Bitcoin price vs google trends interest for 'bitcoin' There more real/useful blockchain is, the more people will get carried away and create unsustainable price trends
Tether is not being accepting 1:1 with USD. People are last reporting at Kraken it was a haircut about 0.95 to $1USD. The real issue with almost all the sites is that they are all vulnerable to DDOS attacks. Exchange goes down, sell orders get triggered and massive liquidation begins. There really is no way around it and it could happen anytime. Happened to Kraken a few weeks ago. People bought ETH at flash crash prices.
@Daal Yes. It could be exchange specific, but at least at Kraken, they aren't reedeming at 1:1. Hey, there's an arb right there.
"Tether is registered as a Money Services Business with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network of the U.S. Department of the Treasury (MSB Registration Number 31000058542968). Tether is establishing a relationship with a U.S. financial institution for purposes of better servicing Tether users in the United States" This is probably why. To guarantee the liquidity of this Tether currency universe at par would draw a lot of people there, wanting to dump their Tethers with less documentation requirements
Now that I thought more about it, this TetherUSD thing seems really dangerous. I wouldn't store eCash there at all. Essentially, you take all the risk of having digital money(fraud, governments shuting sites down, bank accounts being frozen) but none of the rewards (no price appreciation). Here, the best case scenario is that you will own USD cash. But you might get unlucky and the US government shutsdown the correspondent accounts of the Taiwanese banks that hold the reserves from USD Tether So, big downside but little upside This risk also exists with USD cash balances in these other bitcoin wallets sites but the difference is those sites don't have over $50M in USD that is being moved around back and forth with no trace, effectively daring Uncle Sam. With Bitcoin, everyone knows its unstoppable, but this Tether thing could just dissapear overnight if the US government decides they want to make an example of Its a shame because bitcoin is so unstable but its very useful, this USD Tether could have that stability but also the ease of transaction and anonimity so it would be the best of both worlds. Except the goverment probably wont be too happy about it This tether thing effectively is a way for people to transfer large amounts of USD cash without governments knowing about it, so it doesn't look sustainable. With bitcoins government tried to stop it but failed, with tether it will take so little to suceed i think they will try at some point
The SPY Trump impeachment sell off was a good example of my Uber theory of sell offs. All the marginal holders that were thinking of selling in the short-term pilled up on the sell side that day, but there was no fundamental shift in the market perception of the fundamentals. As a result, once those sellers were finished, the market run out of sellers but it had plenty of buyers. Even new buyers that were looking to get in at lower prices. As a result, it came roaring back. That's why is difficult to try to read 'what the market is thinking' from short-term action, its very error prone to do that because the stock market is also a liquidity product, not just a long-term bet on earnings. As a result, the liquidity part can overwhealm any other element and cloud up the signals that people read from the market
I still haven't gotten around to finishing my eCoins/crypto accounts setup, its tough because I have to trade under a corporate name and these sites are so overloaded with new accounts, they are taking forever to approve the documentation. I'm finding that is quite hard to buy high quantities (and by high I mean more than $1,000) now because of that. Documents are required but the interest is so high, the bitcoin dealers were not prepared and simply don't have the human capital to deal with new accounts and documents. I do have an eye on GBTC intraday for trades but haven't made any significant bets one way or the other (and I suspect the big move will happen overnight when most people are not looking) I do wish I had paid more attention to this market earlier, I actually mined some Bitcoin back in 2012 but didn't think it was going to produce much profit. I dont have to pay electricity in my building so I probably should have stuck with it or at the very least, studied it more. But the problem was that back then I was still in the 'contrarian' bs mindset of skepticism. These days I'm a lot more open to 'ridiculous' themes, a lot of the time, there is nothing ridiculous about it.
I'm listening to the audiobook Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance and its helping me understand a lot of new ideas about convexity, specially as it related to equity investments. Part of the secret of Musk success appears to be a Jobs like obsession of not letting people tell him that something can't be done. He likes to fire engineers that say that. The result is that people work harder, try harder, persist more, keep trying to discover new ways to do things. These extra behaviors enable people and organizations to produce things that were not avaliable before, its a form of a 'convexity fountain'. The low hanging fruit in most stablished industries is gone, progress and big surprises require unusual behaviors and ideas, that's a way to get through old barriers that were stopping innovation. Its only this type of culture that can try and suceedd at creating rockets that cost a fraction of what other governments pay for. If you listen to most people, you would never try because they will always tell you it can't be done. So when I listen to a 'ridiculous theme' now, I pay attention to it, even if it comes from an average person. There is a certain amount of genius in a crazy idea, you can't never dismiss it outright because of the convex payoffs they tend to lead to. I believe trying to figure out how big the convex payoff is a lot more important than trying to figure out the chance of success A lot of things can be worth pursuing even if they have a less than 2% chance of success Especially when that becomes a life philosophy, at some point you will find gold and if the payoff is big enough that's all it takes!
This bitcoin thing has been running hot for a few months, but if you use the Tech bubble as a guide, there could be a lot more time left on this thing. Key is to use stops, risk control and pick good entry points. A prudent speculator ought to be able to extract some good profits there. Also, it helps that this market is full of ignorant criminals and retail amateurs, there are very few HF pros. That should create a lot more predictable patterns than most markets these days