Venture Capitalist Tim Draper Wins Bitcoin Auction

No, he didn't buy it on the open market as this was essentially a private transaction between two parties. What it means is there's now someone trying to sell (instead of hoard) bitcoins worth $what_he_paid_for_it + %target_return.

That will have an effect on the price, but he's not going to dump them and drive the price down because he paid a lot for them and wants to make a return (unless there's some kind of panic in bitcoin and he just says screw it). Kind of interesting actually.

At the very least, bitcoin is going to be a data driven economists wet dream for years to come.

danielweber• 12 years ago

Do we know his plan to sell them? It's what I would do, but has he stated his intent?

chollida1• 12 years ago

Wow, looking at the order book of bitstamp [1] through the eyes of someone who lives in the world of market microstructure is eye opening:)

There are huge holes everywhere in the order book and the liquidity at each offering level seems to be completely without reason.

I just spent 20 minutes applying the sort of algorithms that'd we'd normally run on each stock to make markets in it and it can't detect any real patterns or justification for the bid/ask levels.

Is this just a case of everyone in the bitcoin market being "unsophisticated" in the quantitative sense? or is there some new form of market micro structure being created here?

Thoughts??

EDIT For people asking about what you'd expect to see:

1) After the initial price level, you'd generally expect the next 10 or so price levels to be pretty tight. In the bitcoin case some of the spreads between price levels are larger than the bid/ask spread.

The price levels don't appear to have any logical basis behind why they are placed where they are.

2) volume at each price level. Similarly to above the volume at each price level doesn't appear to have any discernible pattern. Typically volumes would increase at each price level, up to a point, as more people join the market at each price level.

They don't break out a level 3 quote( order book by order, as opposed to price) so you can't really see how many orders are backing up each price level but given how small the volume of many of the price level are you can probably assume its only one person/order at most levels.

[1] https://www.bitstamp.net/market/order_book/

ewillbefull• 12 years ago

There are a lot of amateur day traders in the bitcoin community who just wing it. I'd say weird patterns you find are probably because of that.

computer• 12 years ago

I think one reason is that many people in the bitcoin market are unsophisticated compared to your normal market traders.

But also, Bitcoin is an asset all by itself. You can't hedge it against other assets, like you can do with corn or tech. You can't easily short it. So, there's no "true" reasonable price range like with most assets, and no normal influences on the price. It's basically truly a bubble of hot air everybody is bidding on, except with the hope that the bubble will never burst, and be used as currency.

VMG• 12 years ago

Look over at http://www.reddit.com/r/bitcoinmarkets. The "analysis" there will probably make you laugh and cry at the same time.

modeless• 12 years ago

As someone who doesn't live in the world of market microstructure, what kinds of patterns or justifications did you expect to see?

gibybo3• 12 years ago

I think the primary reason you don't see large amounts of sophisticated market makers is that the Bitcoin exchanges don't provide rules that are very favorable to them. The per-trade fees are high and liquidity rebates rare.

minimax• 12 years ago

For more lols check out the trading API. There is no TIF for orders and there isn't any obvious way to get fills as they occur. I guess you just poll the api to check for fills but they also say they'll ban your IP if you poll too often. Nice. Also no mechanism for cancel on disconnect or whatever the HTTP equivalent of that would be.

Maybe there is some money to be made there, but it's hard to imagine trading with that kind of tech.

https://www.bitstamp.net/api/

latchkey• 12 years ago

The btc-e API is far far worse. Some of the messages are in Russian and some are in English (randomly). Even worse (and a deal breaker for me) is that the order id can change underneath you if your transaction is split to fill the order, so there is no way to tell if your order completed or not. I've talked to people on Reddit who say they've made it work, but I'd never trust a bot spending money against an API like that. It's amateur hour when it comes to these exchanges and their API designs.

drpancake3• 12 years ago

Most of the exchange APIs are pretty dreadful to work with. Shameless plug, but I've had to a build a unified library to deal with this at Tradewave[1] and it has been challenging.

Some of the newer, more professionally managed exchanges support FIX but those are at very low volumes right now.

