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How can you short crypto currencies?
Just like you short any other market. You are technically borrowing the bitcoins at $18,000 and selling them. Then buying the bitcoins back at $10,000 and returning them. You then make the spread less the fees. With all the exchanges there has to be short selling.

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even with the shutdown having been short.......it's all out there that the dems caved and gave the repubs what they wanted.......they've got no chance of house.....and hopefully hurt themselves really bad for any chances of the senate......
Actually the Senate is the one they never had a chance at. The House was slim to none and slim left the building.

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10 hours ago, capt14k said:

Just like you short any other market. You are technically borrowing the bitcoins at $18,000 and selling them. Then buying the bitcoins back at $10,000 and returning them. You then make the spread less the fees. With all the exchanges there has to be short selling.
...

Yeah, thanks, I understand the general concept of shorting.

What company/exchange/whatever will let you borrow bitcoins?  Is there a brokerage that will lend you bitcoins "just like in any other market?".

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Yeah, thanks, I understand the general concept of shorting.
What company/exchange/whatever will let you borrow bitcoins?  Is there a brokerage that will lend you bitcoins "just like in any other market?".


Poloniex allows margin and shorting. Not sure what the borrowing rates are now.

I dunno how I missed this topic. I always love seeing people blame “whales” and market manipulation. Shit, every market has algos trading, learn to be better than them.

Better yet, don’t try to time the market and just hold (hodl if you will) through volatility if you believe in the future of it.

While most of this discussion was about BTC, that’s a dinosaur. It’ll largely go away because there’s no innovation and the current use cases are very limited. It’s been touted as a store of value in the crypto world only because it was the first and is the biggest. That will soon change...

I’ve been involved in this space for the past 7 years and have mixed feelings by the recent mass adoption. The fact that my Uber driver is shilling some ico, kind of signals a top for me. It leads me to believe that there will be a lot of volatility ahead bc weak hands will dump as soon as there’s a slight panic. People are putting a lot more money into crypto than they can afford to lose, hoping to become millionaires overnight. Unfortunately, that’s not the way it works.

On the flip side, I can attest to the fact that this market is changing from a bunch of nerdy teens to having some real institutional money injected. Real players are coming in.


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18 hours ago, DirtyDigz said:

How can you short crypto currencies?

I have used https://www.bitmex.com for both short and long positions.  You need to use a VPN that puts you outside the US to sign up, but once the account is established you can log in, deposit, and withdraw without worry.  Need to buy BTC elsewhere to deposit.  It's a pretty good platform and you can leverage to the gills.  Catch a move at the right time and you're rolling in it.  Or you can get wiped out.  Works both ways :)

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Here's a question for Bitcoin fans or observers: What happens when the market value of a single Bitcoin drops below the production cost? (The cost to produce an average Bitcoin is around $6K depending on what state you're in.) I think the answer may be the miners stop mining, which means they stop their computers.

Related question: What happens if Bitcoin miners stop their computers calculations? I think the answer is the entire block chain either slows down proportionally or stops completely.

This article makes some of these points and has links to additional articles with related information. I've studied the computational and cryptographic aspects of Bitcoin a little bit out of curiosity, but I never thought about these two basic questions.

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5 hours ago, 45Doll said:

Here's a question for Bitcoin fans or observers: What happens when the market value of a single Bitcoin drops below the production cost? (The cost to produce an average Bitcoin is around $6K depending on what state you're in.) I think the answer may be the miners stop mining, which means they stop their computers.

Related question: What happens if Bitcoin miners stop their computers calculations? I think the answer is the entire block chain either slows down proportionally or stops completely.

This article makes some of these points and has links to additional articles with related information. I've studied the computational and cryptographic aspects of Bitcoin a little bit out of curiosity, but I never thought about these two basic questions.

You are right. In theory, mining stops, and whatever trade in bitcoins happens, occurs out of the existing pile of bitcoin. Either there is enough, or there isn't. If not, the price goes up and miners come back.  

The fact that the run right now is on graphics cards rather than dedicated asics will tell you how locked in miners are and how interested they are in chasing efficiency. Basically not at all. 

IMO the general purpose gear is selling like hotcakes because people want to mine easy coins in a chain, then pump and dump the crypto of the month while they hold the cheap version of it. 

