How is this true. Someone can just manufacture a bunch of ASICS... done.

I feel like I just witnessed the craziest arbitrage opportunity in history and if I'd noticed it even just 20 minutes earlier I would've made out like a bandit. This is with ppcoin, which has already just soared ridiculously in the last week or so. Some background first...

I bought a decent chunk of ppcoin months ago not long after it came out because I thought it was an intriguing idea and had a chance of being a superior currency to bitcoin, the only alt-coin for which I thought this applied. I bought mostly around 0.00025 bitcoins each (when bitcoins were like $12) over the period of a couple of months, with an investment worth roughly a few hundred dollars at the time. I would've bought quite a bit more if not for a few perceived flaws in the coin; namely the terrible name when spoken aloud, ugly website, highly untested/unproven method of securing the blockchain, and a block reward system that sharply favored early adopters even more than bitcoin. There was a period where the price was on the rise, I bought quite a bit at like .00047 which was around it's peak, and then it crashed eventually back down to like .0001. Until a few weeks ago I felt like the day might never come that ppcoin would trade for .0005 or above.

Not long ago amidst a cryptocurrency mania the price sharply rose, about 10x in a few days, to ~.0025. Part of it was word that one of the bigger exchanges, btc-e, would start trading ppcoins. I sold a decent bit along the way up but also took advantage of some big bid/ask spreads and arbitrage between the only two ppcoin exchanges with any volume. Earlier today, with prices still very roughly around .0025, one of the two exchanges went offline from DDOS and the other one announced it'd be closing it's doors shortly and prices dropped ~30% with huge spreads due to all the uncertainty.

Then around 7:30 PM EST today, btc-e opened its doors to trading PPC. I didn't notice until like 9:30 PM, and when I checked the price I saw they were trading for .018 bitcoins each. My mind thought I saw .0018, and I looked at the other exchange and saw there were some bids for .0025+. I saw an arbitrage opportunity and sold those right away and put in some limit ask orders. Then I switched back to btc-e to put in some buy orders, and that's when I realized the prices ppcoin was trading there were 10 times higher than I thought. I immediately switched back to the other exchange, canceled all my ask orders, and spent all 9 btc I had on the exchange to buy up the coins that were being offered. Even after I spent all those, there were still thousands of ppcoins for sale for under .003, but it takes 6 confirmations to get bitcoins in and by the time I could those offers were gone.

I shipped a ton of ppcoins into btc-e and waited impatiently for 3 confirmations go by. While I waited, I saw the orders and previous trades. The high mark for the day was .06, or almost $9 per coin. At that valuation, my ppcoin holdings would have be worth almost half a million dollars. I saw tons of absurd orders get put up that I couldn't fulfill even though I was dying to, like >100 bitcoins in bid offers at prices >5 times what they were trading for on the other exchange, but they were all taken down or gobbled up before my deposit went through.

By the time I did get my ppcoins on there, almost all of that was over. I managed to sell a few hundred coins at around .005-.006, and shortly after that all the absurd bids were gone. As of this writing both exchanges have leveled out at ~.003. I'm left feeling like if I'd decided to just put off the laundry and obsessively check bitcoin exchanges as I do sometimes - thereby catching the arbitrage opportunities right when they happened - I could be tens of thousands of dollars richer right now.

Anyway, I just needed a place to tell people this story. I thought that I couldn't be surprised by anything with cryptocurrency price swings anymore, but I was wrong. I never thought that kind of arbitrage was possible, or that something could trade at one price on one exchange and then 40x more on a different exchange a few hours later, then 20x less on that same exchange hardly even an hour later.

It's a bit of a shame that bitcoin and, to an even greater degree, alt-coins get way more attention as get rich quick schemes rather than innovative technologies that could change the world, but I can't look away...

damn unlucky man, after im able to dump all my trc to btc-e im going back to poker, its been fun but ive spent 14 hours a day doing this all week, just gonna hoard btc and very few coins of each and move on

This is a myth I believe. The market cap of bitcoin is worth way way more than the electricity used to create the existing coins. The resources dedicated to mining adjust to the value of the coins (and the size of the block reward), not vice-versa. Why should I care how much someone spent on electricity to mine a block?

The point of mining is to make it difficult to make blocks, so that an attacker can't make a blockchain longer than the honest/valid blockchain. It's to secure the network, not to consume energy. The end-goal is to have a decentralized ledger that is secure from double-spends and other attacks, proof of work through hashing is one way of doing this.

