One shouldn't expect otherwise.
Furthermore, setting up such things is not cost-free, and if the high-volatility situation is temporary (which is very likely) it could well be that it isn't worth the cost, complexity and risk.
"It is illegal to pay directly for general transactions with dollars or Euros."
These people: http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2014/12/16/370979773/arge...
Is this true? Why are all major product releases in the US if most of their revenue is coming from overseas?
Edit: Ok, we'll change it back. Sorry for the mistake.
Nonsense. The surcharge is the difference between the spot rate and the futures rate with which they hedge. They can easily predict (to a reasonable degree) the volume they need to hedge by estimating their market.
Dollars are assumed to be much more stable.
I know it's well intentioned, but this power in the hands of a few seems to do more harm than good. Why not just let the populous up/down vote things as they see fit?
I wouldn't have upvoted an article about the general ruble decline (it's not news to me). I would (and did) upvote an article Apple halting Russian sales.
HN needs to stop doing this kind of thing, particularly when the (admittedly ancient infrastructure) doesn't add an "edited" declaration, etc.
The derivatives market still exists and you can null out future FX risk by paying whatever the derivatives market is charging for it now and passing that cost onto consumers.
Basically, you make the customer buy insurance against the ruble losing value against the dollar. It's like charging a subprime borrower PMI.
My guess is that your typo isn't too far from the truth. Everything we've seen lately with regard to falling oil prices is geared towards attacking the Putin regime. Eventually the Russian people will find themselves living in a North Korean-style pariah state... or else they'll wake up and take drastic action to keep that from happening. Either way the medium-term outlook for the ruble is pretty much toast.
Long term high interest rates plus high cost of import supplies will likely strangle the economy though. Increased demand for domestic goods due to higher import prices is a good thing, but one needs capital to operate most businesses. When interest rates are high you can't borrow, and when political situation is flaky fewer people will want to buy equity.
Why would you do that sort of roundabout route when you could just trade rubles for other currencies directly?
Plus selling the phone back to get rubles doesn't seem like a smart move unless you think you've timed the bottom and the ruble isn't going to slip further against the dollar. Doesn't seem like people really think that.
At the moment, people would rather hold iPhones than rubles. I don't think that's in an attempt to turn a profit, it's just because an iPhone (or a major appliance, or a computer) is perceived to be a better store of value than rubles. Which given how electronics depreciate, is a really bad sign.
Amex disallows on their network but Visa and Mastercard do not. Unfortunately, Amex also has forex fees on most of their cards.
At 14% interest rates there's basically no way to afford capital investments. Unless you are buying a printing press to print more money.
Yeah, Saudi Aramco 2005 is still worth more than Apple right now.. but oil has fallen so maybe this has changed.
1) Increase the rate to something truly insane like 1000%
2) Introduce currency controls and force everyone to use Ruble
Neither of these options are good, but #2 seems much more likely.
Apple's US unit volume is close to 50 million per year. For 2014, Chinese consumers are expected to buy close to 300 million smart phones, and Apple has close to 15% of that market. So I'd say it's a pretty tight race currently. Apple has a big problem in China however, they're getting squeezed substantially by the domestics (Xiaomi etc). In the US that's not happening, and Apple has held on to their strong ~45% market share.
http://www.ibtimes.com/iphone-6-preorders-china-set-surpass-...
"China could soon surpass the U.S. as the biggest market for Apple Inc.'s iPhone. A report on China's Tencent Monday said Chinese consumers preordered 20 million iPhone 6 and 6 Plus smartphones in the first weekend they were available for preorder.
"If those numbers turn into sales when the iPhone is released Oct. 17, China will have doubled the 10 million phones sold in the first weekend in the U.S., setting it on the path to be the world's biggest market for iPhones."
I don't know if it's going to be effective at all, just trying to find the most charitable explanation for CB.ru actions.
Where it does make a difference is that long end bonds (OFZ 28s) are now yielding 15%. That's 15% for 13 years ;) Chunky yield in the long end. That will tempt the long term investors in (IF big if, they don't impose controls). Care to catch the falling knife?
