Cryptocurrency Weekly Skeptics Thread - January 28, 2018 |
- Weekly Skeptics Thread - January 28, 2018
- Daily General Discussion - January 28, 2018
- Bittrex holding my about $100.000 hostage with no response to support ticket/email for almost three months
- This posted here yet ?
- BREAKING: Coincheck says it will compensate all losses to its NEM holders at a rate of 88.549 JPY ($0.81) per each coin. Says it is using its own capital to reimburse clients. Exact date of reimbursement not yet decided.
- Robinhood’s cryptocurrency wait list is already over 850,000 users
- Waltonchain 2018 Annual Meeting Live Stream
- “People Demand Retailers Embrace Crypto with Trending #PayWithCrypto Hashtag“
- The End of Counterfeiting
- IOTA Will Be More than a Cryptocurrency
- Georgia Institute of Technology is offering free course on Coursera that teaches you how to perform Technical analysis on stocks, read charts and predict prices, starting 2nd Feb 2018.
- When I am helping friends to get into crypto and what happens the second they decide on their own..
- Blockchain VC Anthony Pompliano on OmiseGo
- Understanding Bitcoin Futures: How they work and why they are NOT going to crash the crypto market
- 3 Reasons Why 2018 is Going to be Big for Stellar Lumens
- We need less hype and more leaders in crypto and blockchain.
- This is not the crypto world I grew up with. Borrrringggggg
- WaltonChain's new logo; featured at today's annual roadmap event
- When you shill your coin but you don't want to take any responsibility in case of being scam coin.
- Could Blockport be the next big crypto exchange? Let's find out.
- I've been using the Brave browser on mobile for almost 4 weeks. The results speaks for themselves. Love this project and its potential.
- Everyone needs to calm down .
- [Tether Drama] Tether has "dissolved" relationship with auditor Friedman LLP
- A $2.2 trillion middleman that will be disrupted by cryptocurrencies
- Last 2 crypto market crashes compared to the January crash and now.
- Buy the rumor, Sell the news thread. Jan 27th, 2018.
| Weekly Skeptics Thread - January 28, 2018 Posted: 27 Jan 2018 10:13 PM PST Welcome to the Weekly Skeptic's Thread. The goal of this thread is to go against the norm and bring people out of their comfort zones by focusing on critical discussion only. It will be posted every Sunday and prioritized over the Daily General Discussion thread. Guidelines:
Rules:
Resources and Tools:
Thank you in advance for your participation. [link] [comments]  | ||||||||||||
| Daily General Discussion - January 28, 2018 Posted: 27 Jan 2018 10:13 PM PST Welcome to the Daily General Discussion thread. Disclaimer: Though karma rules still apply, moderation is less stringent on this thread than on the rest of the sub. Therefore, consider all information posted here with several liberal heaps of salt, and always cross check any information you may read on this thread with known sources. Any trade information posted in this open thread may be highly misleading, and could be an attempt to manipulate new readers by known "pump and dump (PnD) groups" for their own profit. BEWARE of such practices and excercise utmost caution before acting on any trade tip mentioned here. PnDs and brigades are not sanctioned by the mod team in any way as they violate rule III. If you discover this thread is being used for these activities, bring it to the mod teams's notice via the modmail. Guidelines:
Rules:
Resources and Tools:
Thank you in advance for your participation. Enjoy! [link] [comments]  | ||||||||||||
| Posted: 27 Jan 2018 08:33 PM PST Since the last November Bittrex suddenly changed my account to "New Account" and disabled withdrawal without notice in advance. I had also tried numerous times of their failing "automatic advanced verification procedure". A ticket had been opened for two months and I had waited patiently, till when I had to write an email to inquire the progress, to which they did not even bother to reply at all (not even a bot message). Firstly, unlike Poloniex, Bittrex did not notice its customers who had been able to withdraw before, that they would disable withdrawal completely without advanced KYC. Secondly, they should have allowed people to withdraw the remaining funds prior to the new policy taking effect. In comparison, I was notified by Poloniex that they would disable further deposit without Advanced KYC but only allow withdraw the remaining funds in the account. They also warned that current Adanced KYC procedure may take weeks. I submitted the required document a few days back, I was happy that it took actually only 3 days to complete mine. I read months back there were people creating telegram group with people having this issue but did not join thinking Bittrex would solve this sooner than say two months. Now it has been three months with about 100.000 dollars sitting in Bittrex exchange and there is no reply to ticket/mail at all. Advice is greatly appreciated. Edit: Thank you all for the upvotes and advice. 1. I was/am not involved in any p/d group. I would not even mind if they complain about that with me since I am all clear. 2. I'm not a US citizen so not too familiar with suing at the moment. I will look further if it can not be solved more peacefully. [link] [comments]  | ||||||||||||
