Sunday, April 21, 2019

Kraken Confusion

I accomplished my first tiny trade on Kraken. I managed to convert my tiny portion of Bitcoin SV to USD, but not without some confusion.

Kraken gave three choices for conversion: BSV to Euro, BSV to USD, and BSV to XBT.
My first choice was to convert to Bitcoin (XBT). But Kraken makes you fill in three blanks: how much BSV you want to sell, how much you'll sell it for, and how much of the selected currency you expect to get.

Well, I filled in the first two blanks, and the third blank--the expected amount of XBT--came to about 14. I wish! I would love to have fourteen Bitcoins! I knew I had done something wrong. So, to check myself, I changed the dropdown to choose the BSV to USD trade. The result seemed feasible. It showed a small amount of USD, as expected. So I toggled back to BSV/XBT. Again, many bitcoins.

I was afraid to trade. Obviously, I wasn't understanding something. I toggled back to USD. It looked right. I had no idea what kind of fees to expect, so I chose to sell the BSV for a little less than the projected low-end price, kind of a built-in fee, I figured. It must have worked, for shortly thereafter, my ledger showed zero BSV and a little bit of USD.

I still don't understand the BSV/XBT conversion, and why the expected Bitcoin didn't show as .0001 or something. Maybe my amounts were so ridiculously low, the ticker didn't know what to do with it. Trading on Kraken was confusing, and for me, I suspect it always will be. I'm certainly not confident about trading, but after my first (and only?) trade, my ledger seems okay and I did feel a little thrill to know that I must have done something right.

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