Edit: @potench preev.com is an inaccurate indicator of the BTC/RUB rate because it is basing its calculation "based on the USD Bitcoin price" per its footnote, so of course it will never show a big deviation from the BTC/USD rate. For the true rate you need to look at the real-time bid/ask spread on a BTC/RUB exchange such as btc-e.com which is why I linked to https://bitcoinwisdom.com/markets/btce/btcrur or you can also look at https://btc-e.com/exchange/btc_rur: bid/ask is 20855/21099 RUB as of 22:09 UTC, so the arbitrage opportunity is approximately 2000 RUB.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/08/20/w...
In that time the US has added $3 trillion to its GDP, going from $14.5 trillion in 2007, to a present $17.65 trillion or so. It's likely the US has reclaimed its title as the largest economic zone. Given the US is set to expand at close to 3% for 2015, and is growing much faster than Europe, that gap is likely to expand in the next few years.
Apple is not worth anywhere near as much as China's stock market however. The Shanghai Stock Exchange all by itself is worth several trillion dollars.
don't forget that even according to Russian government 60% of currency trading is insider based, ie. those banks and big traders are tipped (it is Russia after all - 137th place out of 170 rated in world corruption index) when for example Central Bank is to perform a ruble supporting "intervention". SEC and Fed cozying up to Wall St have nothing on how things are done in Moscow :)
>Increased demand for domestic goods due to higher import prices is a good thing
That would probably be the case for any normal country, yet not for Russia. Due to food import sanctions self-imposed by Russia, the price of foreign foods has increased, and the domestic foods prices immediately followed it as a result thus directly increasing consumer felt inflation. And there is no way Russia can noticeably increase food production, at practically any food prices. Instead the only option is to buy in other countries like Brazil, which means paying dollars which would mean even higher ruble prices for these foods on Russian market.
Like during 199x years, for the next several years Russians will be back to dollars (and "black" accounting/contracts/salaries/offshoring) while government would implement significant obstacles to such "dollarisation" of the economy. Which means an immense business opportunities for BTC and other forms of money infrastructure allowing to perform "point A" - rubles in Russia - to "point B" - dollars in a Western country - and which are less subject to the [Russian] government control.
It is kind of surreal - i was inside USSR when it collapsed due to the low oil prices of 198x. I didn't understand it back then. Now i watch this, similar, collapse of smaller, Putin's, version of USSR from comfortable "orchestra" seats (Silicon Valley) and can't stop wondering how things haven't changed a bit.
Edit: to the "twelve40" below - i lived in the USSR/Russia the first 28 years of my life. One can write a huge number of PhD dissertations on the problems of Russian agriculture - legal, social, historical, economical, climate-related, psychological, etc... About the same question is why Russia can't produce a good car, at any prices :)
It will be a bit more complicated this time.
They might not have any other option though.
http://qz.com/312598/bitcoin-is-the-worst-investment-of-2014...
http://qz.com/312598/bitcoin-is-the-worst-investment-of-2014...
The more relevant short term argument that I am referring to, is that if they were to "squeeze" the offshore market by disallowing or limiting the lending of RUB by local banks to offshore banks, then they could easily engineer a massive squeeze on the rouble offshore. That is all those people who are short RUB would suddenly find that "rolling" those positions (that is, borrowing RUB so you can sell it), suddenly costs a fortune. This is even true in FX forwards because ultimately these are a derivative of interest rates. If it costs you a fortune to "fund" the RUB, then the converse is that it pays you a fortune to lend RUB to the market. If it pays you handsomely simply to lend short-term RUB to the market, there is no reason to buy long term bonds, whose price must "compete" with the front end of the yield curve. In short: high short end rates will deter purchasing of any instrument with a (significantly) lower yield in the long end of the yield curve. If we were to get the above mentioned RUB squeeze to anything like 100% or higher, imagine how silly it would be to buy a long end bond at 15% (even though yes yes, long term it might still be a good investment - but that would require a long discussion about the implied path of future rates. Humans have proven themselves to be very short termist in markets and thus it is likely that long term bond prices would fall, dramatically in that scenario).
So to answer your question directly, bond investors still would be able to trade out of their positions (though in a disorderly market even that cannot be taken for granted), but at a very low price.
That time they've raised the prices to compensate without closing the shop altogether.
If people think such a scenario can't easily happen again, then they're wrong about that. A small number of major bitcoin holders mostly determine the price.