| Posted: 27 Jan 2018 04:34 PM PST
 | ||||||||||||
| Posted: 27 Jan 2018 07:54 AM PST
 | ||||||||||||
| Robinhood’s cryptocurrency wait list is already over 850,000 users Posted: 27 Jan 2018 02:44 PM PST
 | ||||||||||||
| Waltonchain 2018 Annual Meeting Live Stream Posted: 27 Jan 2018 10:04 PM PST
 | ||||||||||||
| “People Demand Retailers Embrace Crypto with Trending #PayWithCrypto Hashtag“ Posted: 27 Jan 2018 07:00 PM PST
 | ||||||||||||
| Posted: 28 Jan 2018 12:11 AM PST
 | ||||||||||||
| IOTA Will Be More than a Cryptocurrency Posted: 27 Jan 2018 07:44 PM PST
 | ||||||||||||
| Posted: 27 Jan 2018 07:39 PM PST Hi, I was searching online to learn more about reading charts and how to perform analysis using various tool, and bump into this course, https://www.coursera.org/learn/computational-investing/ The course is offered by Georgia Tech and is free (or paid, depends on what you want). The course official commence date is 02/12/2018. [link] [comments]  | ||||||||||||
| When I am helping friends to get into crypto and what happens the second they decide on their own.. Posted: 28 Jan 2018 12:38 AM PST
 | ||||||||||||
| Blockchain VC Anthony Pompliano on OmiseGo Posted: 27 Jan 2018 06:22 PM PST
 | ||||||||||||
| Understanding Bitcoin Futures: How they work and why they are NOT going to crash the crypto market Posted: 27 Jan 2018 07:35 AM PST Recently there has been a lot of talk about Bitcoin futures causing downward pressure for prices, especially with expectations of a crash around expiry date. Its clear that not many understand how derivatives work or why the specific structure of the CME/CBOE future contracts makes it so there is a pretty much no chance that there is a collusive scheme by futures traders to crash Bitcoin. So I wrote up a quick description of how it works, and why there are 3 major reasons that futures are not to blame for Bitcoin's decline in price. How futures contracts workFutures contracts are an agreement to buy or sell an asset on a specific date in the future at a specified price. If you take a long position, you agree to buy an asset in the future at a specific price when the contract expires. When you take a short position, you agree to sell an asset at a set price when the contract expires. A simple example to illustrate: Think of a shipping company who has a bunch deliveries planned in a year. The price of fuel is $2 per gallon today. They can enter a futures contract on an exchange that will allow them to buy say 10,000 gallons of fuel at $2.5 per gallon. A fuel wholesaler might be willing to take this contract on to lock in the $2.5 price guarantee. If a year from now the price of fuel rises to $4 dollars a gallon, the shipping company will save (4-2.5) x 1000 = $15,000. In this case its a risk management tool, often used in financial markets to hedge against the risk of changing prices. However it can also be used by speculators, simply to profit off expected changes in price and these are generally cash settled. Bitcoin futures are cash settled, meaning no bitcoins actually change hands when a contract expires. The differential between spot prices (ie. current price) and the contract price is settled with cash. Winning traders effectively collect their gains from the losers. A key point to realize is that futures markets are a zero-sum game. For every long there is a short. For every winner, there's a loser. Every dollar of one trader's profit is a dollar lost by another trader. If someone wants to bet big that bitcoin is going down, say, by shorting 1,000 bitcoin contracts, there needs to be one or more traders willing to take the opposite side. Bitcoin futures trade on two exchanges: CME and CBOE. The CME is the big one and offers contracts with a unit size of 5 BTC per contract. It has a contract limit of 1,000, meaning that no one party can have more than 1,000 contracts. The CBOE offers contracts with a unit size of 1 BTC per contract. It has a contract limit of 5,000 contracts. Why Bitcoin Futures aren't crashing