make a fee. To avoid those fees, major companies (who do a lot of transactions) sometimes set up their own internal clearing mechanisms so the internal divisions can trade with each other. If open to other institutions, these are the "dark" pools (as opposed to the exchanges which are "lit"). There are about 40 of those in the US.

Bitcoin, of course, doesn't need any of that infrastructure. Also the bitcoin futures are delivered in dollars (just like the SPU, the S&P500 future) based on the PRICE of bitcoins and so don't actually require bitcoin transactions. As such the futures are used for either speculating or hedging and the reason is that futures are typically cheaper and more convenient(*) to trade than the underlying. (Now you don't need to mess with bitcoins in order speculate on them.) This is different from cornflakes futures which contractually will deliver X tonnes of soy or wheat to a specific location and so are a convenient way to sell or buy a harvest forward (locking in the price).

(*) Also cheaper because you can do it on margin thanks to the EOD settling mechanism. Margin depends a bit on who you are but if you have a few hundreds million or a billion, you might only need to put down 1-5% to open. That means that $100 in cash would control $10,000 in bitcoin at 1%.

Re: Bitcoin on the rise

Posted: Tue Feb 05, 2019 8:52 am
by Jason
The company with the $190 million issue is Canadian.

I just don't understand any of it. What I am thinking is that I don't call up Apple to redeem my Apple shares and risk being told "Sorry, Steve Jobs died and didn't tell anyone where the stock share draw key was hidden." I thought the minimum with cryptocurrency was that there was a trading platform to control the flow of transactions.

Re: Bitcoin on the rise

Posted: Tue Feb 05, 2019 9:02 am
by jacob
This situation is not unlike the money people who bought a few bitcoins for $10 many years ago ... and then couldn't remember their password as they watched BTC touch ~$20000. Too bad. No password, no bueno.

In this case the guy with the password [holding other people's bitcoins at the bitcoin exchange] disappeared. Apparently, he didn't think to write it down.

This would be a bit as if the doors and computer lines to the CME were permanently cut. Whatever is on the inside stays inside. Essentially, the funds are permanently frozen.

Re: Bitcoin on the rise

Posted: Tue Feb 05, 2019 10:44 am
by vexed87
$190m BC / 115000 clients = ~$16.5k each, obv some lost more than others. Which begs the question, why did people store that much outside of their own encrypted cold storage devices. Does the exchange do enough trade volume in a day to lose that kind of capital?

Stuff like this makes me glad I never got on that bandwagon :lol:

Re: Bitcoin on the rise

Posted: Tue Feb 05, 2019 6:52 pm
by Jason
When speculative includes "Guy may die and take my money with him", I'm out.

Re: Bitcoin on the rise

Posted: Wed Feb 06, 2019 8:13 pm
by bryan
Coinbase, Kraken, and Gemini are the US digital token exchanges which seem to have very good security, redundancies, processes for holdings. In some ways you could consider it more secure than previous iterations of banks. A far cry from this example or MtGox where tons of funds were stolen, declared bankruptcy, and finally the CEO "found" a few billion* dollars of BTC on an old USB stick. Then again, I don't know to what extent these three handle clients' deaths or exceptional situations.

[*] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-26677291 $116M at the time, would be ~$680M now, 200k BTC.

Re: Bitcoin on the rise

Posted: Sun Mar 10, 2019 7:39 am
by fiby41
https://youtu.be/v1uFcUt0IVE
Is China gaming bitcoin?

Re: Bitcoin on the rise

Posted: Wed May 01, 2019 1:43 am
by Ego
https://medium.com/veil-blog/create-you ... 1ec7c19675

Veil is interesting. Has anyone here created a prediction market?

Re: Bitcoin on the rise

Posted: Fri May 17, 2019 4:36 pm
by Capitalism
How do you guys think the 2020 halvening will affect the price of bitcoin?

Re: Bitcoin on the rise

Posted: Fri May 17, 2019 10:19 pm
by unemployable
Capitalism wrote:
Fri May 17, 2019 4:36 pm
How do you guys think the 2020 halvening will affect the price of bitcoin?
As I understand it, it's an event that's known well in advance by all market participants, so it should be completely priced in at all times.

Re: Bitcoin on the rise

Posted: Sat May 18, 2019 3:04 am
by Capitalism
unemployable wrote:
Fri May 17, 2019 10:19 pm
As I understand it, it's an event that's known well in advance by all market participants, so it should be completely priced in at all times.
This actually sounds very likely.

Re: Bitcoin on the rise

Posted: Sun May 19, 2019 3:28 pm
by Jason

Re: Bitcoin on the rise

Posted: Sun Jun 16, 2019 7:15 am
by Ego
Anyone know anything about Facebook's new crypto Libra?

When I first heard about it I couldn't figure out why anyone would pay $10M to host a node. The answer, it turns out, is obvious. They get to snoop the network. Members of the Libra Alliance include Visa, Mastercard, Uber, Stripe, Paypal, and many others.

https://www.theblockcrypto.com/2019/06/ ... l-backers/