1 BTC is 22,810.00 RUB (1)
1 BTC is $330.80 (2)
$330.80 is 22,982.67 RUB (3)
Arbitrage of 172.67 RUB
3. https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...
It finally "stabilized" somewhere around 5500-6000:$1 but the exchange markets still wouldn't function. Finally, running out of currency, our hosts did the exchange with their personal funds, hoping that the dollars we were giving them would turn out to be a good investment later. I didn't really understand at the time what a huge risk they were taking, and how much money, relatively, they were converting for us.
It's one of many generous things that happened during that exchange that's given me a perpetual fondness for the Russian people, even if sometimes I share in many of the grim feelings for the national politics.
Unless you've already established accounts at several different exchanges, you really shouldn't try anything based off of an HN comment. Please be careful not to deposit funds which are then frozen because your account is new. That type of thing. New accounts are subject to much scrutiny.
In particular, be very careful when your motive is greed (or "to seize an opportunity," to use a euphemism). Bitcoin isn't subject to regulation. Exchanges essentially play by their own rules. And when the world is going nuts, that means exchanges have the ability to do pretty much whatever they decide is the right choice. If they decide to temporarily halt withdraws, and you're caught up in that net, you could potentially lose a lot, even if it doesn't seem like it.
Try not to risk more than, say, 20% of whatever you can afford to lose. Even if you think you can afford to lose it, the reality of losing it might kick you in the stomach harder than you probably realize.
EDIT: Also, if you absolutely insist on taking crazy risks like this, here's a tip: estimate the transaction fees, and then double it. That gives you a margin of error. Your transaction fees are usually what eat up much of your potential profits in this kind of thing, so if you pretend like they're double, you can avoid making some extremely risky decisions.
In fact, I'm just going to urge you to avoid this altogether. It's not fun to be in a position of staring at a financial chart and willing it to go up, knowing that if it doesn't, you're screwed. It's also not fun to sell, thinking you're screwed, when in reality if you'd just waited a little bit longer you would've been fine. Or when you resent yourself for selling too early and "not making as much money as you could have." This kind of greedy standalone thing will wrap your emotions around a pole, and it's way too easy to convince yourself you're the kind of person that can handle it.
Also realize that even if you do profit off of this, you can't really credit yourself for being clever. You'd be fooling yourself. At best, you can simply feel lucky. So there's not much skill involved in this, beyond putting in a lot of time to research how things work, etc, and then hoping the world ends up obeying your mental model, which rarely happens anyway.
Poker is way more fun than this. Go do that.
Err... this isn't a democracy and has never claimed to be one.
Source?
But if you bought BTC only 60 days earlier (November 1st, 2013), it was at $200, so you would have a +65% return rate as of today, easily beating the ruble, or virtually any of the world's currencies for that matter: http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD#rg60zigDailyzczs...
You can't afford think that way. I did, and it took me a long time to realize that I was being insane while I was doing it. Unless you're planning for a timescale measured in "decades," you're setting yourself up to get burned.
Out of all the persuasive arguments I could make, consider this: There are better ways to double your money than bitcoin. Within the next decade, you probably won't see something like the leap from $6 to $600 again. I'll be happy to eat my words about that. Personally, I don't see how you'd even get to 10x your investment. $350 to $1200 would be 3.4x ROI. And while that's a good return, there are other ways to grow a nest egg from $20k to $68k without gambling it. And if we can't publicly admit that bitcoin is essentially gambling, not investing, then we should at least admit that to ourselves.
EDIT: One point I'd like to underscore is that the price of bitcoin is mostly determined by the major holders. If any of them lose faith and pull out, that will trigger others to pull out. Also, they have a lovely tendency to dump a lot of money into the market, which jumps the price, which causes other people to pour money in. Then the major player sells, capturing all of that money that everyone else poured in. You see? It's a predatory game, and you don't have to take my word for it. Examine the graphs and you'll see "jump-sells" like that over and over again.
Wrong. Your assertion is easy to debunk: if this was true, then, since they hold many bitcoins, why don't they make the price go up to increase the value of their assets? Why do they let it fall from $1200 to $350? Answer: because they can't willy-nilly make the price go up or stop the fall.