 

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Once again nobody.  I mean nobody really tries to understand what “the people who maintain the Blockchain” do.  They are not MINING for bitcoin 

there is no “production cost” to get a bitcoin.  There are approximately 2000 volunteers to want to add block transactions to the chain.  They are called nodes.  Anybody can plug in an be a node.  There is a competition to add blocks to the chain.  It’s designed to be random; but you can get an edge by having more computing power.  Human nature people are greedy. They will invest in computing power to get an edge to solve the block and get paid some coins.  Now read this part slowly it’s onky the 3rd time I’m posting it here.  Whenever it becomes unprofitable to solve the Blockchain people who have $10k rigs will unplug.  Does that mean the entire operating system stops!?!?  NO IT DOES NOT.  It just means someone who only spent $5k on their rig has a chance to solve it now.  Then after they evtuuallu unplug the guy with a Mac Laptop can maintain the Blockchain.   It’s perfect supply and demand.  As long as the price of coin covers the cost of the guy who spent the most on ASICS then he will stay in the game.  If “cost” of computing power gets to high then that guy will unplug.   THAT HAS ZERO EFFECT ON THE PRICE OF BITCOIN.   

People are expending large sums to be nodes to win the coin because at this coin price level it’s profitable to be a Blockchain node.  High coin price means very few concentrated winner nodes.  The LOWER bitcoin gets it would actually entice MORE not less people to be nodes because now you can post blocks without an ASIC machine to be the winner.   If the price of bitcoin drops to a hundred bucks then college kids in their dorms will plugging in to be nodes and they are doing the EXACT same process that the guy need to the Hydro plant is doing.  It will just be easier for the college kid to get paid because he’s not competing with ASICS.   If BTC goes to $100k then the super equipped computers will keep winning.   Lastly every 4 years the prize for solving a block is less coins   So the mining thing is not perpetual upward reward   Right now you win 12 coins every ten minutes.  Then it halves to 6 coins then 3 etc   (It’s called halving that’s an important term)

You guys need to make an effort to find out what Proof Of Work means.  Google it.

the word “mining” isn’t even the original Satishi white paper.  The term mining was used to mean the trial and error search for the mathematical “riddle” that makes you the winning node of the next block, and your reward for that is a coin.

theres just so many great YouTube videos explaining how this all works.  If you spend a lot of time in your car listen to a podcast series called #HashPower by Patrick Oshaugnesey.  You will learn what the bitcoin operating system is, what the SHA256 cryptography system is.  What a decentralized ledger means, what ICOs are and what people invision the future will be.  

(Please note I have not mentioned in the above what the “value” of bitcoin is nor debate if it’s even necessary in the world it’s too polarizing of a topic.  But the math/science/trust in the operation system is black and white.  It’s just a matter of education on how it works.   Even after you know it’s design you are still welcome to say “we don’t need that”.

but the idea, the architecture, the decentralization, the trust imbedded in it is breathtaking.  It’s not without flaws, scalability right now is an issue.  (And that’s why litecoin was invented that’s another topic)

It’s fine to think the price should be lower because it will never be widely adopted.  But the argument for how big the “network effect” of bitcoin will be is completely independent of the science/math as the foundation for how the system operates. 

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It’s ironic that a board full of people who embrace freedom are against bitcoin.  The  purpose of bitcoin was to establish a global currency that could not be oppressed or stolen or controlled by a government or dictator or corrupt banking system.  It’s the ultimate freedom.  The white paper is called “a decentralized peer to peer currency system”. All you guys who want silver and gold because you don’t trust the banks or the government or are fearful of inflation?  Satoshi is one of you!   He just invented s way for that to happen digital, that’s all.   But if you don’t want a “regulator” of your currency you need trust in something else to make it work.   That trust is the Bitcoin operating system 

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8 hours ago, Barms said:

The  purpose of bitcoin was to establish a global currency that could not be oppressed or stolen or controlled by a government or dictator or corrupt banking system.  It’s the ultimate freedom.

This may be true in a global sense, but ISPs, and consequently governments, can block the bitcoin protocol in individual countries. Because of the open source, peer-to-peer nature of the bitcoin network, the protocol specification is public, and if you read it you will see that bitcoin clients can be easily prevented from connecting to other nodes. This information is available to everyone, including ISPs and regulators.