[1] https://tradewave.net

kolev2• 12 years ago

The main driver behind Bitcoin is amateur speculation. As those guys don't stand any chance on real markets, they find opportunity in Bitcoin.

kylebrown• 12 years ago

All "real markets" need suckers, just like a wholesale market needs retailers. Institutions are chasing the consumers, not the other way around.

dclusin2• 12 years ago

https://www.bitfinex.com/ allegedly (or at one point) claims to offer FIX connectivity. And they have swaps for BTC.

tptacek3• 12 years ago

Why would FIX support help? FIX provides a means of expressing useful order types, but it doesn't imply that there's a backend that implements them.

haakon2• 12 years ago

https://www.coinsetter.com/ also offers FIX.

throwaway2837192• 12 years ago

Well, a big part of the sparsity of the order book is that the tick size is tiny for a market this immature.

Take the USD/JPY rate for example, which moves in ticks of 0.01 and is currently sitting at 101.83, so the tick size is 0.0098% of the price (or about 1 basis point). This is a mature currency market between two giant countries.

By comparison, BTC/USD also moves in increments of 0.01 but its price is 655, so the tick size is 0.0015% of the price (0.15 basis points) which is absolutely tiny for such a thinly traded market.

I'd suggest that it should be trading in ticks at least 10 times larger. A cursory glance at the order book (top of book is currently 654.03 and the tenth level is 653.00 on the bid) shows that this would result in the first ten levels being filled most of the time. If it traded in increments of $0.20 (20 times the current tick) then the first ten levels would easily be filled.

hft_throwaway2• 12 years ago

That should create opportunity for automated trading. Identify large orders and place small orders a de minimis amount ahead of them when the bid-offer spread is sufficiently large. If someone trades with your bid (offer), try to be the best offer (bid) to exit and make the spread. If the large order behind you starts trading, trade with it to lose 0.01.

I've traded these markets by hand before using relative value signals from other exchanges (e.g. buy on bitstamp if btc-e moves up and bitstamp hasn't yet). You can't really do pure arbitrages since it takes so long to move money around but if you can identify which market leads you can use that as a starting point for coming up with a fair price to trade around. I made money easily but gave up on trying to automate it since the volume is so low, bid-offer spreads are often tighter than 2*trading fees, you can't short-sell easily/cheaply, exchanges seem incompetent or downright crooked, laughably bad APIs, etc.

These markets are wildly inefficient though. For a home day-trader or hobbyist there's easy money to be made. It's absurd how slowly price discovery trickles from one market to another. Most modern markets don't even get mispriced by a penny for more than a few microseconds, but there are nickels, dimes, quarters and even dollars of mispricing to capture in BTC/USD markets clicking on the screen.

You could probably dominate with an algo, but how much can you really make in a market that trades 10s of millions in notional value a day? There are also way too many exceptional conditions to let it run even semi-unattended since the exchanges are too immature. Anyone who's capable of doing it can make more doing the same thing on a real market.

ETA: Exchanges in this space are really, really bad. Some don't even know about rounding errors when using floating point for prices. Or would you trust trading on a market that can't even match trades as an atomic event? http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1r4d6t/bitstamps_st...

stcredzero• 12 years ago

Is this just a case of everyone in the bitcoin market being "unsophisticated" in the quantitative sense? or is there some new form of market micro structure being created here?

Not everyone, but a lot of people heavily involved with bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are rather unsophisticated.

Anyone reading this comment: Has someone started doing automated round trip trading between the various cryptocurrencies and conventional currencies?

broolstoryco• 12 years ago

What would you recommend as introductory reading to a person interested in market microstructure and market making? (Background in finance and programming)

drpancake3• 12 years ago

Rather heavy reading, but this is probably what you're looking for: http://www.amazon.com/Trading-Exchanges-Market-Microstructur...

Cyther6062• 12 years ago

I've been holding Bitcoin since it was $10. In my view, Bitcoin has always been thinly traded because most people new to Bitcoin learn that they should acquire as much of it as they can afford to, and then withdraw all of it from a centralized service. For example, they learn that decentralized, trustless money can only be decentralized and trustless when there's no middlemen involved. Storing BTC on an exchange just invites back the middleman. Which is just not part of the narrative.

Because of this, Bitcoin exchanges have always lagged the market, and BTC-denominated trading volumes will almost certainly always remain small. The real demand comes from people who want to hoard all of it that they can. It'd be a lot like Pogs if it weren't for the sorry state of government issued currencies.

Can this drive more and more people to currencies backed by nothing and governed by algorithms? Any news that affects this picture, moves the price, often times significantly, e.g. China. So in effect, the price of Bitcoin moves on whether the dream of breaking free from government issued currencies worldwide can actually happen.