BitcoinReason #1: There simply isn't enough open interest position or volume You can look at the total open interest and volume for BTC Futures on the CME for January 25th, a day before expiry: http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/equity-index/us-index/bitcoin_quotes_volume_voi.html?marginsTab=SOM The total volume for January was 769, the total volume for all months up to June 2018 is 1,223 contracts. The "open interest" number is the number of contracts which are still open (ie. haven't settled) and its only 139. If you go back to the beginning of the period just after the prior expire date, there were only 560 open contracts for the January 26th expiration date. What this means that the total market on CME for shorting futures for the end of January period was only 560 x 5 = 2,800 BTC. What if those evil Wall Street suits had the brilliant idea to buy Bitcoin back when it was $8,000 and then now flash sell it to bring the price down to profit off the short side? On January 19 the open interest was 560 contracts and the BTC price was $11,500, lets say the entire open interest is actually one group of people colluding to profit off the short positions. That means there is a total of 2,800 BTC value is contractually at stake, with a total nominal value of $32.2 million. Futures markets have something called "margin requirements", which is the minimum amount you have to pony up as collateral when taking a futures position. For Bitcoin its 43%, which means that they would need to put in $13.8 million of capital to short 2,800 Bitcoin. According to Bitcointy, the volume traded in Bitcoin/USD on January 19 was around 134,000, with about 16 million BTC in circulation. This actually drastically underestimates the total volume of BTC traded since it excludes the big Asian markets, but let actually give the scenario this benefit. Lets imagine that someone would need to purchase just half of the daily volume (about 77K BTC) or about 0.5% of the total Bitcoin supply and then dumped it, and lets say this caused a huge $3K drop in Bitcoin price from its $11,500 price level back to about $8,500. They would need to pony up $616 milion to purchase just 77K BTC (0.5% of the supply) at $8,000. Assuming they achieve the $3K drop in price, that would net them a profit of 2800 BTC x $3,000 = $8.4 million from a $11,500 settlement price, or about 1% profit on their BTC purchase investment, less than a guaranteed government bond. All of this is assuming that 0.5% of the outstanding float would be enough to drive the price down $3K, and that they could somehow not experience substantial loses themselves in the dump. Basically it doesn't make any sense, the volume of open interest for futures available is simply too low to make this anything akin to profitable. Even if we assume there was a collusion scheme by everyone participating in the short market. You can look at the Settlements to see the total open interest for all remaining months: The total open interest for all months up to June on January 25th is only 1,459 contracts. That's means the entire market for shorting Bitcoin up to June is only 7,295 BTC. No matter where you set the entry point, the return simply doesn't justify the risk or initial investment required. Reason #2: The margin requirements are too high to offer enough leverage to manipulate the market One attraction of trading futures is the ability to use relatively small amounts of money to potentially achieve outsized returns. In a lot of futures market, the margin (the amount of money that your broker requires up-front) can be quite small compared to the ultimate value of the contract. For example looking at CME Futures market for S&P 500 futures, each contract is worth about $143,000 (50 x S&P 500 value) and the margin requirement is only $4,800 (as of writing this) or about 3.3% nominal margin rate. Your margin account balance is adjusted at the end of every trading day to account for the winnings or losses of the day, this is called daily settlement. If your account balance falls below the margin minimum of $4.8K you'll need to quickly add money to your account or your position will be summarily closed out by your broker. On the plus side, if you've predicted the S&P's direction correctly your profits will be that same as if you completely owned the underlying stocks in the index. A +1% daily move in the S&P500 would yield $1430 (1% of $143,000) in profit even though you only have $4800 invested - a huge return on. Margin requirements this low are only possible because the volatility of the S&P 500 is pretty low and well understood. On the other hand Bitcoin futures have