The reality is that anybody who is wealthy (the millions of high net worth individuals in the world, which is a lot more people than the ~1000 guys in the world holding 1000+ BTC each) can somewhat influence markets, up or down, but nobody can really "determine the price".
I fear forums whom I enjoyed becoming places of distrust, hatred and battle space against the other political 'side'. Where admins and moderators use their given powers to torture the unwanted. I have only recently seen an Isreali woman marrying an Iranian man on television loving each other. And don't think that all people agree to what the politicians have to say.
We are better. If all fails, I still believe that: “Chaos often breeds life, while order breeds habit.” – Henry Adams Regarding 'Chaos' - this seem like a good read: http://www.halexandria.org/dward165.htm
Leading countries co-operate to limit capital-flow to Russia and this albeit sounding implausible to me, has direct influence on the economic liquidity. Implausible because I don't know how it would be possible for countries and companies to co-operate on such a scale on a capital market, where most notably personal profit leads the market over political decisions. I would be much more curious on which companies initiated the financial war and how they orchestrated their strategies, than the actual outcome, from the PoV of a mathematically and technologically fascinated guy.
http://i.imgur.com/dnAWMT2.png
Thank you for reading so far.
Now we're reaching a point that might be a somewhat reasonable valuation for the currency. But my stance here is that even this "low" valuation is extraordinarily precarious. If someone with tens of thousands of coins decides to pull out of the market, they will trigger others to follow suit. Similarly, if someone else decides to buy tens of thousands of bitcoins in order to trigger another bubble, that's quite possible too. Remember, 10,000 coins is "only" ~$10M, which isn't much when compared to the billions that a lot of funds manage. And if someone spaces a large number of buys over a long timescale, it'd be easy to give the impression that the entire bitcoin scene is experiencing healthy, sustained growth, even though that growth is mostly artificial.
This is doubly a problem when you hold a privileged position like a bitcoin exchange, where you can use your position to either manipulate the markets directly or to be privy to info that others don't have. Which, by the way, is totally legal. Even if it's not legal in the US, it's legal in other countries. As far as I know, no one knows who's behind the BTC-e exchange. They're very popular, and they can use that position to do whatever kind of manipulation they want. And since the price at every exchange affects every other exchange (arbitrage), there's no way to avoid being manipulated.
In an unregulated market, you, as one of the multitudes, can't win. Others will always have access to information that you don't, such a whether the growth you're seeing is artificial. You can't win unless everybody wins. And when it comes to BTC, that outcome is far from certain. Especially when people are trying to prey off you.
I lost a significant amount of money thinking that way during the .com bubble collapse.
If the Russian economy is already overdependent on oil money, they should be looking to diversify, not to acquire more energy assets.
Hardware (iPhone, iPad, Mac, in that order) make up the vast majority of Apple's sales revenue.
That is actually pretty striking. There aren't many abritrage opportunities in the 5%+ return range that last for very long. I assume such opportunities always exist since Bitcoin markets are far from perfectly efficient, but these spreads are pretty big.
Agriculture everywhere is a 1. low margin 2. labor intensive enterprise that requires 3. careful planning, 4. careful execution combined with 5. good stable investment climate and 6. property rights protection. In the relatively harsher climate of Russia the 3. and 4. becomes extremely important while Russians are among the worst people in the world when it comes to the 3. and 4. The 5. and 6. in Russia are among the worst due to its people's general contempt for entrepreneurship and due to dis-functionality and corruptedness of its government at all levels. While when it comes to oil/gas, piping it from the ground beats apple growing by the orders of magnitude wrt. the 1. and 2. :), and the 3. and 4. are partially solved by having foreign companies perform the complex drilling (and kicked out of the country after that :), and giving such high margins the 5. and 6. are solved in oil business by merging with the state which isn't an option for farmers. In short - having oil/gas is a big misfortune for Russia in the long run.
The problem is $60 per barrel oil. Putin can't undo that.
Sorry, but I got lost reading this. Mind explaining it a little more thoroughly?
Your Russian hosts gave you Rubles for your dollars right?
> It drives me crazy.
I can understand that, and it bothers me that even one user feels this way. Unfortunately, every time I sit down to reply, multiple paragraphs insist on coming out, and I haven't had time to edit them. I'll try to come back and post something later. (Edit: sorry, I guess it'll have to be another time.)
