I do wonder, if it is a bad sign that someone parts from such an amount of BTC?
What if it's Mt Gox's BTC?
just going to say this...
maybe gox is trying to get enough fiat to send people.
It's precisely what I am thinking right now. But I am no way sending them anything, even if the wall does belong to Gox. It would take at least 1 working day to have the fiat credited, and that wall is going to disappear soon, one way or the other.
Looks like were hitting some resistance from Americans waking up and getting shaky fingers. Usually at this point I would think we were in for some slowdown, but after seeing how we ate through the 10k wall yesterday I wouldn't be surprised if we were at 350 by this afternoon.
350 today is madness, in my opinion it is quite possible that we see 250 first, (as part of the final goodbye to anything 2XX).
It is already thursday, and in March it was generally the highest for the week. Weekend = crash.
Btw. does anyone know of a reliable leveraged platform for trading bitcoins? Bitfinex I know of. How about
this?
I posted my impressions in another thread. You might want to look at
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=317353.0If we look at bitfinex swaps for a moment... USD-0.2016%-0.1272%-24,844,849.98 USD. Can someone gives an answer when those long will start to close if the price doesn't move up for a week? For sure we can't expect the price to go up much till the end of the auction... so when the rates on those longs will become to expensive?
Just a quick reply, I'm a long time lurker of this forum. In my opinion many people fails on estimating the swap rates on finex. It's true that the amount of open longs is really high, and the swap cost has been driven up to extortionary rates, but most of the swap has been taken at a much lower rate.
This is an actual example:
Swaps currently provided
Currency N. of Swap Contracts (of 1 unit each) Rate (% per day) Opened at Expire in Actions
USD 2000.0 0.09% 21 May 10:44 2 days Notify
As you can see this is a long term swap provided (granted, not my most successful swap contract...).
This has not even been placed as an autorenew. At that specific moment this was the highest request available, the FRR was even lower (about 0.07%, if I remember correctly).
My point is that in the 24M USD amount are included really low interest rates, and many of that longs have been opened at about 490/500. Again, I don't claim these are the most successful trades, but they're still there.
Bitfinex has reduced their margin leverage from 2.5X to 1.5X, effective July 21st. Officially, this is because the btc used as margin deposit is also volatile.
That's not entirely true.
This is what will happen starting from July 21st.
1st example
Current BTC price is 600 USD/BTC, and you have a leverage of 2.5:1
If you have 1 BTC, you can open a 1.5 max long or short BTCUSD position
If you have 600 USD, you can open a 2.5 max long or short BTCUSD position
Each dollar you add in your trading wallet will allow you to increase your tradable balance
The leverage will vary depending on the type of collateral.
The leverage will vary depending on the type of collateral.
While this is true I would wager that the vast majority of users are using BTC as collateral and not USD so will most likely apply to most.
Agreed.
I think that overall this will be a positive development for bfx. It will help reduce the risk of the platform and address some of the concerns regarding the current amount of swaps.
Yes you called the question stupid, and no you did not understand it. If "you pay USD go USD to BTC to buy", as the poster suggested, how do you send USD to Coinbase/exchange/Bitpay/whatever?
How about this:
I send the USD to the exchange in any way it's available to me, preferably with the cheapest one.
It could one of these:
ACH for Coinbase
Plain wire transfer (most of the exchanges)
Or even these:
Astropay (Bitstamp).
SEPA (Bitstamp, Kraken, and so on)
...
The point is, even if there are middle-man fees with all these methods, you will end up with BTC, which in turn gives you more purchasing power (due to discount, offers, etc) than you would have if you used USD directly.
I send the USD to the exchange in any way it's available to me, preferably with the cheapest one.
It could be one of these: ACH for Coinbase; Plain wire transfer (most of the exchanges)
Or even these: Astropay (Bitstamp); SEPA (Bitstamp, Kraken, and so on); ...
Thank you! The answer did not have to be that detailed; the important point is that
turning USD into bitcoin requires a bank transfer (BT) of some sort. (Out of curiosity, are there exchanges that accept credit card?).
Well, strictly speaking, actually no, in order to obtain a bitcoin it doesn't require a BT, it's just the exchange part that requires it. Since you asked specifically for it I thought it could be useful to recap some of the available methods. Still, there are other ways to obtain bitcoins that don't involve a BT.
Just to name a few: localbitcoin (peer to peer exchange), ATM (Robocoin/Lamassu), mining (as unfeasible or expensive it may seem, it's still a valid method), donations (remember the "Hi mom, send bitcoin here" sign a few months ago?), or even salary (yes, there are employers who offer this opportunity to their employees).
As per your question, I'm not aware of exchanges accepting credit cards. Too much fraud risk, generally speaking (Oh, the irony).
[...]
So, that would explain why the price does not rise on such "good news": not because of "damn sheep" and "stupid weak hands", but because those news are irrelevant to most people -- except for Coinbase and BitPay, and for the bitcoiners who wish to unload some old cheap coins.
Questionable assertion. Anyone could benefit from a discount offered in BTC prices at the present time, even while currently possessing 0 BTC.
If the company A ("Dell") offers the possibility to either
1) Purchase an item at full USD price or
2) Purchase an item with a x % discount if priced through BTC
I'd say that if the discount is greater than the expenses for the BTC conversion you end up paying a lower price, whether you have "cheap" BTC or not.