massive maintenance margin rates. The CBOE requires 40% of the notional amount for maintenance margin, the CME requires 43%. Your broker will likely require more than that. Because of the high margin requirements, Bitcoin futures don't offer much leverage compared to just buying Bitcoins outright. You would need to place a huge amount of capital at risk just to get one Bitcoin contract on CME, the equivalent of 5 x (BTC USD value) x 0.43. If you wanted to short just 5 BTC and the price was 11K, that would require a margin of $23,650 to be maintained. Reason #3: The big Wall Street Levered Funds aren't actually that into shorting Bitcoin The CBOE is smaller than CME, but one neat thing about it is that it releases statistics on groupings for its futures markets, it gives out information on long vs short positions among Levered Funds, Other Reportable entities and Non-reportable. The Levered Funds is what we would call "Wall Street", large hedge funds that invest other people's money. The "Other Reportable" would be other institutional investors but not necessarily trading with other's people's money, and the "Non Reportable" are small time investors and speculators. Here is the breakdown of Bitcoin Futures open interest contracts by these categories: Levered Funds (Large Wall Street hedge funds)
Other Reportable (Other trading firms that don't necessarily manage money for outside investors)
Non Reportable (ie. small speculators)
http://www.cftc.gov/dea/futures/financial_lf.htm As you can see 68% of the Levered Funds actually go long on Bitcoin! For "Other Reportable" you do have more short interest, but it only adds up to 3668 contracts and at 1 BTC/contract its only 3668 BTC, against 1243 BTC that are long. Finally the non-Reportable are the small time speculators and they're overwhelmingly long. There are a few other smaller categories that make up the difference, but overall there isn't any wide spread of short vs. longs between the big levered funds and the more retail investors. So what did cause Bitcoin's correction around the first expiry date?There was a plethora of factors that compounded around that mid-January expiry date: the cyclical selloff period that we usually see combined with FUD headlines coming out quickly regarding regulation out of China, Korea and Europe. Its highly unlikely that futures actually caused any of the sell off, they actually provide stability by helping with price discovery. If futures do have any downward price pressure on Bitcoin, its largely psychological. Let face it, most Bitcoin investors don't understand anything about finance or derivatives, to them the CME futures are this big scary Wall Street boogeyman that is trying to take Bitcoin down. In essence you got a self fulfilling prophecy, lots of people feared the futures expiration would cause a crash so they panicked and sold, bringing the price down. Its a perfect thing to scapegoat after the huge bubble we saw started to correct. This is what I fear, that a lot of people will now look to anything to point their finger at to blame for Bitcoin and cryptocurrency price declines. Everything will be scapegoated, from the CME futures to "weak hand Asians" to governments to Wall Street. As we inevitably revert to the mean, very few will be willing to accept that it was their own unrealistic expectations of returns that are continually parabolic that is the sole reason for the gross mispricing of most cryptocurrencies. [link] [comments]  | ||||||||||||
| 3 Reasons Why 2018 is Going to be Big for Stellar Lumens Posted: 27 Jan 2018 08:21 PM PST
 | ||||||||||||
| We need less hype and more leaders in crypto and blockchain. Posted: 27 Jan 2018 09:52 PM PST I'm very excited about crypto and even more excited about the potential blockchain brings. My career has been 100% tech and this space continues to blow my mind. I truly believe it will change our world just like the internet has and continues to do. There are a few really good people that I enjoy consuming their content, however it's primarily full of hype people. Buy this coin or that coin, moons, lambos, and a bunch of stuff that is baseless. Feel like I'm watching infomercials half of the time. I started a podcast 2 months ago to help bring a different spin on crypto and blockchain and hope others will follow suit. It's time we bring serious leaders to the table and snuff out the scams and con artists that run them. This is serious technology and will only be taken seriously on a global scale if we get rid of the players that add no value. We do that by adding value. Who is with me? [link] [comments]  | ||||||||||||
