BTCChina at 19K RMB now, which is less than USD3K. 

I will take January 1, 2018.  The reasons are as follows:

The 2012-2013 bear market took 18 months before making another ATH above previous high around USD16.  
The 2014-2017 bear market took 38 months (!) before making another ATH above the previous high around USD1100.

So the next few weeks are crucial to determine whether this is a bear market, i.e. 5th wave over, or merely a correction.  
If USD3K level holds and we can bounce off to test the huge congestion/volume level near $4000 to $4200.  
If $4200 fail, then we could see a huge head-and-shoulder forming above $4k to 5K.  
So we should know the result before by the end of this month.  

Since the Segwit X2 fork is scheduled for around November 21, if everything goes smoothly or BTC exhibit strength throughout
the debacle, then we may have something similar to August 1 BCH fork, i.e. everyone expects the worst and move BTC off exchange,
leaving little sell wall on the exchange, and lead to a sharp move up once everything did not turn out to be the end of the world.

So at the earliest, any BTC ATH should be after the Segwit X2 fork.  I presume that we would be well off the $5K high at that point
and BTC is undergoing sideway consolidation.

If the above two criterion fail, i.e. BTC fail to regain foothold above $4K and SX2 coin turns out to be another battle for hashrate and
result in huge block congestion, then it's useless to predict ATH anyway, as it would many months of bear market, based on past experience.

https://twitter.com/btcdrak/status/908998917995552776

This is annoying even if unverified.  Now supposedly the Great Firewall of China is supposed to block all foreign BTC exchange.
For those who can read Chinese and something not discussed in that thread, there is a note inside that document about how
to use Layer 1 firewall to stop Bitcoin client updating the blockchain, prevent synchronization, and miner contributing to the
distributed ledger. 

I am not a technical person, but can Blockstream type satellite/lnb setup be blocked by the Great Firewall?  Though supposedly
Blockstream only beam the block headers, would it be useful for mining pool to use it to sync and broadcast to the network?
It would be really bizarre (not to mention karma) if Antpool had to work with Blockstream to bypass Great Firewall of China.   

Unfortunately, the Great Firewall of China already block TOR through some fairly sophisticated techniques and that is like 5~6 years ago.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/427413/how-china-blocks-the-tor-anonymity-network/
https://www.cs.kau.se/philwint/static/gfc/

People had to fake the packet to be like Skype or other type of packets using stuff like Obfsproxy.  But that had to be done within China as all outside relays are blocked.  I don't know what's technique now days for connecting to Tor from within China.  But the point is that they are already scanning outgoing packet with with some fairly sophisticated algorithm.  Satellite can not be blocked, but uplink is expensive with limited bandwidth.  There is probably problem with latency as well.  Also, signals can be jammed, even if only locally.

I forgot to mention that's the "DPI" mentioned in that document, i.e. deep packet inspection, to throw out BTC network syncing data, in the word of those officials.

Strange coming from a programmer/developer who made his fortune in software.  Surely he knows that talented developers are only thing distinguishing a promising crypto from endless alt imitators/junks.

Also without decentralization, blockchain is just a stupid distributed database.  Jihan and Roger Ver are the very antithesis of decentralization and someone who will likely one day get bitcoin killed or co-opted by government or banks.   

Someone has quoted me out of context and twisted its original meaning.

I strongly believe that decentralization is only the reason why bitcoin keeps coming back like a phoenix and not dying some horrible death a long time ago.  So even if some people believe that decentralization is impossible in the end, bitcoin should still try everything to decentralize as much as possible.  It's true that most revolution fail and odds are stacked against bitcoin.  But when revolution do succeed, whether it be communist revolution, American revolution, or some long lasting Chinese dynasty getting overthrown, the effects are felt for decades, if not centuries. 

A very good article today in Coindesk also argue for this point, to become "money", bitcoin still has a looong way to go, and being able to resist censorship is the reason why it still has value.

https://www.coindesk.com/economic-case-conservative-bitcoin-development/

If something like SX2 coin succeeds, it will just tell the banks and government around the world that such attack vectors works, and conceivably, before long, we would have something like this,

"We are pleased today to announce a new "Plaza Accord" for the Bitcoin ecosystem.  A variety of largest exchanges, service providers, and hashing power has signed on for a hard fork to increasing BTC adoption around the world.  At our side is the esteemed Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPM, joining as authorized participant for the new BTC ETF.  They will also serve as an exclusive liquidity provider and market maker.  We are also honored to have PBoC, who recently banned and nationalized mining in China, contributing
an estimated 70~80% of existing hashrate to the new fork which will double the coin cap to 42 million and allow miners to receive block reward indefinitely.  As a friendly reminder, only hashrate matters in the bitcoin ecosystem and not users.  There would also be no replay protection for the legacy chain and PBoC fully reserves the right to 51% the minority chain at any time.  So while anyone are free to run their favorite version of code, we do have your best interest in mind when we suggest that the users "upgrade" to the new permission-ed and federated chain for your economic welfare and best user experience.  Thank you."

Damn, MUD, BBS, Usenet, 2.4K baud modem, some of us are revealing our age here.   

Believe it or not, I have a fax machine right next to me that makes exactly this sound, if I choose to use the handset instead of panel to make an analog dial call.
 
I forgot to add that it does not even have those "tone" sound when making a dial.  It's more like those "pulse dialing", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse_dialing ,
making those rotary dialing "clicking sound" that last forever when you dial something like "8" or "9".

I blame AOL for ruining Usenet with their free trial CDs.  

Someone mentioned BTC distribution problem earlier.  I would just note that some of the "Big Whale" addresses might actually be owned by Exchange/Wallet (Servicer Provider).
I notice that Xapo alone appears to have at least 520,000 BTC in its cold wallet.  This is from watching them consolidating those BCH airdrop on the BCH chain.  Of course, they will never reveal this on the BTC chain.  Give that Xapo claims to have 25 million wallet and that Coinbase added 800,000 accounts in August alone, those "Big Whale" addresses could actually represent millions of users.  So BTC distribution problem might not be as bad as it seems.  For what it's worth.

It's beyond intelligence, it's more of a trial by fire.  If bitcoiners have survived all these years, after being Zhou-Tonged, MtGoxed, InstaWalleted, Bitfinexed, BTC-Eed, then it's going to take a lot more than douchebag like Craig Wright to scam people (not including Jon Matonis and Gavin Anderson).  After all, the keyword here is trustless and the default mode of operation is to assume most are scams until proven otherwise.  Frankly that douchebag is an insult to the legacy of Satoshi Nakamoto.

I am pretty sure several people in this thread have at least hundreds of coins, a few may even have thousands.  It is simply quite obvious from their tone, strategy, plus their view and what they are currently doing.  

Some of us are waiting for the polarized outcome, i.e. "When you're ready... you won't have to" or to the very bitter end.

The main thing that I worried about Trezor or Ledger Nano S is that custom officials around the world are going to wise up and start looking for them.  Because they do have rather distinct look from your regular USBs.  

Pretty much every countries in the world has currency amount restriction and reporting requirement at airport.  If countries start to include Bitcoin into amount that you have to declare, having even 1 BTC in your hardware wallet could easily exceed those limit one day!  Since most limit are around USD or EUR 10K max.  BTC could easily reach USD or EUR 10K if it wants to.  

My thoughts originally was to have some kind of "chequing account" to give to muggers or custom officials who want to shake you down.  But as soon as you get home, and it will probably take them at least hours if not days to crack your "real" passphrase, you use the paper wallet backup (of hardware wallet) or whatever option Trezor/Nano S offer you to tx away your real hoard of BTC from those thugs.  Though it's conceivable that real thugs will know that there are multiple passphrases to access different accounts within those hardware wallets.

Cryptosteel is nice in that you can "encrypt" the private key via some simple operation, e.g. change capitalization; shift alphabets, e.g. A to D, E to H, Z to C; or only to a few alphanumeric in the sequence based on something only you would know, e.g. grandma's birthday.  The point is not to make the code unbreakable, but to buy you enough time so that once you get back to safety and have access to your paper wallet backup, you can tx away the hoard. 

But the main problem is that losing Crytosteel to thugs would be even more dangerous than losing Trezor/Ledger Nano S.  Since if the thugs have Electrum available, they can sweep the key right away and find out that something has been done to the key.  Then it is going to be hard to talk one's way out of the mess. 

As far as I can tell, the ruling elite isn't going to cull the no/low skill population that's going to be soon made redundant by robots and AI, at least not any time soon. 

That's why there is all sort of talks in academic and political circles for "Universal Basic Income" (UBI) or "QE for the people".  This will be an excellent chance to introduce FEDCoin or CADCoin too as it would be easy to distribute that UBI if every citizen has a public key account with your favorite central bank (CB). 

The idea is to keep the bread part of "bread and circus" going a little while longer, since there are TONS of pissed off people around the world.  Not just Arab Spring or Venezuela type, but common citizen in US, Germany, France, and lots of the First Worlders too.  People are discontent and restless and hence when gateway to escape the fiat world opened (like Bitcoin), people pile in.

Not everyone is in this for the money though.  Just like a hobby, if it helps you make money along the way, then great, but if not, so be it.

For me, if the experiment fails and bitcoin goes to zero, then so be it.  But if it succeeds, then you won't even have to think in fiat term.  
Just like now, I think purely in crypto terms, i.e. crossrate like ETH/BTC, LTC/BTC, and how much investment people made in that ICO in ETH terms.  You stop thinking about how much money you made in fiat terms, because that can be purely due to fiat failing big time, rather than crypto making gains.  

Ewwwww.  How does he even hold up such a heavy and dense object within his rectum without the thing just falling out?  That takes serious kung fu.  

I presume that everyone knows already.  But those floating gurus are really just a bunch of plate and supporting posts hidden behind loose clothing.

Ugh.. Trendon Shavers, I remember many people pointed out that this has got to be some kind of ponzi scam.  Yet there were flame wars going between supporters of the scheme and more skeptical people.  Not the best time in the Bitcointalk community.  Yes, I do have an account from late 2012, but I am not login that in until Theymos implements some kind of 2FA or Google login.  Too many people lost their accounts to hacks recently. 

Wow, I didn't know that even Finney's account was hacked.  Now I have to be more careful about various old accounts starting to posting again after all these years, lest they be some doppelgangers.

As for gold price, the "flow" matters more than "stock", since gold has a massive 190K ton stock, that's like 6 billion ounces, almost enough for 1 gold coin per population on this planet.  So you look at how much Indian demand are for this year and how many mines are going shut down or come online based on spot price and how much they hedged, etc.  Investment demand didn't have that much of an impact until like 12 years ago (unless you want to go back to 70's).  

The main problem with gold price (besides manipulation through derivatives) is the "scrap" or recycled supply whenever price spike.  Since gold has HUGE stock in the wild, when price spike, some people are going to haul in their hoard (jewelry and heirloom) and exchange them for cash.  Like this Japanese man who recently got robbed in the middle of Ginza, which is like the most upscale and prosperous area in Tokyo,   https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20170731/p2a/00m/0na/011000c
Or this one in Ginza again, http://www.tokyoreporter.com/2017/07/03/tokyo-cops-hunting-for-man-who-walked-off-with-3-kg-of-gold-in-ginza/
Or another one in different place http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/12/14/fake-police-walk-4m-gold-japan/
You can find similar report in Hong Kong too but often more bloody and sanguine.  

So it's reasonable to expect the BTC/Gold ratio to get bigger and bigger overtime since BTC does have less of an overhang in supply (e.g. whales waiting to dump).