VPNs could potentially help to some degree, but VPNs can be blocked as well, for example:

https://torrentfreak.com/china-to-start-blocking-unauthorized-vpn-providers-this-april-180203/

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14 hours ago, Barms said:

Once again nobody.  I mean nobody really tries to understand what “the people who maintain the Blockchain” do.  They are not MINING for bitcoin 

[SNIP]

 If “cost” of computing power gets to high then that guy will unplug.   THAT HAS ZERO EFFECT ON THE PRICE OF BITCOIN.   

[SNIP]

It's called mining because you are sorting through a bunch of shit of zero value for the good stuff you might find if you are lucky. This is remarkably similar to the process of going through a bunch of rock to find the ore you want. It also shares the nature that operational overhead is essentially the same for failure as success in both tasks. 

 

Adiditonally, I don't know how you can fail to understand it, but when you mine bitcoin, you are not "maintaining" the block chain, but lengthening it. If you luck out and add a block, you get the coin that goes with it. No more mining, and you total number of bitcoins stops increasing. That means you stop expanding supply on the supply and demand curve. How the fuck and this NOT impact the price of bitcoin? 

It's like the lottery, not a 50/50. Sell one ticket and they aren't guaranteed to win. Reduce the number of miners and the guy with the 8 year old laptop doesn't win, the timespan between hash matches just gets significantly longer. So I guess if time has zero impact on you, yeah you win, but... well that's stupid. 

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Adiditonally, I don't know how you can fail to understand it, but when you mine bitcoin, you are not "maintaining" the block chain, but lengthening it. If you luck out and add a block, you get the coin that goes with it. No more mining, and you total number of bitcoins stops increasing. That means you stop expanding supply on the supply and demand curve. How the fuck and this NOT impact the price of bitcoin? 
It's like the lottery, not a 50/50. Sell one ticket and they aren't guaranteed to win. Reduce the number of miners and the guy with the 8 year old laptop doesn't win, the timespan between hash matches just gets significantly longer. So I guess if time has zero impact on you, yeah you win, but... well that's stupid. 


I was with you up to this point.

The difficulty will adjust with each block to maintain that a new block is found every 10 minutes. If it does revert back to 8 year old laptops, the difficulty will adjust way down.

The other part is you can’t actually transact on the network without miners. So it’s not even a matter of discovering new blocks but being able to use already found coins.


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6 minutes ago, mikeyjones said:

 


I was with you up to this point.

The difficulty will adjust with each block to maintain that a new block is found every 10 minutes. If it does revert back to 8 year old laptops, the difficulty will adjust way down.

The other part is you can’t actually transact on the network without miners. So it’s not even a matter of discovering new blocks but being able to use already found coins.


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OK, looking into the specifics of bitcoin, it has a 2 week rolling average for difficulty. So in the event of a crash, the guy with the 8 year old laptop can have shit nobody wants. Yay. Because if nobody wants it, it isn't ever coming back. It's like zimbabwe dollars. If something had given value, and a market massively lowers that value to the world at large, you do not magically make it more valuable by printing a shit ton of it.  Bitcoin is unlikely to break algorithmically, nor be exploited algorithmically, it's likely to be exploited because it is a market, and humans know how to game markets. 

Practically speaking, bitcoin is never getting easier unless people stop mining it. Which means, at best, you have a gold situation. People flee it due to poorly scaling limited availability. 

Then there's the problem of subsidized utilities, ambient temperature of the climate, etc. 

 

 

 

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raz I’m not really sure what your issue is.  Is your point that it’s a “flaw” that as soon as nobody wants to post blocks that the system crashes?  It’s clear you know more than most on here.   But what’s with the “nobody wants” part?

saying the system doesn’t work if nobody wants to maintain it is an exercise in immeasurable hypotheticals.   It’s like saying well what happens when a 51% attack does occur?   That’s like saying what will happen when aliens come to our planet.   Well. We don’t know.  But does that stop us from space exploration?  I think you are underestimating the impact a global decentralized protocol will have.   (Said with all due respect Raz that I know we are talking on a technical basis here).

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Did you just say that if no more coins are added to the supply that the price goes down?  That the “demand” for coins is based on the supply of the coins?   If you think the number of coins affects the utility/demand for coins (which drives the price) then we should just stop right there.

