Bitcoin Now

A data contributor submitted its bitcoin price as a floating-point number instead of an integer, which was converted into zero and published The programme of another data contributor took the wrong route in a race condition, generating a zero when it should’ve been negative 8 Bloomberg Bloomberg + FOLLOW Published: 3:30pm, 23 Sep, 2021 Updated: 3:30pm, 23 Sep, 2021 Why you can trust SCMP knowledge Wallstreetbets Q: Are Hong Kong’s financial regulators monitoring the stock exchange to prevent market manipulation via social media? Exchange Square, where the Hong Kong stock exchange is located in Central, on June 2, 2020. Photo: Winson Wong How luxury labels are cashing in with NFTs Digital art piece Creation of My Metaverse by Serwah Attafuah, created in 2021, was sold in a non-fungible token (NFT) auction by Sotheby’s for US$25,200. Photo: Sotheby’s via Reuters China’s bitcoin crackdown: what’s next for the original cryptocurrency? China’s crackdown on bitcoin has sent shockwaves through the global mining community, but as miners flee the country, some cryptocurrency faithful remain optimistic about its future. Photo: Reuters How close is China to launching its digital currency? China began exploring the concept of a national virtual currency in 2014 with the success of e-commerce platforms Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu. Photo: Bloomberg Q: Can a Tencent alumnus turn Futu into China’s Charles Schwab? Illustration: Henry Wong Q: Will the GameStop stock frenzy end in financial crisis? A woman walks past a GameStop store in Des Plaines, Illinois, on October 15, 2020. The money-losing video game retailer has been the focus of a trading war. Photo: AP Q: Is the Hong Kong stock exchange prepared for a possible social driven market manipulation? The Reddit group “wallstreetbets” was behind video game chain GameStop’s inflated stock price. Photo: Reuters Q: Why are GameStop and Reddit all over the news? A chain of video game stores ended up in the middle of a financial frenzy. Photo: AP Q: Could the GameStop phenomenon hit Asian markets? A trader wipes his forehead at the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange on 16 March 2020. Photo: EPA-EFE Q: Why could the GameStop phenomenon could never happen in China? The GameStop saga shows that ‘if a short-seller dares to rashly announce bearish bets against a listed company, it will be in trouble’, says a blogger on China’s Reddit-like investor community. Photo: TNS Q: As GameStop stock frenzy dies, why are the small retail investors likely to suffer most? The Reddit logo is seen on a smartphone in front of a logo for WallStreetBets, a group it hosts. The price of GameStop shares shot up after the Reddit board, which has more than 2 million subscribers, hyped up the stock. Photo: Reuters Q: Can the new war on Wall Street usher in a fairer financial system? An activist, standing in front of the New York Stock Exchange on January 28, holds a sign calling for an increase in the capital gains tax. Photo: EPA-EFE > Visit SCMP Knowledge Post Smartphone with bitcoin symbol on-screen among piles of golden Bitcoins. Photo: Shutterstock Smartphone with bitcoin symbol on-screen among piles of golden Bitcoins. Photo: Shutterstock Smartphone with bitcoin symbol on-screen among piles of golden Bitcoins. Photo: Shutterstock Bitcoin slid about 90 per cent earlier this week on a data network run by several of Wall Street’s biggest players after their computers bungled basic computations. The Pyth Network briefly reported in error on Monday that the digital currency had plunged to US$5,402, far below its level everywhere else. In a subsequent autopsy of the incident, Pyth said two unidentified firms that supply data to the platform encountered trouble dealing with decimals, causing them to report extremely low bitcoin prices. Those incorrect numbers got averaged with bitcoin prices from nine other Pyth contributors, leading to the inaccurate result. Digital currencies aren’t traded on Pyth. Instead, the service feeds data on the current prices of stocks, currencies (cryptocurrencies and conventional ones) and metals to software running on the Solana blockchain. Customers use Pyth to, for instance, automatically decide when to sell positions. Pyth said in its blog post that the plunge caused some liquidations. It was an especially eye-catching error considering the credentials of Pyth’s backers – about two dozen traders and exchanges that count among the most sophisticated companies in global markets. One of the contributors used Pyth software that had a bug, according to the blog post. The firm submitted its bitcoin price as a floating-point number, but the software expected an integer. Instead of presenting an error message, it converted the submitted value to zero and published it. The other company encountered a race condition, or a situation where software must do two or more things in a certain order to get the right result. The programmes took the wrong route, and a zero was used as an exponent when it should’ve been negative 8.