Slow and steady, don't let those tape painting manipulators turn this into the right shoulder...

Not sure what is really up with gold and silver, but they normally trade in inverse to US Treasury yield and US Tsy 10yr/ 5yr/ 2yr all got obliterated yesterday.
There is serious chart breakdown and 2 yr tsy just hit the lowest (highest yield) since 2008~2009! 
So it's either this new US tax cut plan or Trumpflation or Fed upcoming rate hike or the temp jump in inflation from the multiple hurricanes hit in the US, that's prompting the selloff in tsy and hence precious metal.   

Actually D&D type world need money-sink like your personal stronghold or fiefdom or some 4th dimensional object like Bag of Holding or some secret hideout out in the astral plane.  Otherwise, you would have run away inflation from endless slaughter of local fauna/mob/npc by your favorite adventurers.   Besides, D&D is more than just bimetallism, I recall that there are copper, electrum, and platinum as well.

The point being that even with strength of 18/00 and a bag of holding, you can only carry so much coin around with you.  Not to mention that it makes you a really fat target.  
So the use of commodities money like silver and gold pretty much leads to the invention of banking, hawala, and consequently lending and fractional reserve system.

Just try to carry around 15~20 kg of silver or gold around with you, like a monster box of 500 Eagle or Maple around for a week and see what happens.  I have done so and it is quite enlightening.
You can immediately see why people want to store this somewhere and not want to carry it around for trade.  It is far easier to to get that "Letter of Credit" and present it to the local branch of some banking serve for delivery of goods at the port rather than haul so much metals around.  

Naturally with "custodial" banking, it does not take a genius to start lending out these "dead weight money" with some sort of fractional reserve system and try to make some money on the side.  

Edit.  This does not mean that some genius won't find a way to start a credit system with crypto, like Ripple is trying to do.  You could have an IOU system build on top of PoW crypto using BTC as reserve.

This is social engineering at its best.   
But if James Linton can fool some of the most powerful people on this planet, this has some unpleasant implications.

Or alternatively, someone told Charon that there is something called fiat money which has existed for around a century.  Anyone holding fiat money during the past century has basically lost their shirt in terms of purchasing power.  Thus people who hold bitcoin at least retain (even gain) some purchasing power as the relative price vs fiat keeps rising.

Hey, you can't expect everyone to be a scholar in Quenya, Sindarin, or is that Númenórean?

But more opt comparison is probably with the dwarf or dragon of Middle Earth, whose eye lit up with sight of (bitcoin) their precious hoard.  Having bitcoin does kind of change your thinking, but does not really corrupt you or turn you evil yet.  Though some here may say otherwise about the various head figures of current BTC civil war.

https://qz.com/1072907/why-china-is-so-hot-on-bitcoin/

Exclusive "Bitcoin Club" in Beijing, funded by the mining cartel in China. 
Even with a "Faith in Bitcoin" Poker table.   

Actually that news is a few days old.  I remember reading them (over the weekend?) and saw that there was no reaction in BCH price to that news.  In fact BCH just keeps going down in the past few days.  Probably due to the EDA exploiting shenanigan.

https://blockchain.info/tx/a360296ea7c57adbcf55ebe9668373078bc3c24b6b5c7cd96d83b2db5fe288ba

Someone is literally spamming 10MB worth of these txs.  0.04 BTC fees and only 273 satoshi worth of output, so all goes to miner, but with large size (44K bytes per tx).   

This is the reason why I got into the Bitcoin experiment in Late 2012.  I can see right away that BTC is highly deflationary by design.  We all know what hyperinflation looks like and some of us may have even lived through them, e.g. Yugoslavia, Ukraine, Zimbabwe, etc..  But we have never seen "HyperDeflation" before.  Deflation yes, but not hyperdeflation.  So I was curious whether BTC will usher in an era of hyperdeflation vis-a-vis fiat.

There is no reason to expect hyperdeflation to behave the same way as hyperinflation.  But if it does, then we know that Zimbabwe saw hyperinflation in "Quadrillion" percentage.  So even $1600K target may be "conservative" by historical terms.  Though if we ever reach that point, I think the last thing people needs to worry about is what they made in fiat terms.  Government will probably be ready to shoot anyone who is suspected as being the "evil profiteer". 

Actually pretty much every financial instrument on this planet moves in bullet time mode compare to Bitcoin (or most crypto). 
Since there is so much volatility in BTC already, using leveraged position in bucket shop like eToro or BitMex is a really bad idea.  People are more likely to get whipsawed and cleaned out of their position.  The real downside is that it prevents you from becoming a true hodler, which is what makes real money in the long run.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichimoku_Kink%C5%8D_Hy%C5%8D#Tenkan-sen

Tenkan-sen is the conversion or turning line while kijun-sen is the basis line.  Tenkan-sen and Kijun-sen (TK) cross is sort of like short term MA crossing medium term MA.  Ichimoku system is something that can be useful if everyone else and his brother is using it, like the JGB market, back when it was actually a market and before BoJ came in and bought them all.  It gives insight to what other players might be thinking. 

Anyone bother to look up how much Ronaldo mined to that address, which I presume is a XMR address?  Not that he needs the money anyway....

Or is it not possible with XMR's anonymous feature?

Isn't Baleares filled with tourists and across the sea?  How are they going to serve the local clients from across the sea?

Any Cataluña local affiliated banks?  It would be funny if there is a bank run when people don't know what currency they are going to use tomorrow (EUR or new ccy?), and Banco de España / ECB refuse to extend liquidity to regional banks.

Actually it's quite hilarious reading the Chinese forum about Bitfinex's new BT1 and BT2 (SX2 coin) contract started today.  The market trades around 0.7:0.3 now, i.e. if you split your BTC to BT1 (Core) and BT2 (SX2) and sell them, you can expect to get twice as much SX2 coin vs Core.  So there are now tons of warnings coming out about Bitfinex's past history and the somewhat sketchy USDT scheme (which are reasonable warnings, by the way).  

The thinking is that with BCH launch, the miner had ViaBTC exchange that serves as market maker and can somewhat "manipulate" the quote.   But now the miner's exchange has been shut down in China, they can't manipulate price anymore and had to get fund into Hong Kong if they want to manipulate SX2 price.  The much lower price of SX2 coin is quite contrary to the 90%+ hashrate and thus core coin chain will be dead right away narrative by the SX2 proponent.  Naturally miners are not stupid and will mine the more profitable chain.  If this keeps up, then those NYA hashrate may not seem as sure as what they are signaling now.

Thus we can expect people to try getting money into Bitfinex to prop up BT2 (SX2) quote so that the above thinking doesn't snowball out of hand.  There are already accusation that Bitfinex is "faking" quote.  But the market is fairly thin now and we may need to wait a few days for the real battle to begin.
This is what's being discussed on Chinese forum like 8btc.com, for what it's worth.  

Notice that the breakdown is for different Currencies, even if the graphs do suggest nations.  So all EU countries are grouped under EUR graph.  Only countries with different currencies will show up as different graph. 

I am more inclined to think that Segwit 2X is getting priced in and hence the new approach to another ATH.  I seriously thought that we won't see another ATH until after S2X debacle settles down.  But Bitfinex's new S2X future contract pretty much puts the nail in the coffin.  Once people sees that Core is three times the price of S2X coin, the narrative changes from "it's an upgrade and with 95% miner support, it's going to end soon" to "hey, another free airdropped ALT for me to SELL!".  

You then see some of the biggest S2X supporter such as Coinbase comes out and say that we are going to list both coins and let market decides.  Even VIABTC pool says that they are going to offer their miners both coins to mine (which ever is more profitable).  Then you see Jeff Garzik starts to respond to some of the criticisms, such as drawing up a formal spec, putting in more robust replay protection (more than just a blacklisted address).  So instead of another apocalypse, you now have people acting rationally (i.e. follow the money).

Speaking of Romanians, anyone knows what Mircea Popescu of MPEX fame think of upcoming November fork and current market price?
Or is he too obsessed with existential ramblings and the fair sex to bother with such tripe?

Thanks for the generosity MicGoosens.  Didn't think that it would be a good idea for BTC to make new ATH on lower volume and with divergence on various indicators.  But Bitcoin has regularly shown not to give a fook when it comes to technical analysis...

Nooooo!!  Don't tell me that you sold everything for the Seasteading project...  Living in Tahiti would be the dream for many, but keeping some BTC for the rainy day would be quite rational and in one's best interest.

I really feel bad for some of the later comers to BTC (e.g. South Korean and Japanese from the legalization as payment this year).  

BTC is now at $5,700.00 on Bithumb!!  Previously they believed Roger Ver's hype and led the way up in BCH volume and price.  BTC hardly had any volume there, it serves more as a reference price, since ALT are quoted in BTC.  Occasionally they pump Ripple and ETH.  But now in the past few days, volume is mostly in BTC.  There is real FOMO as they realize that they had the wrong crypto all along.

I think the BTC community took the brunt of goxxing.  The legalization and opening of numerous exchanges really make it mainstream and put "Mrs. Watanabe" into the market.  But South Korean are really the most aggressive one when it comes to trading, at least in terms of volume and leading the charge higher in various cryptos.  

   This is why I was asking about Mircea Popescu yesterday.  I distinctly remember what he said in September and that was BEFORE the current carnage in ALT.  So maybe he has a view on the market, a pretty prescient one too.

Just in case if anyone is wondering, BTC is already $6150+ on Bithumb, with 50K BTC volume.......

More than that, backlog may have the opposite effect as one might suspect.  I have certainly seen people arguing that "How are you going to sell if you can't even get coins onto the exchange after a spike?".  

In fact I saw whole bunch of people moaning in a certain ALT trader Reddit that they can't get BTC onto exchange to 1) prevent liquidation of their BTC margin short, 2) to sell the spike, 3) to convert to ALT, etc....

Luke Jr may be a crazy mofo on a stick, but if anyone is willing to die for bitcoin, I think it's him.  

I do remember him trying to blacklist and ban SatoshiDice's spam tx when he was the head of Eligius.  Luke Jr was also the only one speaking out against the removal of Coin Age Priority in the recent Core 0.15 release, thinking that it's foolish to remove an additional defense against spam attack.  So I do think that he has bitcoin's best interest at heart, even if a bit misguided.  

I do believe that the worst from govt and banks is still yet to come.  So we do need fanatics like him, even if most of his proposals are out of touch with reality.

Actually "CoreCoin" is worth around $4,800 now on Bitfinex, vs "SX2Coin" at $850.  The ratio is around 6:1 now, while the high was around 9:1, i.e. Core/SX2 cross rate low is at around 0.11, which is what BCH traded for most of its life before the current plunge. 

Since there is no EDA for SX2, it's hard to imagine mining pools want to mine SX2 at 85% to 90% loss if the above price relationship holds.  So we are probably going to see good percentage of miners to simply bail the SX2 chain soon after it goes live.  Similarly, why would Jihan support a segwit (x2) chain when he has BCH, which he can mine with less loss and possibly with profit via some EDA manipulation.  So it's more likely that as some suggested here, there is going to be a "Three Kingdom" type 3 way battle at first for the hashrate.  With ultimately the market price (and mining profitability) determines hashrate distribution. 

If they are not going to pump it post S2X launch, then it's probably never going to be pumped.  Also, with exchanges closed in China, they can't pump it like before.  Maybe try to lead via Bithumb as in the past?  But I kind of doubt it since the whole point of China ban is to prevent capital flight and evasion of capital control.  If Chinese miners can somehow move their fund oversea, then the last thing they want to do is to risk it on pumping alt on some sketchy exchange.  

