Silk Road forums
Discussion => Silk Road discussion => Topic started by: Tunbear on August 16, 2012, 02:11 pm
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I edited my listing about 2hours ago, changed a product to 20BTC. At the time, MtGox had it at 13.03 per coin.
I peg my listing to the dollar amount, I just checked and it has reduced to 19BTC. MtGox still has it at 13.03. Now, if someone bought my product I'd be 1BTC down because it seems SR is using a false bitcoin amount.
I've noticed this quite a lot lately, my prices reducing when the BTC is staying the same or it reducing far too much when the BTC only changes a little bit.
If this carries on I'm going to have to change my listings to peg to BTC instead of the dollar because I'm losing a lot of money with SR's dodgy BTC changes.
Anyone else noticed this ?
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On Black Market Reloaded (BMR) they have a box on the left hand side that shows the BTC exchange rate with US$, GBP£ and EUR€. This allows an instant comparison with mt gox rates to see how close they are and if you can rely on it. This would be important for bith buyers and sellers and should be relatively easy to implement.
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SR used to list the rate of BTC on the very bottom of every page where "Community Forums" and stuff still is. It used to be so handy and I don't know why they got rid of it.
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Yeah its definitely needed. I reckon I've lost a few hundred already because of this
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I'm pretty sure SR's prices aren't pegged to MtGox's averages. They're pegged to some broader index instead which represents the entire B$ economy.
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Secondly, BMR is naive if it's using prices directly from MtGox. Why? For security reasons. That's why SR changed it in the first place.
A LEA could simply feed junk data to their subsection of the economy, it's not difficult to separate Tor based requests from clearnet ones. And what is more, you're giving LEA a source of intelligence on volumes, which was maybe not your intention. I'm sure there's other security problems too. Supplying a direct price quote isn't as easy as you think, not if you're SR.
There is no conspiracy here. DPR actually dropped his fees over time, there's no reason why he'd go behind your backs to increase them. Obviously like any businessman he's looking for more volume to oust the competition, it's just business.
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I edited my listing about 2hours ago, changed a product to 20BTC. At the time, MtGox had it at 13.03 per coin.
I peg my listing to the dollar amount, I just checked and it has reduced to 19BTC. MtGox still has it at 13.03. Now, if someone bought my product I'd be 1BTC down because it seems SR is using a false bitcoin amount.
I've noticed this quite a lot lately, my prices reducing when the BTC is staying the same or it reducing far too much when the BTC only changes a little bit.
If this carries on I'm going to have to change my listings to peg to BTC instead of the dollar because I'm losing a lot of money with SR's dodgy BTC changes.
Anyone else noticed this ?
Many of my clients complain they have the opposite problem in that the prices in BTC fail to go down in response to the rising value of the Bitcoin. I had thought the prices were pegged to MtGox's rates but see Pine says she believes it's calculated from a basket?
V.
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I had thought the prices were pegged to MtGox's rates but see Pine says she believes it's calculated from a basket?
V.
Yup, two ticks and I'll find a sauce.
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It wasn't really a conspiracy thought, it was more a thought that it's using a shit source.
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I noticed a couple weeks ago that the SR BTC exchange rate was different from the then-current Mt. Gox market price. At that time it worked out in favor of the seller and against me, the buyer, but not by much. But I'm sure it cuts the other way sometimes too. At that time, I found that the SR price most closely matched the 20 hour simple moving average price from Mt. Gox, but not exactly. Not sure if this holds true as a general rule or was just the way it was when I bothered to check. In any event, I think SR should provide some clarity on gnerally how it calculates the BTC price, even if it leaves out some details for security reasons.
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The real root of the issue is Mtgox knowing allowing bots to trade on their exchange and manipulate coin prices. At once point recently, the highest volume seller and buyer accounts on Mtgox were both bots run by the same group. It has been speculated that group is actually a front for the MTgox owners themselves. It's bad enough they willingly volunteer financial information to the feds that would normally take a warrant or exceeding the $10k withdraw limits for the feds to get access to the info Mtgox gives them freely. With them actively allowing or even perpetrating market manipulation there's no excuse for anyone to still use them. Period.
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as far as i am aware, silk road uses a 24hr average for the exchange rate. this has been my understanding of it for quite a while, it was possibly stated in a thread around about the time that they removed the exchange rate from the main site. hope that helps.
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My bad, it looks like it's not a basket weighting after all, but is based on the largest exchange MtGox.
See here: http://dkn255hz262ypmii.onion/wiki/index.php/Bitcoin
"Different exchanges will give different values for BTC, but SR uses the value quoted by Mt. Gox."
It is changed once every 24 hours I think, probably manually.
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i did not mean to suggest that BMR tracked mt gox only, i think it is based on intersango, mt gox and one other exchange but i cannot remember now.
i dont think it is being done on SR to improve the return DPR gets from the site, i think it is just one of things that happens when you are dealing with BTC, but an average across exchanges would certainly help bothvendor and pirchaser.
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as far as i am aware, silk road uses a 24hr average for the exchange rate. this has been my understanding of it for quite a while, it was possibly stated in a thread around about the time that they removed the exchange rate from the main site. hope that helps.
That would be consistent with my observation that it was close to the 20 hour SMA. But Pine is saying that it's set to Mt. Gox price (I assume she means market price, i.e. price of last trade) once a day manually. Again, would be nice to know for sure unless DPR has a reason to obfuscate this, which I would understand.
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When BTC-E got raped a couple weeks ago, their average went up to around $50, and that dragged the SR price from like 9 to like 20, which is why DPR temporarily locked prices to 9.00 for that day. So, at that time, I believe there was some sort of market average in place (my guess was 24hr avg. of the major exchanges). Did we change back to mtgox only after that incident, or is the wiki outdated, or am I just way off?
I think it's updated more often than 24 hrs - in the last 20 minutes it went up a few cents. But your prices going down 5% when mtgox stayed constant would require a significant surge in the other exchanges; if you happened to look at the 13.03 right after mtgox went up, maybe the lag of the 24hr average hadn't caught up (also maybe the other exchanges were a little late in reacting).
Peace
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the wiki is WRONG. sr gets its market data from here http://bitcoincharts.com/t/weighted_prices.json
how do i know this? the guy above me explained it
I fooking knew it! I was looking for that but couldn't find it anywhere -.-
Fuck's sake, who does the wiki?! :o *shakes rattle*
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So using a 24 hour moving average smooths out the price changes because a moving average is a smoothing mechanism. However, this approach is susceptible to gaming by the buyer. At times when the market price is decreasing quickly, the moving average will be well above the market price. So that's the time to buy coins and spend them on SR. Guessing the well-timed buyer could eek out a 5-10% advantage when the BTC price is falling fast, but that's just a guess. Of course, most buyers aren't going to go to this trouble, and at times when the BTC rate is increasing quickly (like recently) the market price will usually be above the 24 hour moving average, and the seller gets an advantage.
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The scum who operate and exploit the "legit" Bitcoin industry would beg to differ, but the currency is actually pegged to the price of dank nuggets in Cali dispensaries.