BTC pricing is broken imho

[iiznh]

My first post to this forum:

 

Disclaimer: I own some BTC, not a lot, but enough to pay for an overseas holiday (if the price does not dive while I am typing this). Not sitting on the sidelines. I am a programmer and work in the financial (investment) industry.

 

My biggest problem with BTC

 

->The price has been fluctuating wildly simply because the way exchange pricing is done is flawed.

 

Let me explain: Let me compare this to buying a share like NPN (Naspers)

I buy a share, there is no half, or fraction shares, you either buy a whole one or nothing. If you sell you also sell the whole thing. Now if I could buy small fractions I could manipulate the price up (or down) with small trades with rather low risk to myself(little money). You tend to see people manipulating penny stocks like this.

 

BTC is priced as a whole but the price is given as the last fraction that was sold. And people get to sell/buy a very small fraction, up to 8 decimals, so you are allowed to buy 1/100000000, once a sale is made that is the "new price". So with lots of little trades the price can be manipulated up or down.

 

The latest price should be calculated as the pro-rata average price (weighted average) of the last complete bitcoin sold.

 

Eg. Let us assume 4 trades in this order (if theory this could be 1000 trades, the same idea would hold)

 

1/10 at $5000

4/10 at $4500

4/10 at $4000

1/10 at $3500

 

The current exchanges will list the price as $3500 (And everyone will panic and sell accordingly)

The price should be listed as 1/10 * 5000 + 4/10 * 4500 + 4/10 * 4000 + 1/10 * $3500 = $4250 (A small fraction bought/sold should have almost no movement on the price)

 

Exchanges should at least have a rolling average for each complete bitcoin sold. The current model of pricing is driving the wild fluctuations, rendering the use of bitcoins useless since people would not spend it. It only serves the exchanges' greed since it leads to lots of trades (lots of panic selling). I would love to hear some other input from people that understand how this works

[iiznh]

The problem is not fractional ownership, the problem is that the latest price is simply the last sold price no matter how small the fraction. Which is not true.

 

If a Pizza costs R80 and I slice it in 8, then proceed to sell 8 pieces, first ones at R12 each, people just want a slice and not prepared to buy the whole pizza, then some more at R8 since the got cold but cold pizza is still ok, but the last one I was planning to eat myself but my colleague offer me @R20 for it, he forgot lunch.

 

The exchanges would price a pizza now at R160 (R20 * 8 slices), and everyone should be paying R160 for a pizza.

Total money in my pocket = R100 (R80 base cost + R20 profit).

Tomorrow when I go to the shop, they looked at the price on the exchange and now everyone is paying R160 for a pizza.

The price should in fact be no more than R100 per pizza.

 

Soon we are all buying Pizza since it is the best way to preserve your money, but the price calculation is flawed.

[Purply]

Yup, it's market driven

 

Your pizza explanation is pretty much spot on