If you check the share of mining pools, whenever BCH is not profitable to mine, that "mysterious miner" already account for 80~85% of hashrate.

https://cash.coin.dance/blocks/today

Again the BCH move is led by Bithumb, volume of 870K BCH.  Perhaps South Korean are already bored with Ripple pump?
Meanwhile, literally like thousands of spams came from this address just now.
https://blockchain.info/address/1AScRhqdXMrJyxNmjEapMZi1PLFsqmLquG
They came from this address,
https://blockchain.info/address/12udvE3zmbQLhtSGZUqqAvGWSKDUCpbgoq

Actually it's kind of scary watching what's happening in BCH.  That Mysterious Miner (who already control 80~85% of hashrate when it's unprofitable to mine the BCH chain and 40%+ hashrate when it's profitable https://cash.coin.dance/blocks ) apparently "fell asleep" again a day ago or maybe he is just trying to trigger the EDA after mining at 40~50% loss for days.

As the 30% BCH pumping will make BCH more profitable to mine, there is a risk that EDA is going to be triggered at the same time, causing 3+ Exahash worth of hashrate to jump in again and strip-mine BCH to death at 1 block per minute.  So apparently someone just call up their buddy at BTC.TOP and say, "Hey, can you get some of your 1.5 Exahash over to BCH chain for an hour, so that EDA does not get triggered?  Oh, and I got 500K BCH that I want to move as well, kind of hard to do that when there are only 2 blocks in the last 8 hours."

Once a minority chain has only 5% of hashrate AND 5% of marketcap, things start to get really hairy for the small guys.  Weren't these people around during the Terracoin fiasco?  Or do some of the painful lessons have to be re-learn again?

I thought the whole point of having Social Security on blockchain is to roll out Universal Basic Income, i.e. "QE for the people"?
You can even have "Demurrage" feature like the good old Freicoin .  So you are forced to spend your monthly airdropped coins or have your money evaporate into thin air right in front of your eyes.  This would be a Keynesian wet dream.  

What?  Any evidence that the Doge of TMSR is dumping his hoard?  I thought that he is hanging out in Costa Rica now?

Nothing for now.  But if there are more volume and open interest, it indicates what people think the BTC price would be tomorrow and the implied volatility of put and call option around the spot price. 

I have friends who moved to Argentina in the 80's.  It was fun for them to watch their restaurant tab changes by the time they finish their meal.  So everyone just used USD, if they have access.  With Macri in charge, things are supposed to be looking up again, but those wealthy Argentinians do use Xapo's Swiss bunker to store their BTC.  So who knows, maybe in addition to a history of bank "bail-in" and pension seizure, maybe one day they will come for your private keys too.

Actually this is a lot higher than I expected.  I thought that BTG would be in mBTCs.  So BTG is getting priced more like ETH since we do know that one of its purpose is to take over all those GPU hashrates after ETH go over to PoS.  

As for the DDoS, I thought that something was wrong with my connection when I could not access GDAX/Bittrex/Kraken ALL at the SAME time 12+ hours ago, even though it lasted for only a few minutes.  So it's a rehearsal for what's to happen later today....

I thought that BTG is going to be priced more like LTC (around $50), when in fact the actual trading looks more like ETH (around $250~$300).  This means that with a pre-mine of around 200K BTG by the developer, they have basically netted 50~60 million bucks!  This is all done without needing the like of Roger Ver, Jihan, or the "mysterious miner" who mined at $10 million+ losses cumulative.  

Actually I can already imagine the look of Jihan Wu when his "buddy" Jack Liao pull this off and have BTG traded above BCH price.  This also implies that everyone will see the opportunity in the new "forking" ICO.   That is, instead of doing ERC20 token on ETH platform, now you can just do "fork ICO" on BTC chain, pre-mine and net yourself a cool 50 million bucks, which is more than most of those useless ICO /pump-dump can ever hope to achieve.  

By the way, Peter Rizun of Bitcoin Unlimited already did a version of Bitcoin Ethereum,
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=563925.0

Actually even without margins, they are technically correct in that options, especially far OTM (out of the money) option have really high leverage if IV (implied volatility) is low.  
Of course, given the really high RV (realized volatility) of BTC, IV is going to be really high as well, i.e. BTC options are really expensive.  So the actual leverage would not be very high even if you bought far OTM put option (which are not currently available on LedgerX anyway).  

As for Risto, I doubt that he got anything from that Crypto Kingdom Game of his.  Did he really squander all his BTC with his divorce and lost all his XMR when his MacBook got ninjaed?  

Wow, I had no idea that Risto had thousands of BTC in interest arrears.  So he pulled a Trendon Shavers when I thought that it was just all fun and games.  

Since we are discussing politics, we might as well discussing Bitcoin politics.  As people may know already, BCH is set to hard fork on Nov. 13, 2017 to change their EDA/DAA.  
https://bitsonline.com/bitcoin-cash-hard-fork/
Now while people may laugh it off as just another joke from an ALT.  I believe the date is chosen to deliberately cause max disruption.  

As we know, the S2X fork is set to happen around Nov 14, 2017 and that the next BTC difficulty adjustment will likely increase difficulty by at least 10%.  So with another difficulty adjustment around Nov 10, we would likely see difficulty rise to at least 15~20% higher than the current level.

As we discussed before, S2X coin is now trading far below the S1X/Core at the current rate (6:1).  So the NYA miners are looking at 80%~90% mining loss right off gate if they choose to follow the S2X chain.  There is no EDA either, so as more miners bail, the remaining miners would face an impossible task in getting to 100 blocks to collect their pay at the current projected difficulty.  We also know that at least 30% of current hashrate is "mercenary" in that they are profit seeking and will jump to the currently most profitable chain, based on BCH experience.  

So by changing the BCH algorithm on Nov 13, it seeks to draw in the most opportunistic miners right before the S2X fork, so that remaining miners would have a better chance of enforcing a NYA outcome and make S2X succeed.  We already know that F2Pool pulled out of NYA and that ViaBTC would offer its miners the option to mine either S1X or S2X chain.  By making BCH profitable to mine on Nov. 13, miners who would have bailed on NYA on Nov 14 because S2X price is so unprofitable, would be unavailable on S1X/Core chain.

By trying to draw as much of profit-seeking hashrate to BCH instead of having them jump over to S1X chain right from the start, I presume the purpose is to try to crash the S1X price, or at least try to narrow the huge price difference between S1X and S2X so that people like Roger Ver, who make the 1000 BTC swap bet, can at least cover their ass and not look as bad.  It could also make the forking debacle more drawn out than expected, as its ultimately a power struggle between miners and hodlers.  Miners have to pay for electricity and depreciation, while it's free for hodler to hodl and not making any tx.  So narrowing the price difference between S1X and S2X would make miners' struggle easier.  

The point is that while the act itself may be self-interested, the date chosen is deliberate, since they can do the algo change at any time and ease the suffering of "mysterious miner" even today.  But they had to chose a date right before S2X fork and hence it is a scheme to help the S2X succeed.  Whether the scheme will succeed or not, who knows, but these kind of attacks are good in that it tests whether bitcoin can resist centralization.  It is better for the attack to come from within rather than from the governments.  

Of course, we could already be facing some sort of "Divide-and-Conquer" tactics with various "Two-Minute Hate" figures planted on both side.  But given the relative incompetence from figures such as Roger Ver over the past year, I would presume that a real government attack would be much more devastating, e.g. ban and then nationalize Chinese miners, then simply 51% attack and force a PoW change/hardfork. 

I think many people would agree that the reason why BTC even has $100 billion marketcap is precisely because of its ability to resist centralization/censorship.  We also know that a centralized govt blockchain would just be a tool for control/tracking/taxation/central-bank-wealth-reappropriation and leads to a dystopian future.  Hence so long as BTC remains decentralized, it would have serious value for people who want to unplug from the Matrix.

Well, BTG trading goes live on Yobit now, the price is around 0.09~0.10 BTC with over 60 BTC done in the 1st few minutes.  This implies that the BTG price is double that of ETH and BCH.  Don't know how many people are going to dump their BTG, so that they can get more S2X coin in a few weeks.

Price is around 0.065 BTC now, with over 1K BTG dumped in the 1st 10 minutes, a volume of 100 BTC.

Nice pump of BTG to almost 0.2 BTC on 400 BTC (4K BTG) volume in 40 minutes.

If the tx wasn't confirmed before block 491,407 snapshot, I presume that it would still be in the old address (the exchange address).  If the said exchange is not supporting BTG fork, then people would be out of luck.  Though of course, exchange can always change their mind later if BTG sticks around and have significant marketcap.  Naturally, one can also do a replace-by-fee tx, if the exchange supports it.  Though I wouldn't recommend it as fee is really high now and we are so close to the snapshot time.

Actually I happen to know a woman who mine as well.  I was really surprised to find that she is hiding one of those loud miners upstairs to "generate heat".  Then I remember that she is a Computer Science teacher, so I guess that kind of make sense since her students are probably all doing it, using "free electricity" off the dorms/labs.  Also, recently I literally overheard a whole bunch of soccer moms talking about pooling money to buy bitcoin.  I can literally hear myself saying "Oh Crap" out loud.  

And I had to buy a virtual currency using another virtual currency in the early days, e.g. Linden Dollars from the Second Life game on VirWox or moneychangers who accept them.  Now that's about as sketchy as it gets. 

Though fratricide are plainly tragic, I do think that a civil war is needed before Bitcoin grows to the next stage (i.e. a new order, a new empire).  Otherwise, it would just be all words and "perceived" power, which may not be an indication of real power they wield.  

I doubt Satoshi sees a world with thousands of cryptocurrencies competing with each other, where miners can jump in to strip-mine a crypto to the ground, then leave as soon as it is unprofitable to do so and leave the chain to die or languish.  That would be "against their self-interest" as according to the white paper right?  Not if there are tons of crypto to choose from and mine.  

So once there are thousands of crypto around and more fork/alt are coming everyday, then hashrate WILL follow profitability.  What determines profitability?  Market price.  And who determines market price?  The USERS of course.  Hence miners just become incentivized service provider who follows money, not the other way around.  Sure, there is short term supply inelasticity as people need time to setup mining operation.  But if there is money to be made, then someone who like the ROI WILL make the jump.  

As far as I can tell, many Chinese miners don't give a crap about Bitcoin ideology.  They admit as much in that Quartz article interview.  But they love the ROI they can make as often they can recover their fixed investment in less than a year when price spike and total hashrate didn't jump nearly as fast!  So I am often puzzled by people who quote the original white paper and saying hashrate is king and thus other people don't understand economics and what not.  I mean, are people deliberately NOT telling these people how the system works so that they can make money off them?  

The truth is that financial market don't give a crap about politics or religion.  You can not convince a person to change their political or religious view.  But financial market CAN redistribute wealth from those who are wrong and continue to punish them until they are broke or admit their mistake.  If anything, the rise of bitcoin itself would be the best lesson.  

Is that even serious?  Or is it photoshopped?

Though I do kind of get the joke as that main character from Pokemon is named サトシ (Satoshi), taken from the creator of Pokemon, Satoshi Tajiri.  But still, I am sure new comers would be puzzled and think that they are buying some virtual currency for the Pokemon Go app.   

Damn, seeing Mike Tyson and Boris Becker associated with Bitcoin really makes me nervous.  I am flashing back to that soccer moms conversation that I overheard.  This can't be good.

