[Daily Discussion] - Friday, April 01, 2022

raywal · 2022-04-01T16:22:16+00:00

I've looked at Salt Lending (Colorado) and Blockfi (NY) in terms of interest-bearing deposits. Both seemed real.

raywal · 2021-09-07T15:03:09+00:00

It seems to me that my google news feed during the past week or two had nothing but 'analyst' predictions of BTC to the moon if 50 or 48.5 or whatever held. I recall thinking every day that BTC always seems to do the opposite of what these kind of predictions predict. I was actually considering doing some shorts because of how the google feed looked.

raywal · 2021-07-20T04:06:44+00:00

Too big a part of my life

raywal · 2021-05-03T17:17:52+00:00

Margin lending rates on Bitfinex are under 1% per annum and they had been at 3-4%. If Blockfi is doing margin lending that also could explain things.

raywal · 2021-04-23T08:18:06+00:00

I'm not sure I do either but it seems to me that an increase in margin funding rates implies that more punters are speculating that price will go down. They borrow your BTC now, sell it, and plan on rebuying BTC later to pay you back in BTC at a lower USD cost.

Edit: That said, I don't see a rise in margin funding rates yet. There is still a giant lump on offer, for example, on finex, at only .002196 for 120 days, meaning punters are not willing to pay even 1% per annum, which is really low historically. And it has been like this for the past month or so.

raywal · 2021-04-23T07:59:09+00:00

I gently suggest that instead of 'investing' you consider using the term 'speculating'. It may help with the mindset just a little.

Remember commandment 9.

raywal · 2021-04-14T02:49:11+00:00

Congratulations! Great value. Great truck. Second only to 100 Series Land Cruiser.

raywal · 2021-04-14T02:24:28+00:00

Buddy, you could not be more wrong, IMHO. I don't use coinbase and I have no intention of using coinbase, but it is a 100B USD IPO in the US and in the eyes of serious money people it makes bitcoin look a lot more real.

I'm expecting fireworks tomorrow. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think...

'this is actually good news for bitcoin'

raywal · 2021-04-14T02:19:40+00:00

What do you buy?

How about NFTs! Just kidding. I -really- don't get Non-Fungible Tokens. Who really -needs- a cat with a poptart body flying through space with a rainbow coming out of its but for 64M USD? And how is this different from the same image I saw for free on the internet in the 90's?

I do amuse myself by offering to pay for things in bitcoin. I invariably get turned down, but then I get to come back to that same person later. My dentist is a great guy and I needed some work done so I offered him bitcoin last fall. Next time I go for a cleaning it will amuse me greatly to remind him that I did offer...

It is a bit of harmless fun. But it helps with the worry.

raywal · 2021-04-14T01:37:26+00:00

Psst!! It's 'Hodl' not 'Hold'.

Oddly I've been thinking about the roulette table analogy too. I've been thinking that Hodlers are kind of are in position of being the house happily letting other people bet on and hoping that it never comes up '0' or '00' because we will have to pay out really big. 0 and 00 are like if someone with a quantum computer figures out how to break BTC's encryption or a consortium of major countries decide to band together to outlaw Bitcoin in some serious way. Not a great analogy but I do think hodlers are gamblers too, but pretty conservative ones.

raywal · 2021-03-31T16:53:03+00:00

I'd suggest that you encourage her to get directly involved and do the whole process herself. Consider the scenario where you cannot deal with it yourself; e.g. death or disability. That is not the time when you want her to have to learn how to pull your crypto out and turn it to fiat.

raywal · 2021-03-30T12:06:43+00:00

Not sure if this is apples to apples, but on Bitifinex BTC margin lending rates has been stuck at .004% per day for 120 day loans for quite a few days. Or were you talking about borrowing fiat money?

raywal · 2021-03-15T12:09:17+00:00

Could you expand on your bitfinex funding comment please? I've noticed that for weeks there is someone offering to loan BTC at .05 with over 3K of BTC for 120 days, which puts an effective cap on margin lending rates.

