Probably not too many traders of cryptos here, but still... discuss trade opps when possible. Bitcoin has been going up, $4617/btc on gdax currently, and the plausible explanation is the upcoming forks (October 25 and in November). If it plays out same as last time, hodlers of bitcoin will get "free coins", with no after-effect to the price. Kinda like free dividend with no ex-dividend price adjustment. How to trade this, buy bitcoin now and hold until after the forks and sell everything including the free bitcoin forks cryptos? Or nah, short bitcoin because bubble.
Should've held on to my Bitcoin cash for a few weeks honestly. Held it thinking it would immediately tank but it rallied hard for a while. I was not aware of any new forks? Eth not withstanding
At the last fork i noticed that those who have spare bitcoin in their wallet got the new fork coin however all of my bitcoin was invested in other coins so i got the only amount equivalent to the amount of bitcoin available in my exchange wallet what was very small.
The easiest way to get the fork coin is to have your bitcoin on an exchange that will support the upcoming said fork coin. Bittrex (a NY-licensed exchange) was the best one for Bitcoin Cash fork, and soon after the fork, you had both btc and bch on your account ready to withdraw/trade/sell. It was literally free money. [TL;DR: Putting that much bitcoin on an exchange for an extended amount of time was not something I was prepared to do and for the upcoming fork, I may decide to put the daily btc withdrawal limit of Bittrex of 3 btc's, if Bittrex will support the Bitcoin Gold fork. For Bitcoin Cash since I have a full wallet running on my computer, I just renamed my wallet.dat, which creates a new wallet.dat, copied some new addresses to a spreadsheet, and sent all the btc's to the new wallet addresses. I backed up all wallet.dat's on multiple media before doing any of these. Once all btc's were transferred to the new addresses, it was simply installing a Bitcoin Cash wallet and copying the old wallet.dat to it that doesn't have any btc's anymore. This was the safest way for me as there was no one who had control of the private keys at any time except me. The way the bitcoin forks have taken place is someone makes a snapshot of the bitcoin blockchain and at a specific block height, the bitcoin addresses that had btc's in it, will get an equivalent amount of the fork coins. This is why it is important that you own the private keys. You can simply transfer btc's to new addresses you own, or sell for fiat and once you've depleted the btc's out of these addresses, use the same private keys on the fork coin wallet and again, transfer, sell, or keep]
No wonder Bitcoin has been rallying as everyone is cashing out of other cryptos for that free money. I'm not sure how I feel about these forks. I get that they're necessary to support better technology, but Bitcoin cash and Bitcoin gold just seemed like a quick money grab. It's worrisome as more forks continue to happen, and how that will affect value.
The costs as well as the profits are very well explained by Jimmy Song in this video (starts at 6 minutes):
Or go flat on BTC - that's what I'm looking at. Long BTC on Bitfinex (using margin, perhaps) and get the forked coin, then short it with XBT/USD swap on Bitmex with good leverage. Alternatively, sell futures, but this introduces more risk. Bitmex does not have an exchange - it's only value swaps and futures, so if you're short BTC (or XBT on that site) you WON'T be liable for the forked coin. Voila - free money for realsy. (Ok - there is some interest rate risk, but usually it works in the favor of going short XBT.) If you're long BTC on Polo, then the price risk is totally neutralized (if you go for a flat hedge) because Bitmex price is set by Polo price. (This could be double checked - the price might be 50/50 Polo and another site.)