I think Luke Jr. is just pointing out that it is more "heroic" to try something new even if you knew that you are doomed to fail, rather than just imitate when you know that you will probably succeed.  So Luke Jr. is probably just projecting the "opposite" of himself onto those big blockers and identify with the act of defending their ideal even when doomed.  

As for the ASIC vs whatever ASIC-resistant algo, I think the point is trying to prevent economy of scale, not effort and ingenuity.  That is, someone who spent $1 billion on mining vs one million guys spending $1,000 each on mining.   With current BTC algo, the 1 billion guy will gain enormous edge and econ scale over 1 million dudes.  With other ASIC-resistant algo, there is nothing to prevent someone spending 1 billion or the effort and ingenuity to gain an edge, but at least that edge is not exponentially greater than the masses.  

So the new algo is not ASIC-resistant, rather "Economy-of-Scale Resistant".  Someone can still datacenter it and even built their own power plant next to it (yes, there are people in the world that actually do this for other electricity-intensive industry), but they are bound by the law of physics and thus can not have exponential gain from scaling. Because after all, wealth distribution do follows power law and there is little that one can do short of forced wealth redistribution.

I think the lambo memes are reserved for the ETH or ALT thread now.  I am pretty sure that some of us can afford Bugatti by now...

As for the Bithumb BCH pump, $1 billion trade volume on one exchange in less than 24 hours and 2.2 million BCH traded is fishy as heck.  I am not sure that there is even 2.2 million BTC out there on the exchanges and not sitting in some cold storage/wallets/wallet-service-providers or simply lost.  It reminds me of OKCoin shenanigan.  Though they do have those chaebol kids in South Korea, who are even more outrageous than those "fuerdai/guanerdai" in China.

A few thoughts on the CME news.  Even though the contract is cash-settled, market makers do need to hedge if they want to provide liquidity.  Because as we hodlers know, who wants to take the other side of the trade, e.g. short?  Jamie Dimon?  If the market demand is one-sided, market makers got to step in and take other side of the trade, and for that they need to hedge, unless they want to get rekted/blown-up.

But as we all know, BTC has limited quantity and even smaller outstanding stock available on the exchanges.  So if market makers want to delta hedge, they need to hold the underlying asset, i.e. BTC, since they can't fractional-reserve this and create BTC out of thin air.  So when BTC spikes up (or plunges), this is going to make the volatility even worse as market maker scramble to buy/sell BTC.  There might simply not be enough BTC around for people to hedge.  Though this would be less of a problem when BTC has huge market cap in the trillions, i.e. fixed quantity but supporting larger notional value of outstanding contracts.    

Also, BTC is traded 24/7/365 across the world and the biggest volume isn't even in the US.  It is in JPY (Japan) now and was CNY (China) before.  So the biggest influence on spot price (needed for cash settlement of contract) isn't in USD nor in the US.  This is like having a BCH future on CME while the trades are all being done in KRW on Bithumb.  Quite risky and manipulations are all oversea based.  One would need to get funds oversea for settlement manipulation and often the exchanges won't even open account unless you have ARC (alien registration card) for Japan or South Korea.

This is brilliant!  Hmm.. but ETH got the dirt nap first and XMR last..

Laszlo got this whole show started, raising awareness back when nobody gives a damn.  If anything, he is now enshrined in the tome of bitcoin annals.  One day he will be remembered as that "1 billion dollar pizza dude".

Actually most of people on this planet are broke and just worry about daily sustenance.  So even if they knew something about bitcoin, they probably would buy very little, if at all, and had get out as soon as they need the money for something else.  

So even if Mircea Popescu type of elitism is repugnant, he is right in that Bitcoin does NOT give a fook whether it sees widespread use as payment or the masses adopt it.  It's going to go up if enough elites see it as a hedge against central bank experimentalism or as a new method of exerting controls.  As I stated before, I got in in late 2012 mostly as a hyperdeflationary experiment, i.e. I want to see whether we can trigger the first recorded case of hyperdeflation in human history.  

Since bitcoin is highly deflationary by design, it is irrational to spend it when you have fiat alternatives readily available, e.g. Visa/Master/Paypal/Alipay/Debit-card/Fiat-Cash.  If any kind of S curve adoption occurs, then BTC would be hoarded to oblivion.  Gresham's law would tell you that people always want to spend the "bad money", e.g. fiat, before spending "good money" like gold or BTC.  So eventually just as in hyperinflation, people try to spend the toilet paper confetti before it becomes worthless, people would hoard BTC before it becomes even more valuable.  The end game would be the same, they lose their function as a medium of exchange, because one has zero function as storage of value, and the other because it is just too valuable to be spent.  

If one just look at BTC in fiat term, going from sub $1 to $7000+ in 7+ years is pretty hyperdeflationary.  It's even worse if one looks at it in "purchasing power parity" terms, i.e. Laszlo's pizza, 2 pizza for USD$70 million, an increase of at least 7,000,000 times.  Naturally the implication would be that if BTC undergoes hyperdeflation, any charting/wave-theory/fibonacci/TA would be meaningless.  That's like applying TA to Weimar stock market or the IBVC (Venezuela stock index), which is up like 20x in 2017 alone and 50x in 1 year.  

I think that article is merely referring to the superiority of BTC against fiat if they were allowed to freely compete and BTC would see widespread adoption as a result.  

But with hyperdeflation, it is not only fiat losing great deal of purchasing power, BTC would also gain enormous purchasing power against other more traditional and productive assets, e.g. gold/crude-oil/farmland.  

As we know, gold and silver retain its purchasing power over long period time, i.e. the tuition for a four year Ivy League degree is still about 5 kg (150 oz) of gold after more than a hundred years and price of cattle since Roman empire time didn't change much in terms of gold.  There is also a somewhat stable relationship between important cross rate such as oil/gold.  But with hyperdeflation, you would expect something like Francis Bacon's triptychs, hoarded and pass off as heirlooms, where owning bitcoin alone would confer status and respect, like some birthright for the aristocracy.    

I doubt that Bitcoin will become the One World Currency so that people won't have any other methods of payment.  Most likely BTC will be used mainly as a storage of value and people would still use their respective national currency (even if gone digital or blockchained) or some corporate backed system like Japan's upcoming "J-Coin", China's Alipay, East Africa's M-Pesa, Paypal/Samsung/Apple Pay, plus the traditional Visa/Master/JCB/UnionPay credit card or bank issued debit cards.  

It also highly unlikely that people would be paid in bitcoin as tax payable are due in respective national currency.  Not to mention the problem of how to record the salary compensation or for employees to report their income tax, given the possible exchange rate risk and potential capital gain.  

The point being that if you want to design a crytocurrency which people would want to spend, it actually has to have some kind of "demurrage" feature like Freicoin.  But something that evaporates your saving and force consumption would never see adoption, while a highly deflationary one like BTC has huge incentive for people to get in early and hoard/hodl it.  So in the end, instead of something that liberates people from financial system, BTC behaves more like a digital commodity that fuels speculation and boom-bust cycle.  

Now it is quite possible that if we were to succeed in building a new financial order, i.e. with Bitcoin at the bottom of "Exter's Pyramid", then we can start issue paper IOU backed by BTC and create credit and then derivatives on higher layer (which I think Wall Street is going to try in the next few years).  Then people would have incentive to spend those BTC backed credit as a medium of exchange.  It doesn't even have to be like the existing system, it could be Ripple type payment hub or a side-chain/new-cryto pegged to BTC and used only for payment, etc.  

Bitcoin is already acting as the reserve currency of crypto world, since most ALT are quoted in BTC and it is much more liquid to trade/quote BTC pairs than say ETH or even fiat pairs.  It is also the gateway to crytpto world since you can't even buy most ALT if you don't have BTC. 

Now there are people like Russian/Chinese central bankers and journalist such as FT's Iza Kaminska that outright suspect us as trying to create a new reserve currency to replace USD/EUR/SDR.  So it is unwise to be like Roger Ver, who recently claim that he is trying to replace USD/EUR/JPY and all other national currency with his project.  On a mainstream media too. 

Even if the miners are angry with the Core team, it is still more rational for them to mine the most profitable chain and then sell the coins for whichever coins they prefer (like BCH).  If miners are willing to mine a coin with huge losses for weeks on end to prove their point, then it goes against White Paper's premise of being rational, profit maxmizing, playing nice, and would be treated as an attack.  It would imply that there is a risk of other side using the nuke (e.g. POW change) and users exit on masses to another chain, leaving miners with their obsolete equipment and worthless coins.  Naturally that would be a lose-lose situation.  When people advocates using nukes, don't forget that other people have nukes too and could have even more nukes than one had imagined.  

Now just being contrarian, what if the price of bitcoin actually went UP, instead of down, even if hashrate switch to another chain en masse?  Then it would just prove the point of critics that bitcoin is not used for payment, but rather as a storage of wealth and tool for speculation?  Thus those thinking that increase the payment utility would increase the value of network, even at risk of more centralization, are just deluding themselves?  

As for the previous discussion on why it's irrational to spend highly deflationary currency such as Bitcoin. it is more of "so now we are aware of inherent limitation posed by the design, and there are trade-offs if we want to change that design, so what can we do to encourage its original purpose, i.e. spending and utility as a payment network?"  Early adopters are highly altruistic and ideological, but game theoretics do require the system to work based on the masses acting rational and self-interested, not on just a few people being altruistic, whether miners or users.  
 

Though the article is in Chinese, it is interesting in that it includes the latest interviews from Jihan Wu of Bitmain and Samson Mow of Blockstream.

http://www.bitcoin86.com/news/17847.html

Something that I find interesting in that interview, various rumors that are denied by Jihan Wu,

1) Jihan Wu is an investor in Bithumb of South Korea (you know, where they are trading 1.5 ~ 2 million BCH at USD$1 billion volume PER DAY).

2) Bitmain's revenue is over USD$1 billion per year.  They made over $150 million profit (1 billiion CNY) in 1st half of 2017, with profit likely much higher in the 2nd half.

3) There are uncertainty concerning future China govt policy towards crypto.  They had tense relationship with some of local govt, like in Xinjiang and their Yunnan facility actually had to stop operation after electricity was cut off.

4) Jihan is going to enforce NYA in the upcoming S2X fork.  But also recognizes that he got significant hashrate from other miners and thus had to take profitability into account.  But unlike BTC.TOP and VIABTC pool, he did not come out and say that he is going to offer miners the option of mining both Segwit chain.

Mining isn't a charity and it's not like NYA actually agreed to subsidize miners to point their hashrate at S2X chain.  So people are only going mine the more profitable chain.  

In fact, I find it interesting that Jihan Wu did not go thru the usual "blame Blockstream" routine in his interview.  He actually said that he is indifferent when it comes to tech issues such as scaling roadmap, segwit, etc..  He reserves the criticisms for Theymos, which is just down right bizarre.  Going so far as to answer, "You will have to ask Theymos for that", when asked which implementation does he think will end up being called Bitcoin in the end.  

Of course, it could be that Jihan and Roger Ver has little credibility when it comes to technical issues, as the Core team is widely recognized as being the one with most tech credential and IQ (though with low EQ).  Or Jihan could simply be backtracking a bit, not wanting to be blamed when S2X fork end up being a total clusterfook.  

