Bitcoin

No. The DJIA is only listed for trade in one location. One location, one price. You can use 3rd party brokerages to place buy and sell orders on your behalf in the NYSE. But that's all that the brokers do, they buy or sell on the NYSE.

BTC is listed for trade in many locations. When you execute a trade for BTC on one of the exchanges, they are not placing an order for BTC on your behalf with a centralized exchange. They are doing the exchange right there. Just like how all the gas stations have different prices, but are filled from the same trucks. Same thing for sale directly in many locations, the price varies by location.

If you have sufficiently large trades and means to transfer currency into and out of local currencies, the exchange differences alone is enough to profit from. Buy USD to BTC then transfer BTC to an exchange in Naira and do the BTC to NGN. Transfer the NGN to a USD bank and rebuy BTC on the USD exchange. BTC transactions and wire transfers can both be done nearly instantly and online.

The multiple exchanges of direct transactions is also why crypto is the only listed item that is available to trade 24/7/365. The exchanges never shut down for bank holidays or overnight.

For those that have followed BTC for years, the current pricing is easily explained by both lots of bad news/press, Chinese New Years, and China's attempt to ban cryptos. Could go to $0. Could go to $50K. Nobody knows. Feel lucky? Wanna play?

 

It took a 1000%+ gain for anyone to start paying attention. It's still at a 650% gain from last year. BTC has always been volatile like this. Just the USD equivalents have been less.

 

Looks like we are leveling off. The EMA12 and EMA26 curves are flat-lining.

Nobody has a crystal ball. However my analysis is that we will see $50k USD BTC by the end of 2018. We are currently around $9k. My complete guesses are that once we get to $9.8k - $10k USD there will be a sharp drop. 10%, 20%, 30% something like that. It will last a week or so. Then ride right past $10k into the $16k to $17k territory where there will again be sharp selloffs and crashes. It will be an oscillating up-trend as people sell at the high for short term profit while others buy at the low to hold on through the storms. It is at this point that we will start hearing about BTC again in the news. Expect coverage on the minor and niche networks to bring in analysts about how it is all a bubble and queue the history lessons about tulips. Then the video clips of McAfee saying it will be at $1b USD soon and the world is coming to and end. Standard circus show. Once we get to $20k (breaking the previous all time high) there again will be a huge sell off and another huge drop. At this point you'll again see your local news channels having a "what is this crypto-currency thing all the young people are talking about? It is a great way to buy drugs and hookers and you should be afraid if your child mentions the word bitcoin". Trade volumes will go from the 20K/day to 100K+/day and this is when we will see the huge ups and sharp downs like last year. My projections are the low-end we will see $20K USD per BTC on Jan 01 2019 and high end $55K USD per BTC. Of course, followed by a sharp 20%+ drop right before Chinese New Years.

/ramblings of crazy person on the internet.

 

Technically yes. But that is true of the NYSE too. There is only so much that can happen, it will overload eventually and trades will get backed up then dropped.

But more to the question, the trade volume is exchange specific and transaction-cost sensitive. In the BTC world if you want your transaction to process immediately, you can just pay more for the confirmation. The equivalent of priority access lanes. When you make a transaction the assets are frozen until confirmed. It can take seconds in a priority queue, hours on a cheap queue. During the last period of high trade volume, it was taking over a day on some exchanges I believe.

But that is irrelevant to transaction volume on the major exchanges. They do a buffer. When you buy 1BTC, it tries to match you with people on the exchange selling 1BTC. If that fails, then it matches you with say 3 people selling 0.2BTC 0.5BTC and 0.3BTC. There was never an actual BTC blockchain transaction. The exchange just debited and credited the proper accounts for the different currencies. So when the trade volume goes up if the buys and sells are equivalent, no transactions have to be made. When it goes up and down, that's when transactions gets processed. The last overload happened because everyone was buying, very few selling so it required actual chain transactions and fees for everyone. Only when you transfer money into or out of the exchange (or if the exchange does itself) is there a fee and that happens when the exchange buys or sells from another exchange to cover their backend or larger transactions.

 

There is now an impact on one nation's power supplies...

I saw this on the BBC and thought you should see it:

Bitcoin energy use in Iceland set to overtake homes, says local firm - Bitcoin energy use in Iceland set to overtake homes, says local firm - BBC News

 

Arizona is going to take Bitcoin for tax payments.
Arizona Senate Votes to Accept Tax Payments in Bitcoin | Fortune

 

With 10%+ gains today and a price closing in on $9.6k USD/BTC, CNBC and Fortune both had articles about the gains. One snarky one less so. The prophecy unfolding...

The financial analysts who do this all-day every-day are setting a watch at $11k versus the $10k I am thinking.

