Please click the link to listen to the 44th episode of my weekly crypto podcast ‘Two Minute Crypto.’ These are intended to be short, single-topic ramblings on some aspect of the cryptosphere. Comments and critiques welcome.
Two Minute Crypto – Wild Thoughts 5 – Bitcoin as Time
The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust.
Satoshi Nakamoto
Welcome to Two Minute Crypto this week I’d like to indulge in a little offbeat reflection on Bitcoin and discuss the concept of BTC as time or return on time invested.
The theory is quite simple -BTC is a scarce asset that
with every passing block moves closer to increased scarcity. Ever four years
the supply of newly minted BTC is halved with the next halvening less than a year
away. The current annual inflation is around 4% – so in under a year Bitcoin will
have already matched the 2% rate generally targeted by central banks. Four
years further down the road will see Bitcoin inflation drop to 1%. Such deflationary
supply lies at the heart of BTC design.
Contrast this with a typical currency which has no fixed supply and which year by year increasingly saturates the market ‘devaluing the current fiat in circulation. As we are all aware the longer you hold cash the less it is worth as its purchasing power declines as supply continues to expand. The last 10 years of ‘quantitative easing’ have substantially exacerbated this process -flooding markets with access to cheap credit.
Now to time – as you save cash – each and every year the buying power of that money diminishes and of course that loss of buying power compounds. A decline of 2% doesn’t seem like much but year by year and over a number of decades, it certainly does. It’s true that salaries do often track inflation, so wages generally rise. However, the value of each dollar saved nonetheless diminishes with each passing year. Actual real inflation rates are debatably much higher than 2%, and in some nations, double-digit inflation is the norm.
In order to earn that money, you invested ‘time’ – you
worked a job and saved a portion of your wages.
Bitcoin, however, establishes a different time to value ratio. Bitcoin earned now – all other factors remaining the same – will be worth more in the future. A Satoshi saved now will buy more in the future not less and the longer you hold the more it will purchase relative to other assets. Fiat and BTC exhibit directly contrasting time return propositions -cash debases at a steady rate – demanding a continued investment of time to acquire ever more fiat to attempt to retain purchasing power or saving’s targets. Bitcoin through ever-increasing scarcity offers a compounding appreciating return on investment – the earlier you set it aside the more it will be worth in terms of purchasing power the less you need to work to attain more of it in the future.
This scarcity and increasing return relative to time held is a core principle of Bitcoin and not is subject to the whim of any government or corporation.
Of course, underlying this thesis is the assumption that
Bitcoin does become a successful store of value with a degree of broad market
penetration. This is by no means inevitable but nor is it a ‘longshot’. Should
BTC achieve an ongoing place in global finance year by year its purchasing power
relative to inflationary currencies and assets will inexorably increase.
Bitcoin is designed to appreciate through time – whereas
fiat through a system of targeted inflation debases creating an inverse reward
relationship between BTC and fiat which compounds through time.
For those of you who live in the United States, Happy Independence Day! Since we talked last, bitcoin broken above the $11,500 resistance. This closes the upper CME gap at just above $12,000. Price has since dropped back on top of the $11,500 support where it’s consolidating.
Zooming out on the weekly chart, we can see the bulls have put up quite a fight after the extremely bearish close of last week’s candle.
In today’s video we’ll discuss where price may be heading next, key areas to watch, targets and so much more. I’ll also answer your questions. I hope you find it helpful.
I hope this has been helpful. I’d be happy to answer any questions in the comment section below. Until next time, wishing you safe and profitable trading.
Workin
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The price action on bitcoin has been interesting of late. Just when we got a nasty reversal candle on the weekly chart after the parabolic move higher price came down to the first support level and rallied hard.
Where do we go?
That is the 20,000 dollar question.
If you look at the weekly chart above you will see what I mentioned in the opening sentence of the post. Talk about mixed signals! I had 9800 as a target and the first support, the reversal pattern (on daily chart) coupled with some follow through is making that nasty candle from last week obsolete.
So the question is. Is this real or is it a bull trap. It has been quite some time since I was this conflicted about the price action.