In order to buy Bitcoin, you pretty much have to get over the fact that the only sustainable demand could come in the event that public trust towards mainstream institutions continues to erode to the point that people at large no longer trust the money. Or no longer trust the money for other reasons. The people who bought into BTC early on for pennies, viewed the situation like this, and many of them refuse to sell. I've seen people try to claim half of all Bitcoins have been deleted from hard drives in the early days or lost, which I find unbelievable. Then again, having been involved in the Bitcoin space for several years now, there's very little left that I find unbelievable. There's an enormous amount of disingenous players, and it's completely cut throat actually. If you're crazy enough to get on board with Bitcoin, chances are non-zero that you're also crazy enough to do and say anything to take people's BTCs. Because really, the narrative states that the price of BTC can only go up as more and more people lose faith in government backed currencies. The whole concept of a currency is based on mutually shared delusions, so it's really not without merit.

To cut it short, this results in poor liquidity. I haven't run the numbers myself, but I very much doubt the BTC trading volume, as measured in BTCs, as done anything but gone down now that the price reached $1200. That _really_ got the early adopters dreaming.

I'm honestly become extremely jaded and cynical over the last year in particular. If you think the idea of cryptocurrency can't work, there's not much you can do besides short it or ignore it. The latter is really quite hard, because anyone, even someone with less than 1 BTC to their name, inevitably finds it worth commenting on Bitcoin stories, and submitting Bitcoin related news of their own on social networking sites.

Bitcoin exchanges are moving to reduce fees to zero and add leveraged trading, because that's all you can really do to offer substantial liquidity in a market where all of the "real" participants aren't interested in trading, or spending the underlying. There's just not enough trading activity. It goes back to the narrative. The sad part is most exchanges are shoddy or even outright fraudulent, see: MtGox (Mark Karpeles in all likelihood stole 850,000 BTC, and no i don't find this surprising in the least bit).

All of you coming at this from the angle of HFT are playing with fire. That's all I can say.

I'm not saying any of this is a good thing, quite the contrary. The price of Bitcoin is effectively determined by day traders, payment processors like Coinbase and BitPay with clientele that effectively accepts BTC and then dumps it on the market, along with the odd miner or newbie looking to acquire coins en masse. Not to be mean spirited, but what the heck. Everyone else doesn't matter, because they don't have enough money to affect the market.

Truly, the Bitcoin concept itself more closely resembles MLM / network marketing than any one traditional financial instrument.

Finally, anyone who has invested or lent BTC over even a short timeframe in the past two-three years will tell you that there's no incentive to invest or lend or spend BTC. It is what it is. The only interesting game is acquiring as much BTC as you can afford and then playing with altcoins, which are mostly P&Ds.

Maybe it's a racket, maybe Bitcoin is only useful to spend on illicit items. Even so, the fact that more and more people are becoming interested in the idea of a currency governed by an algorithm just goes to show how little trust there is in mainstream institutions. This is why I'm very begrudgingly bullish. I don't think anyone who day trades Bitcoin knows what they're doing. I think it's profitable to sell at the top of pure manic phases, but it's not worth doing that when you consider taxes and reporting requirements. Buy and hold BTC in a wallet only you control. This has always been the best option, and it explains the overall shoddiness of the Bitcoin exchange scene.

gnaritas2• 12 years ago

but it's not worth doing that when you consider taxes and reporting requirements

That's like saying it's not worth owning stock because of taxes and reporting requirements; you're either very young, or you're just way off base.

presty• 12 years ago

Bitcoin trading is mostly done by bots/day traders and the orders shift around all the time a whale/bad news moves the market, so I wouldn't try to find much justification apart from people trying to make short term profit

xorcist• 12 years ago

Genuinely interested here. Would you mind explaining the terminology, or even better, expand on your thoughts in a blog post or something?

Bitcoin exchanges are generally very illiquid, in the meaning that little funds are kept on the exchanges. (Because there are no regulations and guarantees.) Would you not expect "huge holes" in such an order book? Why not?

What does "price level" mean? I read it as the distance between orders in the order book, but then your comment does not make sense. You are surprised these levels are farther apart than the bid/ask spread. Why?

What does "unsophisticated" mean? It seems to me you mean this in a specific sense rather than the dictionary meaning of the word. How is it that no discernible pattern is indicative of a less sophisticated market? In the layman definition of the word, one would expect the opposite.