Also, let's not forget the last time merger of farming with the state happened in Russia. The problems with 3 and 4 wound up causing a significant number of deaths.
In Moscow we could use Dollars more or less at most places, but deeper into the country it was harder for the Russians to use dollars so the local economy was Ruble only.
If the Ruble continued to fall, and someday the exchange markets reopened, they could buy more Rubles with the dollars they exchanged with us. This is important because while the exchange rate continued to worsen, their income stayed relatively the same. If they made (pulling a number out of thin air) $10,000 a year, or R15m at the start of our trip, they were only making $2,800 a year at the end even though the number of Rubles they made stayed the same.
If the Ruble continued to fall, say to 8,000:$1 they'd end up making less than $1,900 a year. However, if they bought USD from us at 5500:1 it meant that if it fell, they could buy back 8,000 Rubles for each dollar later, keeping them closer to $2,800 exchangeable dollars.
If the Ruble reverted back to the original rate (1500:$1) then they'd lose their shirts because they just gave us their currency at less than 1/3 value.
Just as importantly, if they were making about $10,000/year, exchanging $400 or whatever with an American kid meant that half their monthly salary was locked up in nonexchangeable USD. The USD had value, but it was non-liquid at that moment.
IIR they weren't able to exchange the dollars until later that year and there were caps on the amount that could be exchanged at once. The next year we repeated the exchange program and I believe some of those dollars we exchanged with them were brought with them to use here.
A few years later, in 1998 the Ruble was reformed on a 1,000:1 basis.
Things were devaluing so fast that people still had Kopek coinage sitting in coin jars that were unspendable and stacks of low denomination currency (1 Ruble to 500 Rubles) that while spendable, were incredibly inconvenient.
I think the point the parent was getting at is that it doesn't take much buying/selling to really move Bitcoin's value.
Why wouldn't they make the price go up? They could, but what good would it do? You need to sell Bitcoins to realize a return and selling will push the price down.
Here's some information I found on the time period http://www.photius.com/countries/russia/economy/russia_econo...
bloomberg.com/news/2014-10-16/saudi-arabia-oil-stance-seen-targeting-opec-output-discipline.html
wsj.com/articles/saudi-oil-price-cut-upends-market-1415063053
Thanks in advance
In the end of the 80es when the Swedes had their big banking crisis, interbank rates were above 30% and the Swedish krona halved compared to the neighbouring Scandinavian countries.
The late 90es had the Asian currency crisis where most South East Asian currencies where more than halved against the dollar. That crisis more or less led to the unfolding of the biggest hedge fund at that time (LCTM) which had to be bailed out by the FED.
Thru the 90es the Russians defaulted and the ruble collapsed manifold.
I am curious on how Russians sees the current situation?
Is this the west/USA waging currency war against Russia?
Is this a return to "normal" with things being like they were in the 90es? Or Russia being isolated as under the Soviet union?
I met a few Russians on my travels. And I always enjoyed the company of those I got to know. My impression is that Russia has an young (age 20-30) emerging middle class who are smart, reasonable and completely unlike the image we have in the west of druken, violent crooks with bad taste.
I would hate to see Russia return to isolation.
If you mean to do so quickly, and without taking some significant risk, I'll call.
If you don't care what happens to that $20k, then do anything you want with it. But if you do, the EV on bitcoin is probably worse than, say, learning to play poker semi-professionally.
Simple. Heads of State get together and decide to what they want to happen. They have a whole range of levers to pull to manipulate markets.
> where most notably personal profit leads the market over political decisions
This is 100% wrong. I trade Forex daily and (a) political decisions drive the market and (b) we follow the market not drive it. Statements from say ECB, FOMC and reserve banks around the world etc all dictate what the currency markets will do.
Sorry but fiat currencies possess no advantages other than incumbent localised network effects. The world needs a true global currency and Bitcoin is it.
Alternatively, wait a few hundred years until you need several hundred terabytes to store the blockchain, which is required for transactions. That's going to be a problem.
Or you could switch to Bitcoin before realizing that currencies which deflate in value are a terrible idea.
(For the record, I support cryptocurrency. I just think Bitcoin has too many issues to be viable long-term. Nice proof of concept, but it needs to be refined).