After all, bitcoin's marketcap is now $100 billion and up 10x since the time when scaling debate really got heated.  So even if Jihan could not give a fook about the users, he has to care about some of the biggest VC names in the Silicon Valley, who had just given him $50 million.  If S2X turns out to be a disaster, Jihan will be blamed for the huge drop in bitcoin price and lose whatever little credibility he has in the industry.  Obviously, he does not want that.

It is just the effect of hashrate leaving for BCH chain when EDA manipulation or price pump makes it more profitable to mine BCH chain.  Various Chinese pools such as VIABTC and BTC.TOP already sets the autopilot for jumping chain depending on relative profitability.  This can lead to 30%~40% of hashrate leaving BTC chain.  This often coincides with spam attack to bloat the mempool, with some tx paying 400+ satoshi/byte, i.e. 1 mbtc for fee on standard 225 byte tx and a few satoshi leftover as dust.  
https://blockchain.info/address/1FLDCfr9iG7n6bAdGsqBXmhaLgC4aSze72

However, BTC went UP during all these time, further proving that people don't give a damn about tx fees or mass adoption or payment utility, at least the whales who can move price don't.  

While I was in high school, I got a classmate who basically drove a Testarossa to school everyday.  One time, he got a suspension from school for a week, and was forced by his parents to attend a public school for a few days.  Not surprisingly, his Testarossa got smashed up and his face punched in on the first day.  

There is also this dad who would show up occasionally in his Lotus Esprit to pick up his daughter from school.  One time he showed up with a girl who looked and dressed younger than his daughter.  
"Hey, I didn't know that you had a sister?"
"NO, that's my new mom."
"Oh..."

Driving a classy antique and people might give you a thumbs up and chitchat with you.  Driving a Countach to school or to work and people might give you the finger and gossip behind your back.  Might as well get a chauffeur who can double as bodyguard, which I do see quite a few people do in real life.

Seeing that video and people falling for pyramid scheme like BCC totally makes me cringe.  But maybe some DJ with madskillz can strip out the vocals and make a bootleg instrumental mix?  Just as a footnote to the annotated history of crypto madness.

I bet that right after CME goes live with its BRR contact on Nov 14, someone will do a custom double one-touch right before Nov 16, just so that whales will profit whether it be 5K or 10K after the S2X freak show.

If anything, Panama Papers and Paradise Papers show that linking BTC with terrorism funding and drug trade are pure FUD.  The elites moved $10 trillions+ and hide them around the world with FIAT and all are done "legally" within the legal framework.

That being said, I still have nothing but the highest respect for the Sassoon family.  Being able to survive the Spanish Inquisition and Ottoman rule, made a fortune in Opium Wars, and still retain their peerage and fortune in the British upper crust, this is nothing short of a miracle.   I am sure that Baron Sassoon, being the previous head of G7 task force on Money Laundering, would not have done anything untoward.

Actually that Quantum Computing article against Bitcoin can't even get its fact straight.  "Most mining is done by application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) made by companies such as Nvidia". 

Nvidia doesn't even have fabs and they miss the timeline by 5 years if they think that mining is still being done by GPUs.  It would be more correct to say that both Bitmain and Nvidia uses TSMC's foundry services (and so are most of FPGA/CPLD made back when it was still profitable to mine with them, before ASIC came along). 

Lastly, my condolence to the "SegWit by Miner Activated Soft-Fork with a 2MB Blocksize Increase DCG Consensus Agreement of 2017" dude who died in vain.  The S2X cabal now has innocent blood on their hand.

Actually I am less and less inclined to educate people on the facts and prefer to let market do its work, i.e. redistribute wealth from those who are ignorant or got it wrong and yet refused to admit their mistakes.  

If she knows anything about mining, those Chinese mining cartels actually ship their Antminers to remote corners of China during rainy season to take advantage of "free" electricity provided by hydro dams.  Due to lack of power grid and long distance power transmission network, those electricity are wasted anyway.  They shipped back their Antminers during dry season to coal producing region such as Inner Mongolia to take advantage of cheap electricity from coal-fired power plant.  

As for why bitcoin even has value or social purpose (and no, it's not about payment utility), I won't bother with a TL;DR discussion of ideas such as social scalability for inherently non-scalable human as per Szabo.  Because that would reveal our hidden agenda of trying to recreate the institutions that give fiat money value or reach consensus on something such as gold, but done via a value transfer protocol over internet, a process that would take places over years, rather than millenniums as per human history.  

Due to its strong incentive to hoard rather than spend, Bitcoin is already a "peer Peerage to peer Peerage Electronic Cash System".  

Payment has already been disrupted by the like of Alipay, which has retained 500 million users and attracted over USD$1 trillion for its money market fund in the space of a few years.  A decentralized blockchain can never hope to achieve such adoption compare to a centralized solution.  In fact, the reason why Japan even introduces "J-Coin" is largely due to the expansion of Alipay into neighboring countries such as Japan and Taiwan.  Because seriously, who would want their personal banking details and spending habits stored in China and be available to Chicom censors?  

There is no need to re-invent the wheel.  Bitcoin only has to try remaining decentralized and trustless and serve its function for social scaling and reaching consensus.  One can then build payment/credit/derivative layers on top as per Exeter's pyramid.  

I was thinking that Peter Vessenes's trolling forcing creditors into becoming long-term hodlers, was actually helping people to get more than the supposedly 56K JPY per BTC pittance from that settlement.  But the WSJ article is actually suggesting otherwise and that the case may be resolved soon?  Any source/link to that fish diet info?

He looks fabulous now and I actually kind of envy him.

But I am still appalled that the value of BCH+BTG (future)+S2X (future) alone already cover HALF of creditor's claim (in fiat terms).  So technically he could just give creditors those forkcoins, but still keep 90% of BTC and made off like a bandit.  I wouldn't want to be him if he end up with like 180K BTC in the end.

Ouch.  I really hope that USDT won't get 4chan-party-vaned any time soon.  

Please don't carry crude oil around.  That colorless hydrogen sulfide will kill you soon enough.

And please remember to get that Certificate of Origin from the said Saudi prince.  Otherwise, you might be arrested when they find out that "Saudi" crude actually came from regions controlled by those ISIS terrorists.  Unless of course, you are thinking of selling them in North Korea, like that bitcoiner @FedericoTenga lecturing CrytoFinance in PyongYang now.   

I use Electron Cash to claim, but be sure to get the right one, as there is a scam/phishing version around.  But for one particular address from late 2013 that has 60+ UTXO, Electron Cash always crash no matter what I do.  So I bit the bullet and sweep that private key into BTC.COM with 2FA and tx them right away.  First time that I would even put a private key into an online wallet, damn.

5 million BCH and $5 billion volume traded today, almost 2/3 volume in KRW and almost half of that volume on Bithumb.  Note that BTC also traded $5 billion today and that BTC+BCH is around the same as BTC high from 48 hours ago, do suggest that someone is dumping BTC for BCH.  However, despite the pump, I am actually pessimistic about this "BTC of East"'s hope of "flippening".

Just as the BCH fork basically doom the prospect of S2X, the Chinese ban from early September caught those insiders by surprise and basically ruin their plan of sweeping up the selling pressure from bitcoiners at low price, control the float, then pump the price so hashrate follows, then with more total work done (sum of block difficulties), usurp the throne of BTC.  

Bobby Lee was just talking about how China "does not want to see bitcoin anymore" and one of the talk that I heard from PBoC governor outright states that there is no reason to assume that the upcoming PBoCCoin is going to be blockchained or distributed ledger based.  That is, the new GovCoin is more likely to be some kind of "People's Alipay" or "Chicom Paypal".  

So a coin like BCH, which is trying to disrupt payment with 1GB block, is not only up against the 500 million user Alipay, they are up against the upcoming GovCoin which can easily do Visa type 50K tx per second.  Worse yet, that GovCoin is going to be combined with monthly "airdrop" of Universal Basic Income/Social Security/Welfare into your public key account to induce people to use them.  So it is very difficult to see something that already compete in a very crowded market against fiat cash/credit card/debit card/Apple pay etc., not turning into some niche payment for selected users.

Naturally, it's a hell lot more difficult to create a digital storage of value then a digital medium of exchange, not to mention much more risky and time consuming, but using decentralized and inefficient blockchain to compete in payment space is a lost cause without some sort of higher layer that trade off trust and security for more tx capacity.  

People are spamming the mempool with 1300 satoshi/byte tx, i.e. paying 3~5 mbtc per 225 byte standard tx, and most go to fee with only dust remaining, to lock up the tx in mempool during this BCH pump.  But BTC+BCH is actually getting lower and lower in total, meaning someone is killing that golden goose that had just kept on giving so far.

Maybe the cartel will do a flippening of ETH by BCH just for lolz.  But if some insiders can flippen BCH vs ETH in marketcap just like this, then it's actually really bearish for the entire crypto world.  Because imagine what would happen when the real professional pumpers, i.e. Wall Street banksters, come on the scene.

Sorry, I should have been more clear about what I am saying.  

There is a joke from yesterday that the cartel is going to do a marketcap flippening of BCH to replace ETH as the 2nd largest coin in marketcap, i.e. around $25~30 billion.  But of course, it all depends on the cross rate and BTC market cap.  So if BTC keeps going down and dragging down ETH too, the flippening of BCH against ETH is made easier.  But naturally, that would be bearish as heck, since the coins that are doing all the real work and innovation, i.e. BTC and ETH, actually get over taken by some cartel of pumpers and miners.  That would disillusion a lot of people in the crypto space.

As to why S2X future even has values, it's the reason that people have stated before.  That is, in order to sell your S2X future when it goes live a month ago, you need to split your coins into BT1 and BT2.  Now when that BT2 is worthless at 5 mbtc as news came out, people buy back (short cover) BT2 to re-combine with BT1 so that they can get back their original BTC and tx out of Bitfinex.  Because seriously, who would want hold BTC a minute longer than needed on Bitfinex?   Thus there is more people who want to buy back their BT2 to tx out than the losers who got rekted, but refused to realize loss, and hoped that some S2X dev will copy-paste BCH's EDA and replay-protection, so that they can at least hope for a pump later.  

When S2X future is almost worthless, you are taking counterparty risk by holding that contract and keeping your BTC on Bitfinex.

Even though it is 50%~70% more profitable to mine on BCH chain now, the split in hashrate between two networks are the same as previous EDA cycles, i.e. a max of 60% to 40% between BTC and BCH chain.  This means that just as there is a "mysterious miner" that is willing to mine BCH chain at a loss (often 30~40% without some EDA manipulation), there are also at least 6~7 exahash that is loyal to BTC chain since August and won't budge even if BCH entice them with 50% more profit.  

As far as I can tell, even though the mining pools behave as a cartel, the individual miners are as split as the bitcoin community itself in their preference for future scaling roadmap.  So there are quite a few Chinese miners who are highly skeptical of Jihan et al. even if they got to keep a polite relation to get their Antminers.  So when people press the nuke button with a PoW change, it also nuke the good guys who are still contributing around 60% of network hashrate, even when it's decidedly less profitable to do so.

I vaguely recall that the new DAA for BCH calls for per block difficulty adjustment based on mean time of last 144 blocks.  So once the new DAA goes live in 2 days, it should remove the current profitability arbitrage between BTC and BCH chain quickly.  Then people will see for real how much hashrate is really committed to both chains.

