exactly the same thing happened to me with Litecoin on GDAX.
They sold off my entire holdings for $0.01 - $0 after fees. At the time LTC was trading for something like $25/LTC.
It took about 3 weeks to get anything but an automated response from their support team.
This was the response:
"After further review, this sell was due to a margin call of your margin position on the LTC/BTC order book. A series of large sell orders were placed on the LTC/BTC order book on May 21, 2017 around 1am UTC causing a large price decline which triggered a margin call of your position when your maintenance margin ratio was exceeded.
The trading engine and margin call functioned as designed. The large price decline was due to the relatively low liquidity on the order book at that time."
They eventually refunded the coins.... but a couple of days later removed half of the refund with no explanation. I'm out of pocket by about $1200. I'm still waiting for a response from them on that one.
I don't see a reason why you should be refunded anything. As I understand it, you were margin long and you got margin called after someone dumped into a relatively low-liquidity market.
Waiting for a response? You were margin called, why did they refund you anything at all? The margin call did exactly what it's supposed to: mitigate the broker's exposure to your downside risk as it increases beyond your account size.
> They sold off my entire holdings for $0.01 - $0 after fees.
Why did you have such an order? I can understand a stop loss order at some small percentage of the original purchase price, because you still get something, but one that says "if this currency suddenly becomes worthless, give it away for $0.01" doesn't make any sense.
Was LTC trading for $25 on that exchange, at that moment? If some big dump wiped out the available buyers and it became illiquid then that may have been all they could do to meet the margin: sell at huge discounts over a huge number of trades such that fees become significant.
AIUI, the way margin buying works is, the first, second, and third priorities are repaying the broker, and the moment your collateral looks like it might not be enough they will dump everything without caution to get the money back, which can result in making stupid (in hindsight) trades.
With that said, I do have a hard time believing there were no buyers at a price closer to $25, so that definitely seems shady. But margin buying is playing with fire and I'd say it could have been a lot worse ...
It's in cygnus, which is always visible in the northern hemisphere, and visible in a lot of the southern hemisphere low on the horizon in the winter months.
The event is not certain, but is highly likely to occur. The date is "2022 give or take a year", so if it occurs in Southern winter then it will likely be visible to the Southern hemisphere.
It's a neat idea but I'm not sure the materials science is there. Right now out best balloon material leaks a fair amount of helium over time. Then there's trying to make a ship that's large enough to carry enough helium to float itself up there then rigid enough to survive the extreme velocities to fly up. Seems like there's a huge gap there that might just not be possible to cross.
Because the orbital ship is structurally unable to cope with higher atmospheric density so must be assembled and maintained at altitude and never go below the height of the station.
There's a few challenges there...
I honestly couldn't finish this. Who exactly is comparing today's startups to the manhattan project? Yes many projects are aiming for more ad clicks, but so what? In the 30's movies and radio were doing the same thing and what? Why are they being compared to the manhattan project, or to apollo, or to the search for the Higgs boson, or world peace, or whatever?.
Is there anything to this beyond the obvious strawmab cllckbait?
Depends on context. In the early days many s100 users assembled the boards themselves and doubtless wouldn't have blinked any eyelid at hacking 8080/z80 bios code if they needed to (I remember the first kid at school to get a computer around that time, programmable with physical switches, binary LED display). By the time the commercial software market for CP/M became established with killer apps like word star, the users would have been rightly horrified by bios hacking.
Of course, MS was also not as willing to provide the MS-DOS OAKs/BAKs to random users than DR was with CP/M. When they finally stopping copying the model before OS/2 1.0 was released, they still did things like putting the floppy and hard drive drivers in the same file.
For context, this launch cost around $60mil and carried $200mil of satellite (spacenews http://spacenews.com/spacex-successfully-launches-2nd-pair-o... )
Spacex are aspiring to a 30% discount https://spaceflightnow.com/2016/03/31/spacex-hopes-to-sell-u...
Until the tech is well proven this would seem to only be a compelling offer for lower cost sats. Theres also the catch 22 that the first mission will be almost uninsurable. I reckon we'll see an LEO demonstration launch maybe with some cubesats n the first one.
From what I understand the first "used" mission will be insured.
Insurers seem to be playing a bit loose with SpaceX:
>This insurance official said that given the market’s current softness, underwriters have overlooked the fact that they are not always sure what modifications have been made to the Falcon 9 they are insuring.
Not if the satellite is much more expensive than the rocket. Using the GP's figures of $200mm and $60mm, that would mean paying $70mm in insurance instead of just waiting for the next $60mm flight.
More like a Pepsi can with a bloody big brick in the bottom 9*470 kg merlins).
Main threat to stability would seem to be wind, but doesn't seem to be the case in practice
They sold off my entire holdings for $0.01 - $0 after fees. At the time LTC was trading for something like $25/LTC.
It took about 3 weeks to get anything but an automated response from their support team.
This was the response:
"After further review, this sell was due to a margin call of your margin position on the LTC/BTC order book. A series of large sell orders were placed on the LTC/BTC order book on May 21, 2017 around 1am UTC causing a large price decline which triggered a margin call of your position when your maintenance margin ratio was exceeded.
The trading engine and margin call functioned as designed. The large price decline was due to the relatively low liquidity on the order book at that time."
They eventually refunded the coins.... but a couple of days later removed half of the refund with no explanation. I'm out of pocket by about $1200. I'm still waiting for a response from them on that one.