Read up on the story of the Piggly Wiggly short/corner.

a link for the lazy (twitter thread): https://twitter.com/dollarsanddata/status/135456107992655053...

And that time, the rules were also changed to protect the big guys. How convenient. The stock market is a farce.

unroll: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1354561079926550530.html

interestingly, the page I got was cached from Cloudflare. I wonder if the twitter chatter / thread unrolling is up enough during all this nuttiness that it's brought the site down.

Love that story. It's told in more detail along with other stories like it in Business Adventures by John Brooks - https://amzn.to/3cq4Fs5

So the moral of the story is you can't win against the machine

Were the market shutdowns manual or automatic handbrakes? I know there are breaks when specific thresholds are hit that are pre-determined.

As far as I know, they were automatic handbrakes based on excessive volatility. A feature designed to prevent chaos and people from over buying/selling due to panic.

Brokerages preventing users from buying certain stocks is clearly manual, and fairly unprecedented afaik

Yes. Both things happened. I was specifically talking about halting trade multiple times during the day.

There are different layers here.

Baked into the exchanges (NYSE, Nasdaq) are circuit breakers which halt all trading on certain volatility conditions. The intent is to stabilize prices. This is not what happened here.

What happened here is a broker (Robinhood) decided to not accept certain kinds of orders. It wasn't a market shutdown, it was a specific manipulation to stop the purchase but _not_ the sale of an instrument, causing the price to drop.

I was referring to what happened yesterday by NYSE, not what Robinhood did today.

Just invest in Bitcoin now, it is going to do the same thing in a few months. And it can’t be censored like this. I admire the gme crowd’s efforts but they are so misguided. Investing in zombie companies we actually hate is pointless. Yes you might bankrupt a hedge fund or two but the system will continue. Bitcoin was created for the disruption to the corrupt financial system that they are seeking.

It may displace the billionaires who run banks, hedge funds, etc... and replace them with billionaires who own huge mining farms.

Bitcoin doesn't solve any of our problems. It just shuffles around who's in power.

Bitcoin solves a lot of the biggest problems.

Fractional lending isn't possible because you can't make bitcoin out of nothing then charge interest on the nothing you lended.

Inflation is out of government control and no longer works as an unofficial tax. Related, money can't be printed at-will.

Large banks and corporations can't outright prevent transactions from happening.

The money can have value as a universal reserve currency without any specific political ties.

Removing big banks from the equation takes their hands at least partway off the politicians.

Seems like at least a decent upgrade to me.

You need inflation to at least match productivity improvements. Otherwise your economy will slow down over time.

I agree on the importance of inflation, but with a difference in how it happens.

Bitcoin currently inflates slightly. I think it should target a 1-2% steady inflation forever both to encourage spending and to replace lost coinage.

At the same time, inflation should not be a spending power advantage. By distributing inflation among miners, you don't give disproportionate advantage to any one group like governments currently enjoy. I view this as more fair and it removes the incentive to attempt to change inflation rates in the future.

> and replace them with billionaires who own huge mining farms.

Aren't most crypto coins set up so that mining is only getting harder with time? The ones ending up rich are the old money, the guys that invested into it in its early days.

Yes mining is a fool's errand. It was only great when you could do it on your computer. After that, it has just simply been a race against the difficulty and costs of mining. Almost every mining company would have come out further ahead if they simply bought coins rather than mined.

Source: I was a miner and would be a lot richer if I had just started purchasing coins earlier. :) Also any history book on cryptocurrency such as The Age of Cryptocurrency by Paul Vigna and Michael Casey from WSJ. The miners profiled in it are just trying to keep the lights on in 2015 and nothing has changed to the hamster wheel.

And merely being rich gives you little to no power over Bitcoin

That keeps the people in power wary from abusing it. What do you propose instead? Lulz

I personally really like alt coins like Nano, which don't require mining in the same way BTC does. But those usually have their own set of problems.

This is a gross oversimplification of how power to influence fiat and power to influence Bitcoin differ. Do better.

I mean, GME has value because it is shorted so much. The goal of WSB is to go for a short squeeze (when the short positions have to be closed to avoid going bankrupt, the stock price goes up). In that regard I'd consider bitcoin to have less "value", as its price is mostly based on hype, and it doesn't really have any practical uses.

And then the rich noted that, bought mining farms and turned bitcoin into their own playtoy.

How? Do you even understand how Bitcoin works?

By killing the revolution.

More money = more mining power, more trading power, ICO pumps and dumps that rose the overall crypto market volume, raising the hype and earned millions in the process for the early buyers/minters. The game was never equal.

Want to buy BTC? Get your ID ready, or do a local exchange which is quite inconvenient.

The revolution died as soon as you could a profit out of it.

Yes, some of what you describe could be done with Bitcoin, but Please do not confuse Bitcoin with “the overall crypto market” where all of what you described actually took place.

KYC and government regulations are a pain, but the core decentralized, limited supply, secure nature of Bitcoin will remain fully intact.

Rich and powerful people have already tried to take it over, they ended up with their own forks and you can judge how those have done.

>KYC and government regulations are a pain, but the core decentralized, limited supply, secure nature of Bitcoin will remain fully intact.

>decentralized How much of BTC is owned by large miners?

>Limited supply If we can't mine more, those with the larger supply have control.

>secure

For now.

Blockchain as the idea will propagate and is great, but bitcoin has failed.

>Please do not confuse Bitcoin with “the overall crypto market”

But it's value is quite tied to the crypto arket, isn't it?

I'm hesitant to invest in an alternative currency that the CCP is one of the largest holders of as a means to stave off corruption.

> Of all the countries in the world, China had, by far, the largest international reserves in August 2020, with 3.46 trillion U.S. dollars in reserves.

Maybe you shouldn’t use USD either.

Bitcoin is a bubble in progress. If you want to make money it certainly is a much better asset to speculate with. However, it's a bit late. Most of the easy gains are not available anymore. If you buy now you there is a decent risk that you will have to wait a year.

This does make the advantages of stuff like Ethereum dexes (uniswap, etc) a lot more obvious.