But the point from my previous post is that people who is looking at hashrate and talking about PoW change is getting it wrong and miss the whole point.  Because hashrate dynamic is no different this time than previous EDA cycle, this means that there IS something else that is happening that affects the price, and it is certainly NOT the hashrate.  It could be the cartel pump combined with noises from Bitpay and Xapo on twitter, plus that Tokyo based memory dealer's move to go all BCH in his biz and .com.  Maybe it's all planned in advance to pressure the Core team to yield or we will move or perhaps it's just another regular "dialogue" between biz/dev/miners.  It's anybody's guess as to which episode of "The Great Game" that are being played now.

Sorry if there are any misinterpretation, but that was my actual experience at the time for those $5 put option.  People cover them and I presume that people just don't want to hold it till expiry and cover them to get money out of system.

Edit, you are right in that an example that parallel BT2 would be much better from short call (rather than long far OTM put) point of view.  Thanks.  

Bitminter just mined a block with 13+ BTC fee vs. 12.5 BTC reward. 
I presume that this is how mining will work as we move toward next halving and future halving.
Good for them, I can't even remember the last time seeing regular blocks coming from Bitminer.

https://bitminter.com/block/btc/0000000000000000007bdc9ed9b9e79fa3010c982a81af7b6b2458d924dc828f

In all fairness, the few Chinese and Koreans that I know, who betted with the Chinese miner side in August and September, already got out during the current pump.  So it's likely only whales with insider info, whatever that info might be, are in this now.  They are doing a splendid job too as there are barely any BCH walls left in places like Bittrex and Poloniex, at least compare to the $5 billion volume that they have been doing in the past few days.

Can't blame people for wanting to get out early either as they are badly burned during the Chinese ban in early September.  The conscience is really on the people who got in in the past few days.

At least BTC+BCH total is going up again and near all time high.  So if both sides of bitcoiners join hand and sing kumbaya, i.e. BTC hold the line and BCH doing the pump, all future Top 10 Crypto Marketcap will be Bitcoin something by next year.  

We have proven to the world in August that one can "add value" to the system by being a bunch of merkleforkers.  Now we can add value even when engaging in the 1st real crypto war.  It's Win-Win for all.  Everyone forced into being Bitcoin Maximalist by default because there would be no non-Bitcoin ALT to choose from.  

Thanks the cartel for a rehearsal on what the future will look like when those Wall Street banksters come online.

Now that Bithumb is down, I just hope that Ver didn't piss off all those Jopok/Yakuza/Triads "businessman" in Asia.

The news links below, but in Korean.
Basically 3000 people show up at Bithumb's Gangnam HQ to protest that lovely Gox style BCH candlestick from 2.85 mio KRW ($2600) to 0.25 mio KRW ($220).  The presidential palace is demanding an investigation into the incident.  Hope that Vers et al. won't get a visit from those Jopok anytime soon.  

http://biz.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2017/11/13/2017111302006.html
http://www.hani.co.kr/arti/economy/finance/818839.html

FUD?  Who knows.

Tencent reported that Sichuan has issued a notice indicating that all BTC production is ILLEGAL.  Thus all hydro power plants are to cut off electricity supplies or face penalty.

The second image is the supposedly "official document".

As I discussed before, those miners ship their Antminers to KangDing in Sichuan during Spring as the Himalaya melts and water flow downstream into Sichuan for cheap electricity from hydro power.  Miners ship their Antminers back to coal producing region like Inner Mongolia during winter as the Tibetan plateau freezes up and electricity cost doubles.  Just to note that it is almost winter now.

Edit: Just to note that this is actually "Bullish" for BTC as it will effectively kill off those Bitmain mining farms, if true, or at least increase electricity cost significantly.  So that individual miners actually have a chance to mine if profitability allows.

It says,

"Emergency notice concerning the prohibition of Bitcoin production"

"Bitcoin production is an illegal operation.  All power plants would thus be engaging in illegal operation (by supplying electricity to the said operation).  From the date of reception of this notice, all power plants are to stop (aiding) Bitcoin production.  Electricity production are now to be controlled and distributed via *Name* power substation.  All illegal supply of electricity will be cut off from the power grid and face penalty.  National Sichuan *Name* Power Corporation."

Yeah, S2X/BTC on Yobit reach parity @1.000 with around 200 BTC volume.  Sounds totally legit.

They are pumping that Bitcore BTX thing over at that some what sketchy Bit-Z exchange, now at 4 mbtc.  Suppose to list at HitBTC soon too.  I am not bothering with it for now.  But one of old Legendary mention it on the thread before and BTX crew did a new snapshot on Nov. 2 too.  So people got some free BTX coins.
Details : https://steemit.com/crypto-news/@xwerk/bitcore-btx-guide-the-2nd-snapshot-for-btc-hodlers-free-btx-or-how-it-works

Also one of the supposedly biggest BTC hodler in China, Li Xiao Lai, is launching his own fork SBTC http://www.supersmartbitcoin.com/index.html .  "Make Bitcoin Great Again."  
He got a handle on Bitcointalk from 2011~2 and posted regularly.  But I couldn't be bothered to look it up now.  He stated that he had 100K + BTC back in 2013, like that FriedCat erupter dude.  No clue how much BTC he has now.

Honestly all these forks are giving me headaches now.  I am thinking of not bothering with them until they go above 0.05 BTC each or if they go bonker like that weekend BCH pumps.  

He still shows up in reddit btc though.  For some reason, the BCH crew refused his "help" at improving EDA/DAA algorithm.

Also, Roger Ver apparently pulled his 10K BTC bid at 0.1 BCH/BTC, at least for now.  It was doubled down to 20K BTC during that plunge to 0.10, for a few minutes.  
Perhaps he has finally regained some senses after that weekend rage-quit?  Whether it be go-all-in on BCH or putting 20K BTC on one exchange.  Both are quite insane for an old timer.  

As discussed before, since ICO will be banned/regulated, it is just easier to do those "IFO", Initial Fork Offering, i.e. fork and pre-mine a percentage, onboard millions of users instantly.  Even a 0.01~0.02 crossrate would be worth a few billions dollars, a magnitude greater than the biggest ICO. 

That is assuming of course that they actually got a crew that can copy-paste and code a bit, unlike that S2X wreck.   

Just clear your browser, everything, cookies, login details, browsing records, etc., then reboot and try again.  I got locked out of my late 2012 accounts too as Theymos apparently has locked all "inactive" accounts.  Hacks are still happening and as far as I can tell, Theymos never answered those emails.  If you got a signed signature in those signature threads, one of the mod may help, but don't count on it.

I wouldn't put it past the government to one day ban BTC and parade those "evil speculators" on the street for some mob stoning and schadenfreude.

Feign ignorance, just smile politely when others demonstrate their impressive (and recently acquired) erudition in blockchain.  This is just so that you won't have to face nuisances from nosy neighbors, envious in-laws, and begrudging colleagues. 

Boromir: One simply does not talk about bitcoin (except on bitcointalks).

The True Prophet has disappeared.  His disciples are fighting over his legacy by cherry-picking the Holy Text and interpret it to suit their agenda.  Charlatans and rabble-rousers come in and pretend to be their saviors and rally the believers to their causes.  But worse trials are coming and fratricide only weaken us for the challenges ahead.

Someone needs to tape a "1 mbtc" sticker to that $10 Federal Reserve Note and put caption, "Centralized, 100% pre-mined, no limit, scam, favored by drug dealers and terrorists around the world" right beneath it.

Someone just need to change the caption to today.

Right on time, ghosts from the past are summoned back to the thread.  It's almost like a family reunion again.  But on the other hand, it's kind of sad that not many here are new faces, i.e. plenty of "newbie" account are actually old timers who got hacked or lost their old account due to Theymos lock.

As for "the largest wealth transfer in history", communist revolutions in the last century are some of the biggest wealth transfer (and wealth destruction) in history too.  So again, people here are not signing up for some hip way to make easy money, but something more akin to taking the red pill and going down the rabbit hole.

Kim Jong-Un is probably long BTC on Bithumb today.   

http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2017/11/103_240088.html

His brand new ICBM sends BTC/KRW on Bithumb and BTC/JPY on Bitflyer to da Moon.

The last time I checked up on him in reddit/btc, he was trying to "help" BCH succeed in its struggle against BTC.  So I guess like Buttcoin since 2011, this is personal for him.  But by now, even he admits that Satoshi is a true genius.  

Since Bitflyer will often block IP from outside Japan, the best charts are probably,

BTC/JPY   https://cryptowat.ch/bitflyer/btcfxjpy
BTC/KRW https://cryptowat.ch/bithumb/btckrw

They are doing ridiculous volume today too, literally in the billions.

Also we might have break a new record today with almost 400K tx as per Blockchain.info.  Of course, this is not sustainable and is only possible with hashrate pointing back to BTC chain and even old miners re-activating due to the ridiculous profitability now.  The next difficulty adjustment is gonna hurt.  

Those Koreans are crazy now at almost 1.5 mio BTC/KRW, i.e. close to 14K BTC/USD on Bithumb.  BTC/JPY also made a new high near 1.45 mio BTC/JPY on Bitflyer. 

Gotta be another record with 470K+ tx done today as per Blockchain.info.  We are almost catching up to that CryptoKitties chain.  Too bad the difficulty will spike to 1.6 trillion within 2 hours.  There is probably going to be a serious backlog as we are in the middle of the week rather than the weekend.

So the high was almost 2 mio BTC/KRW ($18K) on Bithumb and 1.7 mio BTC/JPY on Bitflyer ($15.5K).  So are we almost to MasterLuc's target by now?  Or are we going to blow through even the most bullish forecast by the start of 2018.  

I was really surprised when I saw that a day ago.  I did remember donating to Andreas' fund for Dorian Nakamoto in early 2014.  I didn't know that Andreas was basically broke at the time.  

Someone just donated half a million+ USD to Andreas!  

https://blockchain.info/tx/e68ebe16e6aaa08e3f9d271ba78aaeb4ce7db01b0dc0f3b4d5eb29a14dbddf69

This is why I LOVE bitcoiners.  

The only problem with that tx is that there is an unconfirmed tx when the donator cleared out his address for Andreas.

https://blockchain.info/tx/e4c6511f24aaa6c391794df3dd3786b597c3ffffd28807ea46cde7f4718e4b32

At 66 satoshi per byte, that tx might not be able to clear for quite a long time, especially given the current craze and tx spike.  So that is going to hold up the subsequent tx which paid a very reasonable 150 satoshi per byte.

So it's 2.5 mio BTC/KRW ($23K) on Bithumb and 2.4 mio BTC/JPY ($21.5K) on BitFlyer.  Even GDAX almost got to USD$20K.  Global BTC daily volume almost $20 billion and network buckling under 200K tx pending, with most of spam tx out of mempool now due to timeout.  

So when are we going to see even the old hands on deck, who got thru all these years somewhat unscathed, become scared?    

I doubt that old hands are scared of price movement since BTC can pull a 80% and hodlers wouldn't even blink.  

But it may pull a premature over-reaction from one of government (e.g. South Korea) and having huge spike in tx when network capacity is only around 500K (even with Segwit) may put pressure on dev team to do something rash without thorough testing.  

BTC does have very low correlation with almost any traditional assets.  But that is more likely due to low institutional ownership.  Once funds like Man AHL (which I used to own a  bit) and Risk Parity fund starts coming in, we most likely will start to see an increase in correlation and thus reducing the supposed hedging value of adding BTC to your portfolio.  But the extreme volatility may yet drown out any correlation.  

Regardless of different views or preference on scaling roadmap, I just hope that all bitcoiners will save their precious BTC for the future fight against the banksters and govts.  Pumping via fiat as per Bithumb is ok.  But using up precious BTC as Ver has done is just regrettable.    