As you can see the daily chart is looking positive at the moment. It surpassed the 11,600 level and has since tested it intraday and bounced off it higher.
In the end btc really needs to crack 12,300 to have not created a lower higher after making a lower low.
That level could act as resistance, especially after running up from 9800. At this point I’m just holding my long-term bag as I missed the trade entry at both 9800 and 10,800.
Trading Around a Position
This is why I personally like to hold a core position and then trade around it so that I don’t have to be stressed about getting in or out when the picture isn’t completely clear.
Public Storage (NYSE:PSA) is the undisputed leader in the self-storage industry, and the stock had been quite a market laggard until recently. However, tides have turned, and Public Storage is now up 18% in 2019. Is it still a good buy, or has it become too expensive?
Public Storage has previously said that it can break even with about 30% occupancy in its properties, and its occupancy rate is currently 92.5%. That’s a big margin of safety.
Public Storage also has a rock-solid balance sheet. Most real estate investment trusts use a considerable level of debt to fund their operations — debt in the 30%-40% of total capitalization range is common. Well, Public Storage has just about 3.2% (not a typo) of its capitalization in the form of debt.
Over the years, Public Storage has built up a great dividend track record. Since 2002, the company’s dividend has grown at a 9.8% annualized rate, and the current 3.4% yield is well covered by Public Storage’s earnings.
Some of the risks include if long-term interest rates are rising, an overabundance of self-storage facilities and the sector being cyclical because of their month to month leases. But overall, it appears the pros far vastly outweigh the cons. However, the chart suggests the upside opportunity is limited due to the weekly supply at $254.
This post is my personal opinion. I’m not a financial advisor, this isn’t financial advise. Do your own research before making investment decisions.
Sadly it would appear that nothing is sacred in the world of crypto. This shouldn’t be news to any of us, though it is always sad to see when it hits close to home.
I have caught the exchange Daybit (https://daybit.com/) wash trading Trybe’s TRYBE tokens in an attempt to boost their apparent volume, at least that is how it appears. I’ll tell you the story and show you the screenshots – you can decide for yourself.
For several months I have watched TRYBE price fluctuate wildly on my “Favourites” list at CoinGecko. TRYBE is normally either my main winner or loser over the typical time periods of 1h, 24h and/or 7d.
From https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/favorites (this is my personal list so what you see when visiting that URL will probably be different)
The active exchanges listed for TRYBE are Daybit and Newdex. Prices vary wildly between the two exchanges. To me that means one of two things: either there is an arbitrage situation or there is rampant wash trading taking place. At first I thought I had found an arbitrage opportunity, but watching it over time I saw that the daily price changes of Trybe are nonsensically volatile. There should be no way that such a spread could be sustained with that sort of trading volume.
https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/trybe
I decided that in order to do a more thorough investigation, I should get some skin in the game. Instead of blogging yesterday, that is what I was up to. Admittedly it took longer than expected. I had recently used my Scatter Wallet to carry out the WAX mainnet swap and things were looking unfamiliar to me in the already confusing EOS economy system. The WAX swap entailed importing new keys and switching networks in Scatter, as well as using both the old and the new (version 11) of the wallet. I elected to move carefully in unfamiliar territory.
I decided to withdraw a few TRYBE tokens which I have earned on Trybe in order to carry out the experiment. This was the first time that I have tried to withdraw from Trybe, so that took me a few minutes to sort out. Unfortunately it turns out that there is a delay in withdrawing from Trybe: tokens withdrawals are only processed once a day. On top of that: only 1000 tokens can be withdrawn at a time (though I remember reading that that would be increased to 5000 soon). I executed a withdrawal request, but then couldn’t afford to wait all day for it to be actioned. So I needed another plan to get my hands on some TRYBE.