It seems more likely to me that in a few hundred years, several hundred terabytes will come in your mobile implant than for hundreds of terabytes to be a storage problem.
It just doesn't seem like an insightful comment.
let me tell you a story. In 1996 a Dutch farmer came to Russia to farm potatoes. His plan seemed flawless - availability of a lot of cheap good for potatoes land plus his skills. He rented the land, planted and tended the potatoes on it. By the harvest time his potential harvest seemed very great. Almost miraculously great - like several times compare to the potential harvest from the nearby fields of the Russian individual farms and remnants of collective farms. And his potatoes were just better in size/shape and overall quality. Well, people from nearby villages and towns started to come to his fields en mass and harvest the potatoes for themselves. Including local police people coming and loading the potatoes into their official police SUVs :) A Russian national TV crew came and filmed a story about it right during daytime :) I'd say that was a Russian specific "force major" the farmer failed to plan for :)
That wont be developed overnight, by the time it is a possibility people will be working on solutions. a quantum computer would impact a lot more than bitcoin, all cryptography would become useless.
>Alternatively, wait a few hundred years until you need several hundred terabytes to store the blockchain, which is required for transactions. That's going to be a problem.
With the cost of storage rapidly reducing then that probably wont be an issue in a few hundred years.
>Or you could switch to Bitcoin before realizing that currencies which deflate in value are a terrible idea.
Currencies that inflate have had their share of problems and we certainly have not found a way to solve those problems or the issue of inflation/hyper-inflation. Any problems with delfationary currencies (which you do not detail) are merely hypothetical as no real deflationary currency has existed before.
Despite often being illegal, Soviet Union had a history of people holding a portion of their savings in foreign currency(just look up Bulgakov's Master and Margarita or Ilf and Petrov's Golden Calf for early references).
So if your local currency is in a free fall you would be well advised to convert your local roubles into hard currency.
I rememember very well the day that my father exchanged 10,000 roubles for $1,000 in the late 1980s from an American tourist. The official rate was ~1.3 dollars for 1 rouble (rouble was officially more valuable than dollar!) at the time, but the catch was you could only exchange a few hundred at a time in very special circumstances. (I believe this is how it is in Venezuela right now too, other places with currency controls).
So your hosts were making a nice gesture but also being smart in times of uncertainty because historical precedent was that their roubles would become worthless not come up.
That's really bad for an economy.
My ideal cryptocurrency would constantly "leak" money, trying to maintain a 0.1% or so inflation rate a year, to prevent this problem.
>That's really bad for an economy.
The economy is hardly in brilliant shape right now. This process of Boom/Bust has been running for the last century or so and they still cannot control it (or properly understand it) and they have had a lot of time to try and master fiat currency, controls, regulation etc. You say that people saving is bad for an economy, but that implies that the only good thing for an economy is constant spending and growth. That is bad for an economy, the belief that only through constant growth can the economy work. At somepoint there is a plateau, the planet cannot support an infinite number of people, at some point the world economy will stop growing. according to current thinking that may as well indicate the end of the economic world as we know it.
It is time to try something new, it may go against what most people believe but it cannot be any worse than the current situation which is not working as evidenced by the economic slump of recent years.
Tl;Dr: Simply put, I just felt powerless over the suspicion driven hunt for people who might imply that they belong to a party, a side an ideology, a religion, or whatever is the 'currently trending enemy' of the day. Thus I wanted to reflect my feelings on that, because it's something that's not said often enough.
--- For those who still can't put me into drawer: I don't belong to a religion, don't choose a political party or take any active position in current or past political movements.
I think it was a depressive moment, one where I realized that the war is not only out there and far from where I live, but here and now. That it affects all of us. And is most frustratingly causing a split in once finely cooperating individuals and an ersatz valve for undirected agony on the other side. I've read comments from people in different forums who attack each other for tangential comments. (I mostly lurk around and only enjoy reading interesting or insightful comments)
The increasingly restricting laws that take the freedom we took for granted is a side-effect of our wars in foreign countries, but it's also causing a heat up of anti-surveillance protesters who'd like to reduce the symptoms of the war that targets them.
I couldn't voice otherwise it may not be one of my most insightful comments. Maybe it was an neede. I'm sorry that it doesn't mean nothing for viraptor or byEngineer. That's all.
