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A comment on Bitcoin Tumbles as PBOC Declares Initial Coin Offerings Illegal. Parent comment

Re:Bitcoin Tumbles as PBOC Declares Initial Coin Offerings I... by modeless on Monday September 04, 2017 @07:28PM (#15171478)
People don't buy and sell ICO tokens with fiat, they do it with bitcoins. If a bunch of people want to sell their ICO tokens for fiat, they first end up with a bunch of bitcoins, and then they need to sell bitcoins for fiat. This pushes the price of bitcoins in fiat down.

It's a temporary phenomenon, but the price going down can make the price fall farther, because there are a bunch of amateur traders who think it's a good idea to buy when the price is rising and sell when it's falling.

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Re:Bitcoin Tumbles as PBOC Declares Initial Coin Offerings I... by Taek on Monday September 04, 2017 @09:19PM (#15171872)
Most ICOs actually trade Etherum, Bitcoin plays a role but it's usually secondary.
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Re:Bitcoin Tumbles as PBOC Declares Initial Coin Offerings I... by atomical on Monday September 04, 2017 @09:48PM (#15171957)
Are you sure that's the case for non-US crypto startups? Also, there are some ERC20 tokens that have better liquidity with the BTC pairing.
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Re:Bitcoin Tumbles as PBOC Declares Initial Coin Offerings I... by DennisP on Monday September 04, 2017 @10:09PM (#15172034)
It's true of almost all ICOs launching ERC20 tokens because on Ethereum you can write code that automatically turns your ETH into ERC20 tokens. A couple pages of code and it all just happens on the blockchain by itself.

If you take bitcoin contributions, you need something offchain to track who contributed what, and issue a bunch of minting transactions.

Some ICOs do that, but if it's ERC20 that's generally in addition to automated minting via smart contract, and since the token and ICO are running on the Ethereum blockchain it's predominantly ETH that gets contributed.

Liquidity on exchanges later doesn't have much to do with any of that.

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Re:Bitcoin Tumbles as PBOC Declares Initial Coin Offerings I... by cslarson on Tuesday September 05, 2017 @05:47AM (#15173731)
Most SNT trading is against BTC on the Bittrex exchange. It's 5x the trading as against ETH.

https://coinmarketcap.com/assets/status/#markets

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Re:Bitcoin Tumbles as PBOC Declares Initial Coin Offerings I... by DennisP on Tuesday September 05, 2017 @10:38AM (#15175615)
You're talking about trading after the ICO, I'm talking about the ICO itself.
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Re:Bitcoin Tumbles as PBOC Declares Initial Coin Offerings I... by rebuilder on Tuesday September 05, 2017 @12:36AM (#15172566)
To go from altcoins to fiat, one needs to first buy Bitcoin with altcoins, then sell Bitcoin for fiat. Why would this not be price neutral for Bitcoin?
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Re:Bitcoin Tumbles as PBOC Declares Initial Coin Offerings I... by zhte415 on Tuesday September 05, 2017 @06:09AM (#15173809)
No. Because volumes at different price points, and spreads, differ. Not transitive.
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Re:Bitcoin Tumbles as PBOC Declares Initial Coin Offerings I... by jgalt212 on Monday September 04, 2017 @10:29PM (#15172096)
> there are a bunch of amateur traders who think it's a good idea to buy when the price is rising and sell when it's falling.

professional traders and asset managers do this exact same thing.

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Re:Bitcoin Tumbles as PBOC Declares Initial Coin Offerings I... by astrange on Tuesday September 05, 2017 @05:25AM (#15173628)
That's called momentum trading and it's not a bad idea in a market where most traders aren't setting a price… aka, all public markets especially this one. Who needs fundamentals?
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