Fortunately I had some STEEM and SBD available. I converted SBD to STEEM, sent all the STEEM I could lay my hands on to Binance, traded STEEM for BTC, traded BTC for EOS, sent EOS to Scatter, logged into Newdex with Scatter and finally traded EOS for Trybe. With that Trybe in hand I made my way to Daybit to run my test. I logged in and noted the previous trades. They looked like this:
From Daybit
As you can see: there is a long line of orders executed at a price of 0.00148560 EOS. It is important to note that they were all for just over 300 000 TRYBE and that they had been executed over a very short space of time. It had also been several hours since the time of the last trade. Before that time there had been a gap of many hours, and then a cluster of similar trades – already very suspicious.
With 0.00148560 as the selling price for all the trades shown and with the cheapest current order on the platform being 0.00148570, I decided to send my TRYBE to the exchange and place a sell order at a price of 0.00145000 EOS, which I then did. Take note: the price shown for all the “Recent Trades” is 0.00000010 EOS below the price of the lowest sell order – you will see why this is important later on.
I placed a Sell order for 14900 TRYBE at a price of 0.00145000 EOS (a limit order).
From Daybit
Nothing happened. Then more nothing happened, and finally a whole lot of nothing. Eventually I stopped watching went to sleep.
THE NEXT DAY…
I woke up this morning to find that (surprise, surprise), my order had not been touched, even though it was still the cheapest order. BUT: a whole lot of new “Recent Trades” had appeared in the logs:
From Daybit
Thousands of dollars in TRYBE orders had magically appeared during the few hours that I had been asleep. Once again: all the same price, all right after one another (and then absolutely no activity after that) and all for about 300 000 TRYBE. What was the price of those orders? Exactly 0.00000010 EOS below the price of my sell order…
So I cancelled my order and placed a new one at a MUCH cheaper price: 0.00080000 EOS. Anybody prepared to buy at 0.00144990 should immediately snap that up… but no, the order has now stood there untouched for hours.
From this I conclude that Daybit is using TRYBE to try to inflate its volume and to boost its popularity. As further evidence of this, I can offer the following:
Daybit uses four base currencies for its trading pairs: BTC, EOS, ETH and USDT. Here is a complete record of the alleged trades recorded for each of those base currencies over the last 24 hours (at the time of writing):
EOS – note the very high TRYBE volume and the zero volume for everything else except “DAY”:
From Daybit
BTC – a little bit of DAY (suspiciously close to the amount traded for EOS), some HUNT, a small bit of STEEM and a lot more zeros.
From Daybit
ETH – a world of nothingness – the list carries on, but as you can see I have ordered it by decreasing volume – nothing has been traded.
From Daybit
USDT – More nothing
From Daybit
As you can see on CoinGecko: the total claimed trading volume of Daybit over 24 hours was just over $500 000, most of which came from TRYBE.
From https://www.coingecko.com/en/exchanges/daybit
Yet my orders never even triggered.
I’m calling Daybit out on what is obviously Wash Trading. I don’t know why they have picked TRYBE, perhaps they feel it is “below the radar” enough not to get noticed. Hard luck Daybit, it’s been on my watchlist for months – and I don’t miss much.
Decide for yourself if I am right, I don’t see how I could possibly be wrong. In light of this, I will be ensuring that CoinGecko gets this information so that they can improve their “Trust Score” algorithm (which I have written about in the past). At the moment Daybit is too small to even get a Trust score, but the sooner CoinGecko knows about it, the more they can keep an eye on it and the better for us all.
Bad actors are a blight in the crypto space. I will fight them wherever I find them, be it a little wash trading by a small exchange or the mighty Facebook, Ripple or JP Morgan and their self-serving “cryptocurrencies”.
As a community it is up to us to self-regulate. Nobody is going to regulate crypto for us if we don’t do it ourselves. (Yes we all know the banks and governments will try in vain – much to our amusement!) Dishonesty in this sector is bad for us all, it breaks trust and gives crypto a bad name. Wash trading is a major problem, what you see in this post isn’t even the tip of that iceberg, some major exchanges do it all the time. We all need to stand together to say that we will not accept it.
I recommend that if you want to buy or sell TRYBE then you do so on Nexdex. It works smoothly with Scatter and is non-custodial – making it cheap, easy and secure to use – just as a DEX should be.