I don't know if other markets behave the same but Bitcoin exchanges have large dark components to them. If the price moves dramatically, lots of coins move in/out of the exchanges. Some people believe the days-destroyed metric is indicative of these movements, but in practice things are of course not that simple.

As you might understand, I do dabble with Bitcoin trading on the side on a pure hobbyist basis and I would be very interested in your views on this. I don't know if there is a personal message function on the HN board but any answer would be appreciated. I think a lot of traders on Bitstamp and other exchanges are hobbyists too, but I have the feeling that something happened during the runup to the October rally and would not be surprised if there are quite a few pros among us now.

test1235• 12 years ago

Where does the money actually go after the sale is complete?

mrb• 12 years ago

"Proceeds generated from asset sales are used to operate the AFP, compensate victims, supplement funding for law enforcement initiatives and support community programs." http://www.usmarshals.gov/duties/factsheets/asset_forfeiture...

jordanmessina• 12 years ago

The Drapers are quite bullish on Bitcoin. Adam Draper's accelerator, Boost VC, is investing in 100 Bitcoin companies over the next 3 years: http://www.coindesk.com/boost-vc-accelerate-100-bitcoin-comp...

bredren• 12 years ago

Rob from Gliph here. Gliph is a Bitcoin company from Boost VC Class 2. Tim Draper led our angel round (with Pantera) and is a mentor to Gliph.

Tim has been excited about Bitcoin and its potential for some time. Well in advance of other VCs, Tim was talking about its potential, particularly with regard to "competitive governance."

Have a look at this youtube video from his presentation at Stanford in February of last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZ0mrD0EnI0#t=28m05s

He starts describing solutions for competitive governance around 28:05. At 29:10 he brings up Bitcoin. I believe this was the first time he spoke about Bitcoin publicly but may be wrong. He states in the video:

"[bitcoin is] the most valuable currency now on the planet because it is under no one's control. It is out of people's control. It is no longer regulated by any government. They can't print Bitcoin."

Bitcoin was worth about $24.50 when he said that.

roymurdock2• 12 years ago

The developers and miners are, in effect, the government of bitcoin. The developers act like the federal reserve, in that they can change the code to raise the max amount of bitcoin, increase the mining difficulty, etc. just as the Federal reserve would conduct open market operations or set interest rates to target inflation. So it's completely wrong to say that Bitcoin is "under no one's control". [0]

The key difference is that a majority of the miners have to accept the developer's changes and run the new client. The average US citizen cannot refuse interest rate hikes. So it's a transfer of power away from the few and corrupt (Fed + banks) to the few who are limited in their ability to be corrupt (developers + mining pools).

If the developers implement a terrible policy, the miners will refuse to update their clients to avoid devaluing the currency they are working hard to generate. So the power distribution and incentive structure are different. Whether thats a good or bad thing remains to be seen.

[0] http://www.weis2013.econinfosec.org/papers/KrollDaveyFeltenW...

cbhl• 12 years ago

I'm confused as to why anyone would invest in Bitcoin companies as opposed to Bitcoins directly. The impression I got was that investing in companies provided added risks (co-founder separation, business failure, legal risks), without providing a significant advantage (risk mitigation, upside multiplication) over just buying Bitcoins directly.

_delirium• 12 years ago

There are scenarios in which the Bitcoin "sector" grows without the value of Bitcoins themselves appreciating significantly (or at least, to the same extent). For example it could become a common medium of exchange but an uncommon medium to hold, if a large portion of the growth is in Bitcoin exchange platforms that convert payments immediately to national currencies, like BitPay. In such a situation there could be a large volume of business going through companies like BitPay, but with only transient demand for the coins themselves.

ghshephard2• 12 years ago

Bitcoin companies may quickly move to focus on properties of the blockchain that are not related (and, perhaps more importantly, more profitable), than the bitcoin currency.

Also, importantly, bitcoins may be extraordinarily profitable for a bitcoin company, but never increase in value, whereas if you purchased a bitcoin today for $700, and 5 years from now, the bitcoin was still $700, you would likely be unhappy.

jonnathanson• 12 years ago

The distinction is subtle, but important. Let's say, for example, that I have no real idea what the price of bitcoin should be in five years -- but I am confident that enthusiasm for, and interest in, bitcoin buying and trading will grow dramatically all the while. I'd rather own the company processing the transactions than the bitcoin itself. The bitcoin might soar, and it might tank, and it might do both of those things in a mostly unpredictable, haphazard fashion. (As has been happening.) But the companies trading bitcoin don't necessarily need to buy and hold. They can make money off of transaction volume, or off of leverage against their bitcoin assets, or off of any number of things only tangentially affected by the nominal value of bitcoin.

