Warning: may contain deep conspiracy theory, but may also contain some truth... NO FACTS JUST FEELINGS
The day following on from what can only be termed 'Black Ethereum Wednesday'.
All over tinterwebs there are people distraught after looking at 0 balances on their GDAX accounts.
WTF happened? Someone accidently hit the market sell button? Calculated gains manoeuvre? Internal manipulation?
So what happened? It appears a large sell order was created which triggered limit sell orders causing the price to plummet, as each buy order got cheaper and cheaper. In fact not dollars but cents!!! On one side of the coin some people got very rich by buying unbelievably cheap ETH, but sadly, at others expense.
Not only were limit sell orders at risk, but those that had margin orders (long) in place ended up with nothing as margin maintenance minimums were reached.
Who has the power to control the market within GDAX? Well thats Coinbase... they control your ETH and in fact own your master keys until you withdraw them. Which means they own your ETH essentially, scary right? Therefore would be able to use them to create havoc, especially if they knew they were going to end up with more ETH than they started with...
One reason why I leave margin trading well alone. Don't get me wrong when you win, you can win big. When you lose...you can lose everything!
Keep you coins guys! At least if your Bitcoin drops to $10, you still have your Bitcoin. It may take 4 years to go up again, but at least it will go up. Margins are designed so that house wins, otherwise they wouldn't risk offering it as an option.
Margin creates bad traders, too easy to play with your heart. I'm talking from experience here. Don't get me wrong, I've made money. I've lost money too.
Just remember to trade cleverly and never gamble - because thats exatly what this is really - with more than you can lose.
Enjoy being a part of the crypto community and understand that its impossible to always win...and that there's more than just a cape between you and superman, even when sometimes you feel invincible.
Please feel free to contribute
Coinbase have said they will honour the margins that suffered at the time. Which will go part of the way to calm the red faces of the traders who lost out.
Nice
Here's a culprit https://etherscan.io/address/0x7d551397f79a2988b064afd0efebee802c7721bc
Deposit from Genesis nearly 2 years ago. Moved out 15 hours ago... dump! ~$11m
That's nice of them