So all the news articles pointing out Bitcoin's widespread criminal use have been wrong? I'm shocked.

Wouldn't know which, but they talk about how the government will obviously get involved, even "shut it down", but don't mention any way that could actually be done. They just assume since government has power in their own domain, they have as much power elsewhere. I wonder how long it'll take for this bunch to start talking about that.

What, exactly will they regulate out of existence?

Trade in:
-Bitcoin specifically? That's a nice game of whack-a-mole they'd be setting themselves up for.

-Virtual currencies in general? There are a lot of them, I'd rather not even try to figure out where the unintended consequences of such a move would lead. Say goodbye to your MMOs, for one, if this comes to pass.

The argument I'm trying to make was made much better here:
http://www.finextra.com/Community/fullblog.aspx?blogid=8019

Let's assume, for the sake of argument, the Gox price rise is mainly caused by their withdrawal issues creating increased intra-gox demand for bitcoins. So much of the fuzzy "market sentiment" is still driven by that Gox ticker, it's not hard for me to imagine a scenario where all the exchanges keep creeping up on the hype of the Gox price going up, even if it did in the end turn out to be a sort of bank run fueling the Gox rocket. If that were to happen, we could also see a pretty drastic drop down when the Gox uncertainty get resolved, one way or the other.

BTC withdrawal delays on Gox have been reported every now and then for a long time now. IIRC the official explanation long ago was that that's how their system is set up. A relatively small hot wallet or something, maybe.

Of which the first is relevant. I speculate there's a negative correllation between Bitcoin's adoption rate and dorky bro-commentary on bitcointalk.

In case I didn't make myself clear enough: When someone is present at a U.S. Senate hearing, whether you'd "do them" is rarely the point.

Boy will I be glad when the hammer finally falls and we start correcting. I don't care what price it happens at, I just want to stop giggling at these charts. This is getting positively Lovecraftian.

I wish I was religious, all the best profanities revolve around that theme.

You can't really trust the Localbitcoins charts. That trade may or may not have actually happened.

I've done several SEPA withdrawals from Bitstamp in the last week or so. Everything has gone without a hitch for me so far, my latest withdrawal was processed yesterday, although that hasn't found its way to my account yet, of course. All the other withdrawals have come through just fine, on time for me. So, without any inside info on Bitstamp, I don't think they're doing a runner at this point.

Bitcoinica, Mybitcoin, inputs.io... Trusting people with your funds in this game has gotten many people burned. There isn't, and can't yet be, a single operator out there who could truly be trusted. No exchange has even been running long enough.

Personally, I have a lot of faith in Bitstamp, for example, but I don't trust them implicitly. Spectacularly trustworthy people have stolen or simply lost other people's money time and time again, and I'm sure we'll see big losses in the future as well.

Edit: To be clear, right now, I don't think Bitstamp is doing anything alarming. I have gotten everything I was supposed to get out from there promptly, so the "technical issues" explanation seems credible to me.

I'd be more inclined to believe that if I hadn't received a SEPA transfer from Bitstamp this morning.

If we're at 'early majority' already, Bitcoin is never going to see widespread use. Also, that graph doesn't make much sense. What's that bell curve supposed to represent? The numbers don't seem to be related to the graph.

After a big bout of selling at record highs, there's a record sum of USD on gox books? That doesn't sound like new money to me.

You're right, I guess some sleep here would help. The only way this would be old money is if there was a lot of USD sitting on gox off the orderbooks, waiting for a crash.

Re: trendlines, I see no way to know what they will be in the future. Now, you can get an average trend for what has been, but extrapolating that into the future seems iffy. It's possible the market up to now has consistently been either mostly above or below whatever the trendline will turn out to look like 5 years from now. Has anyone backtested this?

I was just wondering, has anyone analyzed historical data to see how much variance in price there is between weekdays and days of the month? Is there a weekday that's demonstrably higher than others? Or even a day of the month?

Is it just me, or are "posturing" walls that get pulled quickly when they are at risk of being eaten much more rare these days than they used to be?

There seemed to be a 2k or so sell wasll at 1000 on stamp for a second there.

An 80 BTC or so ask seems to keep popping up just below 1000 on bitstamp. It gets bought up, a minute later there's another. Stealth wall?

I'm wondering if it's the same player who bought the 900+ BTC on the way to breaking 1000 USD on stamp. Pave the way past a resistance, sell what you can over 1000, sell the rest to cover whatever you didn't manage to sell yet. If this is the case we shouldn't see much more than 900 sold this way. Otherwise, who knows.

So... increased liquidity leads to decreased volatility, right?

Check the volumes in USD...

In any case, I was talking about this 0-fee business.

Are you referring to my preferring to consider USD volume? If so, I'd like to hear your thinking there. It'd be pretty amazing to see both, BTC volumes from a year ago and today's prices right now. Yet today, selling enough to, say, buy a house compared to selling the same a year ago isn't a very big chunk of the daily trade volume.

Or maybe you take exception to my ribbing about the general idea here that speculation should increase liquidity, therefore decreasing volatility. I could have phrased that better to begin with, but my point was: if that's true, then given the barrier to speculate has now been significantly lowered, volatility should decrease. I guess we'll see!

I don't particularly believe one way or the other at the moment. Looking at the charts for the last few hours, the swings seem to be much wider than before, but it's pretty early to say.

What I'm getting at here is:

-The general consensus answer I've seen here is that speculation is good since it provides liquidity.
-Similarly, the general consensus answer seems to be that liquidity decreases volatility. (makes sense on the face of it)
-Ergo, increased speculation should lead to decreased volatility. And lo, we have a live experiment!

That's all, really. If my point was fuddled before, I apologize. It is late.

How many alts does this person have?

You don't. You place a limit order. If you really just want to buy or sell at any price, set your price absurdly high or low. Otherwise, set some sane max or min price and know you won't get shafted due to slippage.

On the topic of wall-watching, there's one to see at Bitstamp... Someone's rolling a 900k BTC bid wall upwards, the price seems to be getting pushed along so far.

And if the price goes off the trendline for very long, the trendline will shift... So how do we know whether Bitcoin has been mostly trading above or below whatever the trendline will turn out to be, so far? I'm guessing some tea leaves will be involved.

My point was, any trendline can only describe the past. Whether it can be extrapolated into the future in any meaningful sense is entirely speculative. (Ha ha.) If you were to draw the trend 10 years from now, using the same method, the portion of it corresponding to the market data we've seen up to now might or might not be close to the trendline as drawn now.

Bitcoin is not a conservative market. I'd be very surprised if it conformed to a trend estimated from a few years of data for very long.

You probably should. If it's luck, it's guaranteed to run out eventually.

Sometimes, repetition is the key to being funny. Mostly it's just boring.

Edit: What the, that was directed at fr33d0m1z3r or however he spells his nick - their post is gone, though. Is this thread being moderated after all?

Really? I was working under the impression the Wikipedia definition was more or less correct:


"In finance, technical analysis is a security analysis methodology for forecasting the direction of prices through the study of past market data, primarily price and volume. [...] Technical analysis is frequently contrasted with fundamental analysis, the study of economic factors that influence the way investors price financial markets. Technical analysis holds that prices already reflect all such trends before investors are aware of them. