This particular broker IB has accounted for nearly 50% of the traded contracts. But, they are not allowing any shorts at all. They wont even allow market orders
Due to the extreme volatility of cryptocurrencies, clients will be unable to assume a short position. In addition, only limit orders will be accepted.
Trading with market orders is generally like playing with fire. If you're comfortable with the current market price, just place a limit order at or slightly above market price, and it will usually fill.
Telling the market: "I want to trade now, and price is completely irrelevant" can be a recipe for a bad time.
How do you figure? People in cryptocurrency are already not afraid of the rampant volatility so this move seems to protect the broker and not market participant.
This also raises another question - whether these guys have stop orders? Because stop orders actually become market orders once triggered and help people get out at whatever price possible. Turn this into stop limit and it tries to find the "best" price possible and many people left holding the bag if things go south.
So set a limit order at half the current price, or whatever.
Placing a market order is equivalent to saying "I'll accept $0 for this asset, so long as that was the best price available." Only most people assume it means "I'll pay the number shown, or something close to it" which is only true of relatively stable assets on markets with plenty of liquidity. Making only limit orders available forces the market participant to choose what range of prices they would find acceptable.
Sure but again that is a roundabout to avoid a barrier which shouldn't ideally be there. Why worry about volatility and block stuff if the product is all about volatility.
Things work in these limited conditions and then people claim victory, like they are doing with the bitcoin futures. We haven't seen the full market force out yet.
Because the time between when you've made the decision to place the order and when you actually physically place it is enough time for the market to shift drastically. "The number shown" may be different in fewer milliseconds than it takes the signal from your brain to reach your finger, plus the delivery time for the web request to the server.
A couple markets have had flash crashes down to pennies. Imagine placing a market sell order right before that happens, selling your bitcoin for $0.15 instead of $15,000.
In reality you're usually somewhat safe, but market orders are always a small gamble for this reason.
A limit order. Specifically a fill-or-kill limit order for the cancellation part.
Most people don't realize a limit order isn't "buy at this price" but rather "buy at the best price in my favor, but don't spend more than this much."
Fill-or-kill means don't put it on the books, just get it now or cancel. You can also typically specify whether it is a partial fill-or-kill too (get it all or none at all).
TIL! Much thanks. Are you sure this (buy at best price in my favor) is how it is implemented commonly (e.g. the limit order is not just rejected for being an invalid liquidity maker order?)? I guess it is the Fill-or-Kill that is key; I suppose you can add an additional factor to that limit order to give yourself a range of acceptable prices (obviously you could program it, but is it a common order type on something like E-Trade?)?
"In your favor" is how it is required to be implemented by law. You get the absolute best price on the books at the time it hits the exchange.
Of course that doesn't stop low-latency firms exploiting information differentials to get their bids in before your order makes it to the exchange, a process called front-running. It would be illegal for your own brokerage to frontrun you, but pretty much all discount brokerages sell information to third parties, which enables those third parties to front-run. Ever wonder why your Robinhood trades are free?
Shorting futures does not necessarily mean there's negative sentiment. There's a large arbitrage opportunity right now. Futures are going for about $1,000 more than BTC itself right now and you can make risk-free* (assuming you know how to securely store your private key) profit. Doing so requires selling a future.
> There's a large arbitrage opportunity right now. Futures are going for about $1,000 more than BTC itself right now and you can make risk-free* (assuming you know how to securely store your private key) profit. Doing so requires selling a future.
Not really. You have to post margin against your short position, which is costly and could rapidly lead to a margin call where you are forced to close your short position at the worst possible time (futures price surges, you are closed out in the futures but still long the cash Bitcoin, and then the spot price crashes before you can sell your cash position). Furthermore, there is a non-trivial cost of carry - properly securing your Bitcoin private key involves a costly cyber security infrastructure and operation. Then there is the massive counter party credit risk that you take on when facing the cash Bitcoin exchange (eg Mt. Gox). Finally, there are the unknown unknowns ... this is the first week of trading for a brand new type of futures contract created on the back of a bleeding edge technology bubble, things could go wrong in all kinds of unforeseen ways. So I would submit that a $1000 cash vs. futures spread is in fact not some huge arbitrage opportunity (or, in other words, there is no free lunch here in front of this steamroller).
Usually there isn't any risk in this scenario but thanks to cboe rules that cap volatility at 20%, there is quite a bit of risk hidden here. Say, you buy btc and short the future. If btc drops by 30% in a day, future trading will be halted at 20% which means that you can lose money if it is an expiry day. Also, CBOE and your btc exchange aren't linked. So you will have to put up additional margin when btc goes up and your future is losing money.
Expiry day is going to be very interesting then. I had no idea their volatility rules would apply to expiring contracts too, that's insane. Why would anyone want to trade that instrument?
This is how all future contracts work. There are daily limits that lock the contracts from trading. Interestingly enough these contracts seem to have very high margin requirements and lock limits. I also find the discussion about "shorting" to be interesting. All futures contracts have 2 position - a long and a short. The number of "shorts" is identical to the number of longs, unless I am misinterpreting the was these contracts are set up.