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Decentralized, P2P protocols are fad that become famous until they catch on and then crash. Thousands of years of history tells us, we (Humans) haven't figure how to live in decentralized way. If anything, the "progress" has always been towards consolidation and centralization. 

In the recent past (read a decade), many P2P protocols came, became tremendously popular and died a terrible death. Sure, some part of them became "back office utilities", but did not stay mainstream. Because, The System wants control. As much as People bitch about it, they want someone to control. They want "security", "stability", "assurance". Psych 101. 

Quote all the tech stuff you want, debate the semantics, buy into whatever you want, but that doesnt change reality. Decentralization of anything of value WILL NOT SURVIVE mass adoption. Heck, even gold (and metals) that provided pseudo-decentralized "value" did not survive.

Oh, CEOs stopped talking much about "blockchain". I guess they are looking for next buzz word. 

Before anyone brings up Hawala as p2p, know that there is some muscle and/or religious beliefs involved in that system, and LOT of tax evasion, a mechanism of near-instant conversion to local currency . 

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Just like the dot com boom, there will be a few winners that change the way we go about our lives and the rest of the coins will go the way of the dinosaurs.  I have no skin in the game regarding BTC (sold my position some time ago) but I do feel that there are several very promising projects that possess the potential to change the way large corporations transact and how commerce is tracked.  I have invested substantially in these projects despite them being risky "cryptos."

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If everybody got as angry at Bitcoin media as they did about assault weapon media I suppose I’d be okay.  But nobody cares about fake news or even lies about bitcoin.   Bill gates comments yesterday I can kinda just eyeroll.   But a NY Times reporter clearly has proven he spent really zero research caring to want to really know how things work:

Bitcoin miners compete for the coins by submitting answers to difficult math problems. Instead of solving the problems, miners use computers to submit a flood of guesses. This can be lucrative: Each Bitcoin is currently valued at about $10,550.”

instead of SOLVING the math problem!?!?!      Shame shame on you. 

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On 2/8/2018 at 4:55 PM, Barms said:

raz I’m not really sure what your issue is.  Is your point that it’s a “flaw” that as soon as nobody wants to post blocks that the system crashes?  It’s clear you know more than most on here.   But what’s with the “nobody wants” part?

saying the system doesn’t work if nobody wants to maintain it is an exercise in immeasurable hypotheticals.   It’s like saying well what happens when a 51% attack does occur?   That’s like saying what will happen when aliens come to our planet.   Well. We don’t know.  But does that stop us from space exploration?  I think you are underestimating the impact a global decentralized protocol will have.   (Said with all due respect Raz that I know we are talking on a technical basis here).

OK, if your lack of demand on the demand curve is due to mining becoming too difficult and punching out, easing the work effort is a valid response. It moves the point of intersection of supply and demand if you believe the only ting impacting demand is time and electricity cost. Implicit in that is the assumption that on all vectors there is no over supply. 

I'm not saying that the network break if nobody wants to maintain it. While true, like you said, it's kind of not relevant as to get to that point other factors that kill it had to occur first. My point specifically is that any of those things occur that make demand for bitcoin fall off radically, producing MORE bitcoin will not fix the problem facing bitcoin. 

Lets say you have big banks manipulating things. They do a pump and dump and the bigger fools get stuck holding the bag on bitcoin and it goes back to the price from a year ago of about $1020. Open the spigot and tell people you can mine a coin for $700 in electricity and that the rig to mine it can be amortized in three coins, you STILL face the specter of a capital investment in the face of a provenly unstable good, AND you have pretty shitty gains in the face of the knowledge that there's a shit ton of idle coins hiding out that people are upside down on. When do they flood back into the market? 

Bitcoin, as admitted by the bitcoin folks, is designed to go deflationary once you hit 21 million coins. Historically any deflationary currency or store of value has been abandoned as it inherently hampers growth. Bitcoin hopes to bypass this problem by making mining easier when it happens and collecting transaction fees. This only works if people want to conduct transactions only in bitcoins. Which to date they don't really. Everyone wants to turn it into money. The market cap of it is small enough that manipulators have generated massive deflationary behavior now. One of the results of that is that pretty much all the mining is consolidated in very few hands. The hands of the folks likely to front run the market and fuck you over. Jo average and the coke snorting gambling addicts on wall street might not be wary of that, but regulatory agencies, banks that want to be guaranteed a buck and don' find themselves one of those groups that own the giant pile of mining asics, well they tend to dislike such markets. 

