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Well he might not have made a loss, depending on the size of the premium he has taken. Also if the market is liquid enough and he has the right kind of trades
by TheAnimus 14y ago
Well he might not have made a loss, depending on the size of the premium he has taken.
Also if the market is liquid enough and he has the right kind of trades he might even be able to automatically delta hedge.
Or even more simply, he just immediately de-bitcoins it, then re-bitcoins it when releasing the funds from escrow. This is probably the most likely.
- mike_esspe 14y agoIf he is doing automatic hedges, then it's relatively easy to uncover his identity with access to main BTC exchanges?
- TheAnimus 14y agoDepends, I doubt enough of the information about what is going to be hedged is public, and I'd imagine he takes a view on BTC to help stay anonymous too. (Ie delays certain operations) It would also be trivial to have choice of exchanges and settlement currencies. I don't know enough about silk road, having only read about it never played with it, but I'm guessing you can't see the time a merchant has placed an offer to the time they chose the hedging. Combined with the low overall spend, and ever increasing liquidity of BTC, I would have thought that would be quite a challenge. It is funny with BTC, I was playing with some exchanges the other day and there did appear to be free money to be had as not only some Bid Offer spreads were above or below other exchanges, there was some free cash to be had fixing the FX market, say selling in USD to buy in EUR with a hedge on a regular forex site. I figure its still pennies in front of bulldozers time mind, but the thing is its not a perfect market. As such hiding in it whilst making reasonable profits should be easy if you charge enough premium for the option.