Unless people got their own Bloomberg or Thomson/Reuters Terminal, just watch this dude live stream the CBOE feed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zj0ttLruAc

Just look at the trading volume.  On GDAX, the main driver of recent LTC move, LTC $volume is 600 mio+, almost the same as BTC volume (700 mio+).  So it's just the newcomers who went thru the same stage that we all went thru years ago, i.e. BTC is too expensive, you can get bigger percentage gain for less money on smaller marketcap coin, etc..  It takes a while for people to finally see which coins has real value in the end, and it's not the ALT.  Heck, I went thru that stage myself in late 2012 and even mined a 50 LTC block with a crappy HP biz notebook.  

Another day of BTC doing almost 500K tx as per Blockchain.info.  This means that we are going to see another 20% spike in difficulty in a few days.  Even that Cryptokitties chain is doing almost 1 mio tx today.  Now even Bitmain's own BTC.com is rolling out Segwit wallet to pack more tx into blocks.  I have seen a few 4K+ tx blocks and lots of 3K+ tx blocks.

Given the nominal tx volume in fiat terms, our BTC is averaging out to about $60K fiat per tx vs Cryptokitties chain's less than $4K fiat per tx.  So despite what exchange volume might tell you, e.g. that pump-and-dump XRP's 6 billion+ trading volume.  BTC is actually seeing serious uses and moving lots of value around on the internet, as it is designed to.  

Edit.  Uhm..  by the way, that XRP has passed BCH in marketcap from the current pump....

With Direxion, people are probably going to get rekt with some inverse (bear) 3x (leverage) BTC fund though.  Probably going to break record for a listed ETF going to zero (or splitting).  

Also, it takes a while for crowds used to buy-low-sell-high and pump-and-dump in CB dominated inflationary world to figure out that with deflationary currency, it's all pump-and-pump and sell-high-and-buyback-even-higher as people hoard it to oblivion.

It's just newbie quoting random post from 2013, again.  This is quite common in the forum for upping post count, though not in this thread, up to now.

Ouch, I think some people here, like Arklan, also started in 2011 and supposedly end up with barely anything.  But like Rosewater said, if Andreas Antonopoulos can end up with almost no bitcoin and only recently become debt free, then any bitcoiners can end up making wrong calls that eventually see most of their paper wealth evaporate (and that includes even the current semi-billionaire such as Roger Ver).

There are tons of ways to lose BTC over time, scams like Trendon Shavers, Friedcat, Butterfly Labs; getting Zhou Tonged, Goxxed or Bitfinexed; more often than not, lost it in some ALT pump-and-dump or daytrading.  But quite often, simply because people can't afford to hodl and had to sell to paid expenses/debt or emergencies.  So it is actually quite difficult not to make wrong calls along the way that sees one's own BTC holding reduced substantially.  Fortunately, due to exponential rise in fiat terms, people normally end up with more, in fiat terms, than years ago.  But that still leaves a bitter taste for some as they know that they would have substantially more BTC had this and that not happened along the way.  

There are quite a number of people who can make 100+ mio in a single year, let alone their net worth.  There is also this bitcoiner who had just donated like $100 million to charity.  That dude is probably somewhat rich, but definitely not "filthy".  

You can see the order book building in BCH on GDAX.  So little coins and yet can start fiat trading on them right away?  Hmm.. and this combined with an interview "news" from a BCH proponent on mainstream media..  I guess someone frontrun this in price in the past few days.  So the new challenge for BTC in 2018 is not only CB fud, but also a corporate version of crypto based on either BTC or ETH or Iota or what not?

Though I do believe that if BTC crashes, it's going to take down all the crypto with them.  So I guess we should thank GDAX for pumping BCH and crashing all the crypto, all in time for Christmas?  (Not to mention a replay of hashrate war, tx spam, mempool spike and what not....)

I wouldn't call it a crash, more like a lack of liquidity in that spike down to 14K on GDAX.  Their "news" has obviously caught people off guard, except for the BCH crews and pumpers who are obviously in the know. 

Actually fiat does everything better than crypto if you are just using it as a medium of exchange.  But few people want to hold it long term and those who hodl it has their wealth redistributed over time.  So it takes a while for the masses to figure out why people even value something like BTC.  Even if people think that they got it all figured out at the beginning, the more you go down the rabbit hole, the less you know.  

If anyone bother to check, they can see that BTC is transferring consistently $30 ~ 50 billion value over the internet in the past weeks.  This is more than ALL the ALT COMBINED!  So it is functioning as designed, i.e. an internet value transfer protocol with a daily $10 million+ fee market that incentivize profit seeking miners to secure it.  

Actually CBOE and CME contracts have barely any volumes, at least compared to spot market.  I bet those derivative players wish that they are in cahoot with Coinbase for insider news such as this.  But at least it could serve as a game plan/rehearsal for future attacks.

The best link is this one.  You can add your favorite crypto too as they are surprisingly some small alt that see significant transaction volume in fiat terms.  Might be due to the occasional pump-and-dump though.  Now obviously it does not work for XMR or similar ccy.

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/sentinusd-btc-eth-bch-ltc.html#3m

Lol BCH @ $9500 on GDAX..

GDAX's fiasco with BCH launch today and the news that Charlie Lee has sold all his LTC holding has definitely hurt sentiment.  Nothing new for long term hodler, but all those newcomers to GDAX are probably getting a rude shock.

At least the Hunt Brothers did get their comeuppance with their attempt at cornering silver, but not so much for Buffet though.  

Just to be fair, that large BCH address might have been an exchange cold wallet as I have observed and tracked Xapo's 520K+ BCH consolidation, meaning that they are also holding 520K+ BTC on behalf of their clients and millions of users.  Though that particular BCH address certainly looks unusual as it only started at the end of Sep 2017.

I am not a Xapo user.  Though I heard that they have already distributed their 520K+ BCH to their clients.  I had presumed that Coinbase is going to do the same.  But instead, they pulled this 1 hours listing stunt with nothing more than a blog/twitter post, while everyone could see that BCH is already pumping yesterday and before.  Some people even mention it in this thread.  So no market depth nor preparing people for the listing, and end up with $9,500 BCH quote and had to stop trading all together.  So much for a supposedly highest valuation "unicorn" in the crypto space.  

I was laughing all the way as I listened to the "guru".  I am not sure whether he is serious or whether this is a spoof.   

Well lots of spam tx do come from this whale address with 35K BTC.

https://blockchain.info/address/1CCUx4uRbHekUgqSeUm969G6oZ1KhvKagQ

Just keep following the split into 100 BTC and 1 BTC,

https://blockchain.info/address/16WkWhvfUtWuL62hLKyLXjRTHzQRy2zUXC
https://blockchain.info/tx/fc3e64581b89406eabc1655b0cc922c19233b7d54960fd04bfcb13fe5b8da66c
https://blockchain.info/address/13GDCrMhVnsdGFDEEKJr1t9A5cHYUMT9sM

and you will get tx like this.

https://blockchain.info/tx/f3d38a015f8c68bfc62187d3497ac74b673fb788bedfe8d1a9a86fa1d07ccee9

Each batch of spam pay the exact same fee, but they are adjusting higher to make sure that they squeeze into next block and take up block space.  I have see it gone up from 750 satoshi/byte to 820 satoshi/byte now.

Perhaps "Pricing Gouging" by self-interested and profit-maximizing mining cartel would be more appropriate than "spam".  Heck, if there is a "profit-sharing" agreement among the cartel and they control most of hashrate on the network, it is probably the only rational thing to do.  

Since govt and banksters are going to do this in future anyway, having a whale "stress testing" the system using their own fund might even be considered as altruistic.  Since they are already being "altruistic" by offering unlimited capacity and no fee network for people to use, all courtesy of hodlers and miners.  So if one day some govt decides to send continuous batches of 1 million dollar tx over the network, we should just thank them for "adding value" to the network and live test the fee market.  

As mentioned previously the fee record was already broken weeks ago by the good old Bitminter during the previous hashrate war, when BCH was still under the old EDA.

https://bitminter.com/block/btc/0000000000000000007bdc9ed9b9e79fa3010c982a81af7b6b2458d924dc828f

I suppose people figure out by now that with fixed coin supply, market price will exhibit large volatility as demand for BTC spike and ebb.  With its deflationary design and strong incentive to hoard, the general trend is up and people are happy with it.  Yet some people seems to fail to carry over the same understanding to fee market, which given limited capacity on a decentralized network, the price of tx is even more volatile and can spike from 10 satoshi/byte to 1K+ satoshi/byte in fairly short period of time.  This is regardless whether the tx demand is artificial (35K BTC whale spams) or organic (massive influx of new users and manic stage) or combination of both.  

Businesses that require stable unit of account for trade/commerce (to avoid exchange rate risk) or reliable confirmation (tx may or may not confirm depending on fee/backlog) will not use crypto.  At least, not until some sort of Layer 1.5 or Layer 2 solution is rolled out.  But Bitcoin is voluntary and requires people to be motivated by self-interest, i.e. users adopt due to deflationary design and miners secure due to a fee market is approaching $20 million daily.  

So people who are saying that our coin supply is fixed and volatile just as BTC but with unlimited capacity for no tx fees are being inconsistent or even paradoxical, i.e. they are offering you a subsidy to use their network, courtesy of their whale hodlers and miners.  They may seem "altruistic", yet the rent on that "free" network would have to be extracted from users in other ways, e.g. upfront entry cost as some variant of "Jeonse" landlord system widely seen in South Korea.  So just like fiat, people who use those "free" services seemingly provided by kindness of strangers are not thinking through the full implication and consequence of using such money.

Central banks can already ctrl-p fiat to pump alt and short BTC on fiat settled exchanges.  So XRP is just a rehearsal for whatever FEDcoin or PBoCcoin that's going to come online.

When was the last time that Theymos even bother to show up here?  Now that general stats is disabled....

Actually I find it hilarious that bankster coin XRP went from $1+ to $0.40 (-60%) just like that on Bitfinex and pump-and-dump IOTA went from $5+ to $1 (-80%) at the same time, on Bitfinex.  That's some of the biggest red daily candle around.  

As for micgoossens' ATH game, that is very generous of you, again.  I believe that it was 0.5 BTC reward last time, and we did break through $5K after that game.  So it was certainly bullish for BTC at the time.   Maybe it will prompt other people to buy harder to make sure that they win.     I am going to leave the opportunity for others to make the guess.  

Except for a certain country in the world, the so called "commerce/turnover" is not buying Christmas gifts for loving members of family via Bitpay, but rather paying 2~3% to "smurf" RMB over Lo Wu Custom into Hong Kong, or paying 5% min so that Triad enforcers can deposit "winnings" as Chinese casino whales at a local gold & silver "dealer/moneychanger" in Vancouver.  So paying even $1,000 per tx is like a godsend where $20K~50K is often expected for a $1 mio tx, and has been for the last 30 years.  Heck, they even recently nab some South Korean prosecutor/law-enforcement for taking in billions+ KRW "profit-sharing" so that Chinese "whales" can "arbitrage coins" from China and deposit proceed into exchanges like Bithumb in Gangnam.  

I think the fact that years ago, everyone knows that solar energy requires massive amount of silver and yet silver failed to stage even a meaningful rally is quite bearish.  Even China, which is on Silver Standard for a millennium and was one of the largest silver producer in the world (still is), doesn't care about silver.  It just means that silver has been demonetized.  A study on why something would be monetized (like bitcoin) or demonetized (like silver) is an interesting topic in itself.  But now days, I just give away those silver maples/eagles as souvenirs.  Pretty much no one has a clue on how much these lovely coins are worth.