To the Trybe team: I suggest automating the withdrawal process and increasing the withdrawal limits. For Trybe to find fair price, get noticed and to gain popularity as a token, it needs to be traded, spoken about and visible on the exchanges.
For the record I don’t think that TRYBE is the kind of token that one should be trading right now: it’s still a small token and the value of such tokens lies mainly in holding them and staking them while they are still cheap. My readers will know that I’m far more interested in investing than in trading. As a community let us all try to grow our TRYBE in the healthiest way possible: let’s spread the word and let the price grow organically. I definitely suggest that you avoid using Daybit for TRYBE trading.
Yours in crypto
Bit Brain
“The secret to success: find out where people are going and get there first”
~ Mark Twain
“Crypto does not require institutional investment to succeed; institutions require crypto investments to remain successful”
In Elliott Wave terms, SNX began a wave one advance on May 14. The red wave one (blue sub-waves i-ii-iii-iv-v) finished on June 7, and the red wave two (blue sub-waves a-b-c) correction ended on July 1. If this wave count is correct, SNX should be heading next towards the June 7 peak in the red wave three.
Synthetix is a decentralised synthetic asset platform that provides on-chain exposure to real-world currencies, commodities, stocks, and indices. Blockchained Future explained the platform in more detail back in May this year.
The stock surged 2% on Monday, adding to a nearly 30% advance for the year, after a pause on additional tariffs between the U.S. and China reignited hopes of trade progress.
Apple would need to reach at least $210 to break out above the upper band of its symmetrical triangle pattern. That marks a roughly 4% rally from its current level at less than $202.
“However, the more important level is going to be the early May highs. That’s up right around $212. You break above that, not only will you get a break of the triangle pattern, but you’ll have a nice higher low, higher high sequence which should give this stock another leg higher,” said Maley.
But the real level to watch is the weekly supply at $222, because of the previous sellers at $215, the weekly supply at $222 is just below the monthly supply and the unfilled sell orders waiting near $222.
This post is my personal opinion. I’m not a financial advisor, this isn’t financial advise. Do your own research before making investment decisions.
QTUM seen from the temporality of 1D we can observe how the price maintains a movement of (EW), after forming the wave number three, QTUM has entered into accumulation where it has found support within the price range of 4 – 4.1, which is indicated on the graph within a blue rectangle, this structure is forming the wave number four of the current trend, therefore, it is a good time to buy to go for more profits in the fifth wave that I have placed in the price range of 7.6 – 7.9.
QTUM seen from the temporality of 4H we can observe more closely the bullish banderin, a pattern of continuation of the bullish trend, in the graph I have marked the points (ABCDE) that has already formed this setup, currently the candles are consolidating in support forming point E and last of this pattern, we should see the price rise from here to test the resistance of the figure and look for the break up to the rise.
In conclusion, the price is forming a pattern of continuation and the movement has already formed point E, therefore, this is the best time to enter long and take advantage of the next movement of the price, I recommend to be attentive to the movement of the next candles of 4H, the price should not fall beyond 4.8, as this would be causing us an invalidation.
As I always say, you have to be aware of the movement, invalidations can occur, there is no 100% reliable analysis, take your own precautions when trading.
I hope this has been helpful. I’d be happy to answer any questions in the comment section below. Until next time, wishing you safe and profitable trading.
Workin
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Get paid for viewing ads and Support the Crypto Ecosystem with Brave Browser. Free download here: https://brave.com/wor485
Bulls have fought their way back up to test a major resistance at $11,500. This is a critical zone for bitcoin. Not only do we see clear visual resistance, when zooming in on a micro level we can see it’s hitting the golden pocket when pulling the fib from the local swing high to local swing low.
Bitcoin is also sitting right inside the upper CME gap.
In today’s video I discuss where price may go from here, traps to avoid and so much more. I hope you find it helpful. I’ll follow up this video with another one that answers your questions.
Video Analysis:
I hope this has been helpful. I’d be happy to answer any questions in the comment section below. Until next time, wishing you safe and profitable trading.
Workin
If you found this post informative, please:
Get paid for viewing ads and Support the Crypto Ecosystem with Brave Browser. Free download here: https://brave.com/wor485