Ppcoin uses proof of work and the very same hashing algorithm that bitcoin uses to distribute coins, but the network is secured by consuming coin-age (# of coins * time elapsed since they've been spent) every time a block is created. To 51% attack or double-spend on ppcoins, an attacker would need to (at least in theory since it has not been tested extensively) control a large percent of the ppcoin supply. Just like how to 51% attack bitcoin one would need a large percent of the hashing power. The differences are that coin-age doesn't consume electricity to create (think about how many resources would go to mining if bitcoin reaches its potential) and that an attacker would need to acquire enormous amounts of the very coin he's trying to destroy.

I know the feeling! But if I don't follow this **** 14 hours a day, I might miss another once in a lifetime arbitrage opportunity...

haha yea same, I'm clicking refesh every 5 seconds now.

Something is wrong though, i have 12 confirmations for my terracoin and no coins are being traded on btc-e

i feel pretty foolish for blindly buying ppcoins at the higher prices. Live'n learn. Sanga are you interested in a btc themed werewolf game?

Hello 30 minutes ago! Price has since doubled. Anyway that's enough from me for now.

It was the other way around. Bitparking exchange closed, and Vircurex died under the influx of traffic from people transferring to there - or DDOS. I noticed Vircurex's ppcoind had stopped as the blockcount on their main page stopped increasing before they crashed completely a few hours later. BTC-e then opened for PPC.

whats the other exchange that trades ppc?

Yeah I have nfi what's going on. PPcoin now has a market cap of like $11.6M, and you can't do anything with it besides satoshi dice knockoffs afaik. On the other hand, there's some legitimate (but unproven) innovation behind it which can't be said for terracoin or most other bitcoin knockoffs.

I'd be down for a btc themed WW game though, sure. Or maybe I'd rather design one...

Are you the same doublec on bitcointalk?

I thought vircurex broke due to a wave of DDOS attacks on a number of sites, not increased traffic. Possibly both though. The order of events as I understand them is:

1) bitparking announces it's closing it's doors
2) vircurex breaks
3) ppcoin price drops ~30%
4) btc-e opens its doors and briefly trades ppcoins for 5-20x higher than the asks on bitparking

wow that is harsh might go up a bit yet still

Also saw the whole thing & got my ppc into btce too soon infact cause sold way before 0.04 but still made a mini score - 600 ppc turned into 8 btc

next stop litecoin hitting MTgox

Yes, that's me. Your order of events is correct. It took a while for vircurex to break - a few hours anyway. Impressive speed from btc-e to open and take advantage of it.

what i dont understand is

why aren't people arbing between btc-e and mtgox ? there is a $5 difference in their quotes..

Ah cool! I'm a fan, had no idea you were a poker player as well. I actually sent you a PM over on bitcointalk earlier today about keeping bitparking going, did you read that by any chance?

I thought btc-e had already announced that they'd be putting up ppc and that seemed to be the reason for ppc's 10x increase in price over the last week or two but before the craziness today. Maybe they rushed to bring it up once they saw vircurex go down though.

hi can someone with security knowledge about bitcoin please contact me. i think i was just hacked for a large amount of bitcoins. my wallet is not updated yet but the blockchain is showing i sent out a bunch of coins to random addresses

^^ damn unlucky bro, im gonna check mine now, what wallet are you using?

i gave up waiting on terracoin and missed out at a .2 high which was about 60x the price it was this morning, sold at a 3x

I know a thing or two but if the coins have already been sent to addresses you don't know then there's probably not much I can do. Least I could do though would be to give you some advice on preventing it from happening again. PMed.

I talking to a guy doing it, he sent me the steps he used, but there were a ton of steps, it looked quite slow, and I didn't really look up the fees, but I think the fees alone might eat a lot of the profit.

Ugghhh.

gl man.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-0...ral-state.html

Bitcoin Really Is an Existential Threat to the Modern Liberal State

Thoughts on complete change of opinion? How scared are they? How good is this gonna be? Are the coins satanist?

http://rt.com/op-edge/ecologists-embrace-bitcoin-413/

Are you sure it's not the 'change' addresses? When you do a transaction for an amount it has to often break up other transactions into parts to fulfill it. The remainder left over are sent to a new address that is created in your wallet to receive it.