As for Dyson Sphere, I suspect that if they are ever built, they would be for powering bitcoin hashing rather than synthesizing silver at the rate we are going with hashrate.  

Like those permanent magnet based on rare earth, as soon as rare earth elements price spike a few years back, all sorts of cost saving process are researched and implemented.  So not a surprise that as silver is like I think 20% (?) cost of solar panel, people immediately shift to thin-film process.  So I presume that future process may not use any silver at all, just like there are permanent magnet without rare earth elements now days, since they are crucial for electric cars. 

This is merely a public service announcement.  Our 35K BTC spamming whale is back with his batches of tx.

As discussed a few days ago, this 35K BTC whale address started spamming on Dec 20,

https://blockchain.info/address/19Rd2Z4ckdPEs34KEmKpbddpK7ngp1sR6g

but he stopped after BTC bottomed at 10K and specifically with the green candlestick that goes from 13K to 14.8K.

But now he is back, paying 1k satoshi/byte, despite optimal fee for getting into next block at around 400~500 satoshi/byte.  

https://blockchain.info/address/197D9cfnEM3NwBGsmw4N99h18pkosoufkf
https://blockchain.info/tx/56a314ac0e58fe97daf97d75b73f8b6b4660488f099ffd37c22a774d2971420d

Note the coincidental downturn in the chart and those who trade the market can derive whatever conclusion they wish.  

For those interested in fee market, we are now down to backlogs with 400 satoshi/byte txs.  So for those who believes that it's mining cartel price gouging rather than whale manipulation, this is a data point for future reference on possible cartel price fixing scheme.

You know, the above LN discussion is why pretty much why every time a bankster coin like XRP pass BCH in marketcap, BCH will be pumped to heck to surpass it.  Because that bankster coin also offer unlimited tx capacity with even lower fee, and guess what, it even ironically resembles how LN might look like in operation, if LN ever becomes operational.  If some layer 2 LN coin can be worth more than BCH, then guess what the base layer coin would be worth?

If some easy and cheap L2 can be implemented without serious trust/security tradeoffs, then we would already have Gold Standard 2.0 empowered by internet and bitcoin price would be on its way out of Milky Way galaxy.  

This is just to note that just as people can pump and manipulate BTC price, they can pump and manipulate fee market too.  So now if people don't want to get fleeced, they got to look at distribution of pending tx in mempool too.  

Since now we have people still sending out large batches of 1K satoshi/byte txs when mempool was down to 140 satoshi/byte range.  So fee estimator can be way off.  Also, there is only a handful of block found 2~4 hours ago, in fact only 1 block was found in the entire hour, that will screw up the fee estimator even more as those 1K satoshi fee tx do come out in batches and if no blocks are found regularly, they eat up more and more of space in the next block.  But BTC.TOP did just shift back most of their hashrate to BTC chain now, so more blocks will probably be found.  But it's kind of scary just to see how much hashrate Chinese mining cartel controls now and it is still going up fast.

P.S.  This is a good site to see the fee distribution of TX, check it before sending out tx so that people don't overpay.

https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/

Naturally as many people pointed out, a visual version is here.

https://dedi.jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/more/#24h

There are also fee estimators directly on Chinese mining pool websites.  Necessary because people might want to use their tx accelerator to pay those "out of band" fee.

As people can see, those 1K satoshi tx is sitting at one end, with almost nothing in between, but as network clogs up, it will "help" to shift the fee back up again.

Uhm, people don't even need to speculate on how much other hodlers hodl.  A certain someone already openly stated that Trendon Shavers alone cost him 1.6K BTC, and that's after deducting "interest" received.  So the principle amount is even higher.  No need to read up past posts either.  People can also make educated guess simply based on the year that they started accumulating BTC, assuming that they hadn't lost it through the million ways that you can lose your BTC.  

Can also vouch for HP ProBook with Windows 7.  Still have one of these.  Mined a 50 LTC block with it in late 2012.  Only worth about $2.00 at the time and screwed up the HD and embedded AMD Radeon that cost me around $1K.  But their multi-years warranty allows me to basically replace the components and I learned not to mine with laptop again.   

This is just to note that there is no reason why a bankster coin should be worth more than the banksters it serves.  Because if that is the case, the said banksters can always just issue another bankster coin mk. II and extract even more rent, and we already know the marketcap for the likes of JPM or GS.  

On a side note, that 35K BTC whale is still sending out large batches of tx and ironically making the BTC fee market and daily tx count looking far better than it is.  Though the fee for those tx have gradually decreased from 1K satoshi per byte to 950, etc., to 650 and now 535 satoshi/byte, the number of tx has doubled.  This is costing him between $500K~$1 mio per day min in terms of fees.  

Wait, wait.  People do know that in certain parts of the world, Auld Lang Syne are literally sang by school kids at graduation and at the end of school, right?

Happy 2018 and hopefully it will be another great year for Bitcoin, just as 2017.

I think one of the reason why the Core team insists on soft fork and no hard fork is for backward compatibility, so that someone can still run their strip-down 0.5.3 node.

But I presume everyone already knows that if you bury those paper wallets in the backyard, it is going to turn into dust in a few years.  Same thing as if someone bury those fiat cash (non polymer ones), you will end up with only those shiny metallic security stripe.  Some govt/bank will allow you to exchange those metallic security stripe into new notes, but don't bet on it.

So if people insist on burying their paper wallet, use something like CryptoSteel or just stamp your private keys (part of it or "encrypted") onto metal sheets or AU kilobars.  

Probably not a sold account, at least not by the original owner.  It is far more likely that legendary account, dormant since late 2015, got hacked/sold a few months ago, like crap load of other people, including quite a few on this thread.  

I don't even want to admit how many people I recognize in that teaser.  Though if Episode 6 truly occurs, that would be an epic end to this saga.

Actually there was a discussion on dev-mailing-list just a while back on introducing an "intermediate" block using different PoW via soft fork.  So pretty much everything can be done via soft fork.  

There was a discussion on changing block size via soft fork, yep, no need to hard fork to change block size.  There was even a discussion on shortening block interval to have much faster blocks for BTC, via soft fork too, written by none other than Vitalik himself.  But getting those soft forks to activate via miners or even users would be quite a challenge though....

Even the Mining Cartel knew that PoW may be a "bug" rather than a "feature" and hence BCH was created as a hedge against the possibility that the Core team may just decide to brick all those ASIC miners.  Then at least they can try to rebrand their pet project as bitcoin thru the definition of having most cumulative work done. 

Since S. Korea is leading the way down (-20% ~ -30% across board), I suppose that Korean are finally starting to discount the possibility that their govt may pull a China-style ban, regardless of whether it's tax authority raid on exchanges or new legislation being discussed.  But on the bright side, newbies to the crypto world will finally get a chance to see what their favorite ALT is made of.  BTC got here today not because it's the coolest kid on the block, but being basically the last one standing through out all the storms.  

To be fair, he is probably just warning users about the hazards of using Kraken to trade in a volatile day such as today.  

I think the problem with decentralized exchange has always been the fiat link rather than tech. 

There is some hope that some crypto friendly jurisdiction will be issuing their owned pegged crypto, e.g. J-Coin with Japan, that can serve as a fiat gateway rather than sketchy scheme such as Tether.  Once you have a real JPY Tether backed by sovereign, then it's a simple atomic swap or any decentralized exchange, then you can do your usual forex via USD/JPY, EUR/JPY or CNY/JPY pair. 

That 35K BTC whale is still sending out huge batches of "spams" to BTC chain since Dec. 20, 2017.  You know that's the day when Coinbase decided to list BCH in the middle of night with nothing more than a twit and 1 hour notice on blog, and a certain someone go on CNBC and said that BTC is useless and people should keep their BTC on exchange just in case that miner decides to switch off on mass, and satoshilite decides to twit that he had sold all his LTC holdings, and of course that is also the start of correction from 19K+.  

I guess someone had finally decided that everyone can play the same game, except that instead of costing that 35K whale around 500K~1.5 mio fiatcoin per day to "stress-test" the BTC network, it actually cost zilch to do the same to even 8 MB chain.  Ironically, over 2K BTC fee spent so far on stress-testing actually make the fee market and BTC tx count look far better than it really is.  It didn't do jack to the "true vision of Satoshi" chain except to make people "fee arbitrage" to ETH and XRP, with some to LTC.  

Of course, at the current burn rate, that 35K BTC whale can keep this up for more than a year if he doesn't mind blowing away all those BTC on fees.  Even then, it is still possible to pay nominal tx fees and then pay those "out of band" fee via fiatcoin to various mining pool accelerators to take up space in the next block.  So people can play this war of attrition as long as they have the BTC, fiat, and willingness to do so.  But in the end, I suspect that it is still going to do jack, not getting even some personal satisfaction or schadenfreude from all these money that could have been simply used to pump own ALT coin.  

https://vinnylingham.com/a-tale-of-two-bitcoins-20375d49d3d3


From my reading of Vinny's twits and his argument with Core team over the past year, I thought his ideology follows more closely with the ETH and BCH crowd.  

The problem with the above statement is that those who don't care about centralization will probably end up using the upcoming bankster and govcoin in due time.  So I have maintained in the past that ALT isn't really the problem, but govcoin with monthly airdrop in the form of Universal Basic Income or social welfare would be the real competition.  Because Bitcoin is voluntary and based on incentives, people can leave any time if they want.  So it got to be deflationary for hodlers to hold and fee market high for miners to secure.

I mean if you are in crypto only for the money, I think it's perfectly fine for people to play with bankster/govcoin.  After all, crony capitalism is highly lucrative and the overlords always want their goons and hanger-on to be well paid to set an example for others.  Even if you are a diehard rebel planning to pull a disappearing act once the revolution fails, it still may be sensible to hedge a bit because if we can't get Gold Standard 2.0 empowered by Internet, than it's more likely that we will end up with some dystopian Fiat 2.0, paid for and paved with the blood of crypto pioneers.  So with some bankster/govcoin on hand, you can actually claim some plausible deniability or at least as someone being led astray and now repentant.

I thought the "Nothing-at-Stake" problem is well understood by now, i.e. large PoS stakeholder will just "mine" every fork since it cost zilch to do so.  So people falling that kind of scam, thinking that they would be earning "interest" from doing nothing is going to get screwed by the whales.

Due to the fact that the selloff started from Chinese related OKEX and Bitfinex and the timing coincide with a certain news coming out on Sina, I think it's that Reuter FUD from PBoC Vice Governor.  Those interested can read it up.  But it fits the general trend (and rumors since the end of last year) that noose is being tightened on crypto again in China.  All those OTC trade after the exchange ban, capital flight to exchanges across the border in HK, and BTC mining now screwing up electricity consumption data in China, means that Chicom is interested in doing something about it.  

I honestly would not worry so much about China or even South Korea, but rather a coordinated G20 action as hinted by Mnuchin and Bundesbank member.  The actual G20 summit is later this year, but they can always come up with some sort of joint communique thru scheduled events or workgroups.  So our fellow brethens who favors on-chain scaling need  to try harder with their "we are only trying to disrupt payment space and provide banking to the unbanked poor" meme.  The banksters and govt never bought that argument in the first place, now they are outright calling Bitcoin for what it is, i.e. the good ole numbered Swiss account, with your personal SWIFT terminal attached, before Swiss sold their soul and bank secrecy law to USG in 2009.