 

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Ahhh.  I see our differences/confusion now.  I don’t equate “demand” for bitcoin as a miner issue.   To me demand for bitcoin is increase In utility for the asset.  Either via people wanting to hold it like gold or via people wanting it to replace a currency.  (Yes as a currency now it is a failure they are working on improving the scalability)

over the next decade my bet is its utility skyrockets for a multitude of reasons.  If it does, just by math it must go up in value (if indeed the utility goes up).   So under my assumptions the economics of mining have zero impact on the price of bitcoin.

all big leaps of faith.  But I’m okay to wager on 100% down versus 1,000% up.

show me any other investment that has an addressable market the scale of bitcoin with the payouts of 100% down and 1,000% up and I will invest in that too.

 

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On 2/6/2018 at 11:20 PM, Barms said:

It’s ironic that a board full of people who embrace freedom are against bitcoin.  The  purpose of bitcoin was to establish a global currency that could not be oppressed or stolen or controlled by a government or dictator or corrupt banking system.  It’s the ultimate freedom.  The white paper is called “a decentralized peer to peer currency system”. All you guys who want silver and gold because you don’t trust the banks or the government or are fearful of inflation?  Satoshi is one of you!   He just invented s way for that to happen digital, that’s all.   But if you don’t want a “regulator” of your currency you need trust in something else to make it work.   That trust is the Bitcoin operating system 

I don't think it's that people are necessarily against bitcoin.  It's a new technology and people are creatures of habit, even if those habits are sometimes illogical.  It takes time for some individuals to beccome comfortable adapting to new techologies and new ways of doing things.

Plus gold, silver, etc have applications and uses outside of being used as a monetary unit.  There is no real use for bitcoin outside of using it as an alternative currency.  It will be interesting to see how, or if, it cryptocurrencies are able to flourish.  

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WMC2 link complete contradicts Glennjesey link.    The CFTC is going after ICOs because of unregistered investments in companies which violates securities laws.   So ICOs won’t survive if they are illegal   

Just sayin....

Now for better news...hot off the presses from the St Louis Federal Reserve:  This below to me is the most fair assement of what bitcoin is, and it’s the challenges it faces    I do not see the word Ponzi scheme anywhere mentioned.

https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/review/2018/02/13/is-bitcoin-a-waste-of-resources/

And this quote goes on to show you how intelligent and fair the St Louis Fed examined the state of our own paper money 

“Modern fiat money is a bubble, as it has no explicit future payoffs, yet people value it in exchange. Currency issued by Federal Reserve Banks is not a promise to pay anything in the future. At best, one could take one $20 bill to the nearest Federal Reserve Bank and exchange it for four $5 bills. Unlike private bonds or government bonds, which promise a future payment or stream of payments, or a stock claim, which provides a future stream of dividends, fiat money has no intrinsic value. It is purely a bubble: We value it only because we expect other people to accept it in exchange in the future.”

Yes im bullish on this new asset class but it faces all the challenges exactly described in the paper.  Most significantly the scalability of transactions and the volatility it can have when there is no Federal Reseve to dampen volatility.   But that prescription was what the patient created the germ for in the first place.  

This might be the best thing i will read all year.   (Besides posts about 9mm 1911s)

Cheers!

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It's a good article and pretty fair. I think it waits until way too far in to discuss two distinct risks

1) The energy cost. It's environmentally bad for no good reason. It also locks out many regions form being competitive in mining. For all the reasons block chain is attractive, you will see a crypto currency arise that is not based on accelerating the heat death of the universe as rapidly as you can. This will be disruptive to existing block chain products. 

2) The bubbleness of the market. They discuss good points, but don't get close enough to discussing that one of the primary risks you face is how dishonest the current valuation of any given blockchain product is.  

I also agree that ICO's are risky, scammy bullshit, and that block chain is not a ponzi scheme. If you get screwed, the mechanics of that will be entirely different from a ponzi scheme. 

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