Litecoin is the new Bitcoin. People are realizing there is nothing special about Bitcoin, and I'm saying this as a HODLer. Stores of value will come and go. Bitcoin will eventually lose its supremacy. It's not like people use it as a currency at this point. And if they did - Litecoin is far more efficient.
I would argue that Ethereum is where it's headed. Ethereum does everything that Litecoin/Bitcoin does along with a smart contract programming layer built into it, and a great team of incredibly smart people iterating on the platform.
Millions upon millions of dollars are being poured into companies built around Ethereum for a reason. If you look at the open positions for Consensys you can see just how many positions and projects one company has going on.
I would argue Monero is the first stop before the coins figure out a more environmentally friendly method, because the killer feature of a currency is anonymity.
I don't know much about ethereum though, does it offer anonymity functions of some sort?
Yes, in theory Ethereum is the better way. I was a strong believer in the "flippening" and exited some of my BTC position based on that belief.
But ... it may be a long time before that theoretical superiority translates to practical. Ethereum has been plagued by a hard fork and semi-regular thefts that exploit hard-to-write contracts, plus the Parity bug:
None of this inspires confidence. Only after ETH can go for a while without these nightmares can it regain its well-deserved spot in the lead. (And imho that would involve a migration to a less error-prone language.)
The closest Bitcoin had was the database code in a client implementation that had to be fixed (and had major consensus).
Those aren't equivalent comparisons. The issues with Ethereum have all been with regards to implementations of applications on top of the ETH layer - parity bug and DAO hack being the two biggest. Neither was due to mistakes in the underlying Ethereum protocol, both had to do with something that someone made using Ethereum.
If I make a vulnerable website it's not nginx/Django/Postgres's fault.
The reason Ethereum hasn't taken over the dominant position yet probably has more to do with Bitcoin's superior brand penetration. Most Bitcoin holders that I know personally have very little actual understanding of how any of the crypto currencies work under the hood, so they follow the general sentiment of the community/press and do not invest based on technical merits.
The DAO hack itself wasn't the problem (in this context) -- the problem was having to deal with a network that does hard forks at a whim in a way deliberately constructed to favor a small group.
I agree that Parity was merely an application on top of ETH, but it was widely used and indicates that users can innocently get snagged by something like that.
>If I make a vulnerable website it's not nginx/Django/Postgres's fault.
If nginx/Django/postgres/PHP have defaults and syntax that make it extremely easy to open up vulnerabilities, then yes, that is a strike against them, and a valid reason to build on a less flaky platform or wait for them to iron that out.
>The reason Ethereum hasn't taken over the dominant position yet probably has more to do with Bitcoin's superior brand penetration.
Or they're people like me, who were excited, then saw the nasty warning signs.
There is a bunch of work happening with Ethereum to address the scalability problem, namely Proof of Stake and Sharding as well as complimentary systems like Raiden that use the main blockchain for dispute resolution and not every payment. I expect 2018 to be a busy year for Ethereum development!
As soon as I can experiment with programming an EOS or Cardano smart contract I'll be happy to comment on their viability, but as far as I can figure out you can't, or at least no one is doing it.
Ethereum has a working smart contract on the foundation website, as well as an online compiler to test with.
EOS looks like the most developer-friendly crypto I've seen. If you can write in a language that can compile to WebAssembly, then you can create a DApp on EOS.
But if Litecoin is more likely to be used as a currency wouldn’t that mean it would have to have no chance of appreciating with the same volatility that sent the price of Bitcoin to $20k?
Personally I don’t give a damn about which coin is the most practical currency, just show me which one is most likely to have a meteoric rise so I could throw a few bucks into it and pull out before it all goes bust.
At this point, it feels like investing in Penny stocks, just hotter.
although, to be fair, at least with penny stocks, they actually represent some companies whereas blockchain coins are more about a store of value and a bunch of other stuff
I'm not OP but time in market beats timing the market. If there's a chance LTC goes 10x in the next few days or weeks or months, better to have bought now than trying to wait for a dip that may or may not arrive.
If there is one thing the last 8 years have shown us - it doesn't matter at what point you get in.
But Litecoin in particular has had crazy corrections in the past. There are also many LTC hodlers from when it was pennies on the dollar who will now want out.
Litecoin has more potential for pumping though because it can be pitched as a better Bitcoin, which will cause a mania in the masses who missed out on Bitcoin the first time, leading to a much more powerful rise in price in a shorter period of time.
I'm surprised that of all the Altcoins that you could have picked, you chose litecoin as the one that is better than Bitcoin.
Litecoin has never been about actual utility or usage. It has always just been about being a store of value, and just copying every development from Bitcoin.
There are definitely altcoin that are different and interesting in meaningful ways. But not litecoin.
People want a coin that can give them 1000x gains, the next iteration of "buying btc in 2010." Far < 1% of those people has ever used a cryptocurrency to make a purchase.
Related, but not directed at prev comment...