| This is not the crypto world I grew up with. Borrrringggggg Posted: 27 Jan 2018 04:58 PM PST
 | ||||||||||||
| WaltonChain's new logo; featured at today's annual roadmap event Posted: 28 Jan 2018 02:15 AM PST
 | ||||||||||||
| When you shill your coin but you don't want to take any responsibility in case of being scam coin. Posted: 27 Jan 2018 10:48 AM PST
 | ||||||||||||
| Could Blockport be the next big crypto exchange? Let's find out. Posted: 27 Jan 2018 03:47 PM PST
 | ||||||||||||
| Posted: 28 Jan 2018 01:10 AM PST
 | ||||||||||||
| Posted: 27 Jan 2018 10:19 PM PST I can barely find one post about a topic on crypto that doesn't have some negative comment towards the OP. Its always some prick. Give people a break once in a while. Give your self a break . If someone has something to say about a coin because they are excited about it. Don't start off by going off on rant about it being a shit coin, and that the OP is an idiot if he thinks ...yadayada. Its to each his own. Its even more fierce than that. Sometimes I see people cursing up a storm yelling all types of incoherent nonsense. "THEY DONT HAVE A WHITE PAPER. SCAM!" , SHOW ME PROOF BRO!! " SCREENSHOTS OR IT DIDNT HAPPEN, HOLD UP A SIGN SO WE KNOW,ITS YOU" "ITS A CLONE OF DASH. ITS A CLONE OF TITSCOIN" who cares what's a clone of what. This is like saying , " that company wants to make cars? Too late, that idea is already done" Relax your fucking pie holes. Increasingly by the day there is more and more people like this. Be greatful youre getting 2, 3, or even 10 x your gains in a month. Some people have to wait years with stocks for that to happen. They do... Eventually within time they get rewarded greatly for holding. Its 15 years later snd the guy says " wow.,I'm,happy I had the patience to wait 15 years , now I'm a millionare. " Who cares if a crypto comes out that wants to do the same thing another coin has already done or is trying to do. Its a free market. Theres many successful companies in the same market of a product.
Just because a coin seems to mimic another coin doesnt mean it sucks, things evolve over time, Alot of these coins are younger than the pimple that just grew on my back. Crypto is still in its infancy . Remember when MySpace Came out in the infancy of social networks? A whole bunch of different networks came out. Then years lster facebook comes out of nowhere and steals the show. Hold your nuts together . relax. The only thing you need to be concerned about is crypto staying popular for another 2 years from now and still gaining ground. Thats it! If that happens A lot of us will be rich . [link] [comments]  | ||||||||||||
| [Tether Drama] Tether has "dissolved" relationship with auditor Friedman LLP Posted: 27 Jan 2018 02:48 PM PST
 | ||||||||||||
| A $2.2 trillion middleman that will be disrupted by cryptocurrencies Posted: 27 Jan 2018 09:35 PM PST
 | ||||||||||||
| Last 2 crypto market crashes compared to the January crash and now. Posted: 27 Jan 2018 10:21 PM PST
 | ||||||||||||
| Buy the rumor, Sell the news thread. Jan 27th, 2018. Posted: 27 Jan 2018 01:39 PM PST I had a great response from this yesterday and a lot of people asked me to do this again, so I think I'm going to do it daily update style. Huge disclaimer: I own the majority of the coins I listed here. If there's news for a coin I didn't list here, you're welcome to put it in the comments. I likely didn't list it because I'm either a. Keeping it a secret until I buy in, b. I'm not interested in it, or c. I didn't know about it. I am 100% using this as a platform to shill what I own and also hoping to pick up new coins I may have missed. Second disclaimer: This thread is solely for news/rumors. Please do not post "X is a coin that does so and so, it's super undervalued, great team, here's a meme". Minor speculation on the news is fine.
Look forward to hearing about any news you have on coins you follow! [link] [comments]  |
![[Tether Drama] Tether has "dissolved" relationship with auditor Friedman LLP](https://b.thumbs.redditmedia.com/4fRX8SLOqSJvwo6TiA1cdUaJQvxfYgb_XvL9f5BYQlY.jpg "[Tether Drama] Tether has \"dissolved\" relationship with auditor Friedman LLP")
![[link]](https://i.redd.it/pvn2ssppepc01.jpg){kind=link}
![[link]](https://i.redd.it/a3md9smenrc01.png){kind=link}
![[link]](https://i.redd.it/4s7y3aszipc01.jpg){kind=link}
![[link]](https://i.imgur.com/MCibmYl.png){kind=link}
![[link]](https://i.redd.it/hbjns7iwonc01.jpg){kind=link}
![[link]](https://i.redd.it/6cvgn2mgyrc01.png){kind=link}
| You are subscribed to email updates from Cryptocurrency news and discussions.. To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States | |
No comments:
Post a Comment