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://qz.com/312598/bitcoin-is-the-worst-investment-of-2014...
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...
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