If anyone actually cares about sound, uncensorable money, then they should look to the $300B network that has been battle tested and withstands constant attack. BTC has prioritized stability and security, and done very well in that regard. I understand that btc businesses, and the small minority that purchase from them, are frustrated that the digit cash use-case is more difficult right now. From my perspective though, the proven stability and security is far more valuable in the long run, and is something that other coins only talk about. I think btc has to go through a full financialization to complete its price discovery (eliminate the massive volatility) before any mass adoption of a cash use-case is practical. Luckily, futures and ETFs are incoming, and lightning network is testing on mainnet.
Not for long. The creator has stated that they don't plan on increasing the blocksize.
They've swallowed the poison pill of "copying everything that the bitcoin core development team does", which means they hate low fees and on chain scaling just as much as the bitcoin community does.
I would encourage you to look into other alt coins for human to human value transport. My personal favorites are raiblocks and smartcash, but there are many others. Eth can even be used very effectively.
Litecoin has a cool name, a good position on the charts, and all of the same issues that bitcoin has.
Wall Street being able to buy Bitcoin might increase demand, but they might also do things that would at least at times amplify sell pressure like panic selling, shorting it, leveraged shorting, margin calls
The weird thing here is, Bitcoin is clearly a shitshow. There's not much debate about it. It has no redeeming qualities compared to other coins except the global hashrate. And it is worse off on so many aspects.
How many times has bitcoin hard-forked because of the protocol being compromised? How much daily volume is it currently supporting? How does the velocity of the codebase compare to other coins?
>Terrible. Constant in-fighting. This is what is hurting bitcoin right now.
Anyone who's paying attention to the bitcoin repo can see your statement has no basis in reality. For instance, compare the number of closed pull requests between btc/eth/ltc...and bch if you want a good laugh.
Litecoin actually did last night, more volume than Bitcoin, the fees were almost nothing! I actually did send an LTC transaction last night, so much fun not to be stupid and take advantage of this revolution instead of just sitting around like a troll calling it a bubble :D
Hard-forked? Never. But you don't need to hard-fork to secure the network. Bitcoin HAS soft-forked several times to close of critical zero-day vulnerabilities, although to be fair this was in the early days of the network. (There was multiple ways in which any random participant could spend anyone's funds in the early days. They were all honorably disclosed and fixed without being exploited.)
There was an unintentional fork on August 15, 2010, when "[an] attacker exploited [an] integer overflow bug that permitted an attacker to create several billion bitcoins". [source][0]
There was an unintentional fork on March 12, 2013 caused by previously disallowed number of tx inputs (?) as resolved by [BIP50][1].
The first one was reorg'd out of the chain. It was a soft-fork, just deployed in response to something rather than in anticipation.
Likewise in the second case, where there was a temporary soft-fork put in place to limit the block size so as to not run afoul of the bug, which itself wasn't a hard-fork or a soft-fork but rather a probabilistic failure to achieve consensus under transient circumstances.
> How much daily volume is it currently supporting?
(for varying degrees of support where without a transaction fee of ~$5-20, your transaction may be silently dropped, and even without may require multiple hours for confirmation)
Hashrate and adoption are important though -- anyone can create the smallest tweak to Bitcoin that may improve it to some degree, but the market can't swap chains every day to accommodate these changes. Bitcoin is good enough for now, and that keeps it on top.
You're right. The adoption advantage used to be my go-to argument about why Bitcoin is better, but what good is that if it is unusable for transactions it was meant for?
Lightning network looks like it can do something, but the slow progress even with the current situation makes me question the future of Bitcoin.
The point is that people aren't buying bitcoin to make purchases with it now. There are relatively few merchants that take bitcoin and its cost ineffective to buy bitcoin to make the transaction anyways (even without the high tx fees). People are buying now because of the potential and because of exponential increase in price. That bitcoin is bad for coffee transactions right now is irrelevant.
>People are buying now because of the potential and because of exponential increase in price
This is the problem though. People are buying it for the price increase, rather than technical merit. It will eventually result in some middle aged couple who took out a mortgage holding the bag when it comes crashing down (if it does. If it doesn't, that's even scarier because that tells us how uninformed most people are.)
That's a lot of assertions without any backup. Here's one thing bitcoin has that no altcoin has: the legitimacy of its network buy-in from being first to market. And since any technology another chain has can be adopted via sidechain, extension block, or soft fork, why not standardize on the one currency that has achieved the most adoption?
>the legitimacy of its network buy-in from being first to market
What legitimacy? It's all code. Any smart person will take something for it's technical merit. Good developers will eventually move.
>why not standardize on the one currency that has achieved the most adoption?
And where did that get us? A currency which isn't usable for daily transactions. And people give that "Oh it isn't meant for that, use Litecoin" comment. So why do we even quote adoption?
Even then, when a transaction takes $25+ dollars, you realize that there's something wrong.
I never quote adoption. Bitcoin isn't a currency, it's a store of value. Just like gold which it seeks to emulate. It's useful as the collateral for fully-backed smart contracts. Not paying for coffee.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/interactive-brokers-launches-...
This particular broker IB has accounted for nearly 50% of the traded contracts. But, they are not allowing any shorts at all. They wont even allow market orders
Due to the extreme volatility of cryptocurrencies, clients will be unable to assume a short position. In addition, only limit orders will be accepted.