This is sort of like the old saying about how to make money in a gold rush. You don't mine for gold; you sell picks and shovels.

adrr• 12 years ago

Without the infrastructure to support bitcoins, the value bitcoins will remain stagnate or may even go down. Investing in companies to build out infrastructure for this currency is only "sure" bet you can take unless you gamble on someone else to make the investment.

guiomie• 12 years ago

Cashflow. The company can sell a service and have perpetual income. If bitcoin losses value, you are still generating income, as opposed to having your money invested directly in the currency.

goodcanadian• 12 years ago

From the article:

“Bitcoin frees people from trying to operate in a modern market economy with weak currencies. With the help of Vaurum and this newly purchased bitcoin, we expect to be able to create new services that can provide liquidity and confidence to markets that have been hamstrung by weak currencies”

The issue that I take with this statement is that so far, bitcoin is far from a strong stable currency. I reserve judgment on whether it will ever get there, but I am not convinced that doing business in bitcoin is currently safer than doing it in Indonesian rupiah (for example).

ianpurton• 12 years ago

Citizens in countries with high inflation could piossible benefit.

BorisMelnik• 12 years ago

anyone have any clue what some of the highest bids were?

r0m4n0• 12 years ago

It's interesting that they didn't communicate the amount and I haven't found any sources that provide one. You would think there would be more transparency seeing that the money is going into the government's pocket.

Someone should submit a freedom of information request...

n6mac417172• 12 years ago

The FAQ (http://www.usmarshals.gov/assets/2014/bitcoins/faqs.pdf) specifically says they will not disclose. I guess if someone really wants the information, they will challenge this intention. I find it interesting that it was leaked that 1 party won the bid--that seems in contradiction to the above...

mandeepj• 12 years ago

how it is different to mine your own bitcoins rather than buying from market? Who decides and based upon what factors - how many coins you can mine?

arg01• 12 years ago

To simplify: Bitcoin miners race to discover a code that gives them 50 bitcoins. This code gets harder to find each time it is found. This decision is pre-baked in using the bitcoin system (other e-currencies have different traits.)

If you join a mining pool then you split the 50 coins with everyone else in the pool (and they'll split with you) if you are the lucky machine than found the code.

The analogy is pretty direct: mining is the same as going and doing work to dig up gold, buying from the market is the same as buying gold in the market.

jc1232• 12 years ago

The current coinbase reward is 25, not 50, bitcoins. Halves every 4 years.

jc1232• 12 years ago

Mining bitcoins is a hardware arms race that will be very hard for new entrants to join unless they are willing to spend a lot.

robertlf• 12 years ago

Yup, the rich get richer.

oafitupa• 12 years ago

Everyone can get richer now thanks to Bitcoin. Not rich? Doesn't matter, just buy $10, $100, or whatever you can spare.

davycro• 12 years ago

Mr Draper states that Bitcoin is badly needed in resource-poor countries with unstable currencies. How does he expect Bitcoin to compete with mobile currencies such as M-Pesa?

Thinking about it, I imagine that the advantage of Bitcoin is that it can be sent globally, whereas M-Pesa type currencies are restricted to specific countries.

logicchains• 12 years ago

It's also harder to tax Bitcoin transactions than M-Pesa transactions, which could provide financial incentive to use it.

defo_nonconvex• 12 years ago

Isn't M-pesa backed using the country's currency? What logic of what you're saying sounds like it could imply that "Paypal is it's own virtual currency"...

tomlongson• 12 years ago

Building on the momentum of mainstream adoption and giving access to emerging markets, GogoCoin (500 Startups) is working to get Bitcoin and digital cash into everyone's hands.

I applaud Tim Draper and all the other notable bidders who help push Bitcoin one step closer to Wall Street and the mass market.

fdsary• 12 years ago

So there was a press conference about this. It was streamed somewhere.

If anyone has a torrent of the video I'd love it's url! Thank you very much

Venture Capitalist Tim Draper Wins Bitcoin Auction

Related Stories