On similar crpyto news, it is rumoured that Antmain is trying to woo TSMC to get their newest ASIC platform fab'd. The kicker, it is for ETH. 32GB of DDR3, 6 custom ASICs, and a mobo/psu combo with an effective hashrate proposed in 200MH/s to 250MH/s.

For a comparison one of my GTX 1050's does 12.5MH/s on average, and a GTX 1070/1080 does about 40MH/s-50MH/s depending on memory overclocking speeds. Current prices are about $350-$400 for a GTX 1050 and $900 to $1000 for a GTX1080. The F3 is expected to be released around $2k-$2.5k.

If the rumours are true, it will be the death of the GPU based ETH farms. That includes my own. If true, used graphics cards will absolutely flood the market. If you're a desktop gamer, you can get some absolutely sick deals!

Additionally Nvidia and ATI are ramping up GPU production and Nvidia has announced their Turing platform, the GTX20xx series. If the F3 is released when the huge rampup has occurred Nvidia and ATI be left with huge brand new inventories while their still top of the line cards are being sold for fractions of the price used. Could be bad news for them for a couple quarters and then back to business as usual.

 

Seems to be fluctuating at the $10k mark the past couple days. Goes above, goes under, just oscillating. This has happened many times before at the so-called "psychological barriers". $10,000.00 is one of those human numbers that sounds so much bigger than $9,999.99 as all the consumer marketers know. This is why things cost $9.99 and not $10 at the store.

 

Huge sell-off cliff at $11K USD/BTC. Maybe those that do it all day are on to something...

 

Once we got closer to $11k, the buy orders evened out the sells and it climbed past. Up another 10% this 24hr period.

 

And down 10.5%

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/02/20/venezuela-launches-the-petro-its-cryptocurrency/?utm_term=.7d51f6eaec60

Sh--coin?

 

It is actually one of the more "coin-like" versions. It is essentially buying Venezuelan bonds and making it easy to bypass the international sanctions. If Venezuela defaults, it becomes worthless. If they don't then you get minimal gains over time. It is pegged to what they wanted the price per barrel of their oil to be a while back. They are facing a huge shortage of cash and this is a way to gain liquidity. People all over the world buy the coin with dollars, euros, baht, whatever, which go to the Venezuelan government and they use the fiat currency to prop themselves up banking on the hopes that oil prices will recover in the next couple years.

North Korea I think is being much smarter about it. Infect idiot's machines with ransomware and demand payment in BTC. They abstract themselves from any sort of exchange on the front-end and cast a wide net making it perfect for laundering. Then they can withdraw into local currencies around the globe and funnel back into the DPRK like they do with their restaurants and stuff. Much more sophisticated and volatile but also more lucrative.

 

Clean out some of the cobwebs around here!

It has pushed $10kUSD/BTC a couple times and failed to push through, with up to a 20% drop as expected during the previous push. Got about another month before I might have to go back to my spreadsheet of crystal ball predictions. I currently stand by my year end prediction, but the path to get there is getting fuzzier.

On a side note, I experimented this weekend with heating the house via the miners instead of turning on the furnace and it worked great. Got a 8.5C rise over about 12 hours and then opened the windows to the outside (~4C to 8C ambient) to modulate. But temps are expected to rise back up to 25C+ today so the AC is back on with the exhaust keeping the deer warm. They love to sit right by the exhaust vent. Something about 2000+ CFM of 40C+ air blowing on them is comforting lol.

 

Fair enough. Some have been waaaaay down, other flat, other volatile but on average flat if you consider 25% swings flat.

Really there are only a few crypto-currencies. There are lots of coins out there, and with the hype from the end of last year, lots of money sucked into some very dubious places. IMHO most of that will evaporate.

 

So how much power is that? Approaching 20kW?

My entire life's energy conservation efforts, plus plenty more, squandered on keeping deer warm outside ...

 

That tent of miners is just under 20KW. Got another 20KW of GPU based miners in a different area. And about 15KW of servers. All of them run 24/7.

But when the hot-tub kicks on that's over 15KW just by itself too!

I am currently completely redoing the venting and exhausts, hence the happy deer. I have just run new conduit to a single unfinished room of a few thousand sqft. Within that room each section has its own intake and exhaust lines to the outside. Putting in some automated duct dampers to allow in and out which should be good and reduce my AC usage (3 units, about 40KW total running most of the time) and furnace usage (3 units, but natural gas). This allows me to take outside air from a cool location (shaded) and blow it through the ducts to cool the house to ambient without needing to open/close windows. Also allows me to take the exhaust heat and blow through the house to heat it up without needing to power on the furnace. And in the winter time, suck from outside warm by miners, blow out through vents.

Near the end of August the utility company is coming to add in a new transformer (1 on my house, 2 in the neighbourhood) so that I can get 800A+ service.