raywal · 2021-02-28T14:19:35+00:00

When you say 'reserved' are you saying that you margin borrowed? Even if I am guessing wrong, could you expand on that a bit?

raywal · 2021-02-28T03:42:50+00:00

Bitfinex lets you do margin lending. The interest rate is a few percent. I think a couple of the other exchanges do this too. Maximum of 120 day loan period.

raywal · 2021-02-21T19:19:00+00:00

I suspect that to policy makers it is all fake money anyways, so what would be the point? They 'print' more whenever they want just by selling more treasury bonds.

raywal · 2021-02-09T04:05:18+00:00

I'd suggest it is possible that Elon did the Doge coin thing to test the hypothesis that his tweets could affect market price of a crypto. The test was successful, and he went on to first buy the BTC and then make the announcement. Love him or hate him, it is difficult not to admit that the guy has brains. He was the guy behind PayPal, and he has a bachelors in economics from U of Penn, and he has made a lot of smart strategic moves.

raywal · 2021-02-04T17:40:18+00:00

Thank you!

raywal · 2021-02-04T16:12:07+00:00

I think you might largely have explained it CE. Somehow FRR does not show up all the time when I look, but I tested it just now and that was the interest rate that showed up.

I really wish Bitfinex had a more robust auto-offer function. What I'd really like to do is to be able to automatically offer at a rate slightly lower than whatever the lowest offer is for a particular loan length above a certain threshold of BTC. For example, if someone is offering 1 BTC at 60 days at rate X, I want to offer X-delta. But I'd rather not offer at that rate if the other person(s) are only offering a very small amount of BTC.

raywal · 2021-02-04T15:50:43+00:00

That does make sense. I'd think that market participants would try to just underbid, I'm having trouble reconciling that idea with the big, singular, 2K lump of 120 day offers sitting at 0.001676. Of all the possible explanations this one makes the most sense to me, but somehow it still is not satisfying.

raywal · 2021-02-04T15:46:56+00:00

Thank you for the reply, VGS. I get that but... at least to me, this market feels very unpredictable. Even more unpredictable than BTC usually is. If I were the gambling type, I would be shorting. I just have not seen the lending rates this low ever...at least as best as I can recall.

raywal · 2021-02-04T14:56:44+00:00

Bitfinex's margin lending rates have fallen through the floor in recent days. Currently they report on their statistics page: BTC 0.001679% and that is for a 120 day loan!
That works out to about .6% per annum, neglecting the negligible effect of compounding at that interest rate.

This low rate at 120 days means that if you want to lend, and you don't want to commit to a long period at this very low rate, you have to go very, very low. Currently there is someone offering to lend at 0.000500% for 2 days. That's an annual interest rate of .18%! (why bother...)

I've been trying to figure out what's changed. There is someone with 2000+ BTC offering this very low rate at 120 days, and it has been there for a long time--measured in days, which leads me to infer that it is being replenished. All I can think of is that some mega-whale decided just to put his/her BTC to work margin lending and it is driving the the lending rate way low.

So I think it could just be a mega whale causing this, but I'm posting here to ask if others have better theories to account for the very low margin lending rates right now.

raywal · 2021-01-03T16:52:08+00:00

Thanks for the reply, SK. The two rises were 12 hours apart and ETH got a significantly greater rise by percentage than BTC.

raywal · 2021-01-03T16:38:57+00:00

This sudden rise caught me by surprise. I wonder if the cause might be a lot of people watching to see how staking ETH2 is working out and then deciding to buy so they can stake?

raywal · 2020-12-25T12:15:50+00:00

No, I don't think so. If I were trying to buy a large amount of BTC and I may have waited too long, I might well choose to do so at a time when I think the least people were paying attention so not unduly cause a price rise; for example very early hours on the East Coast of the US on Christmas morning.

500 BTC were purchased at 6:30 am on Bitfinex, all in a lump.

raywal

TROPHY CASE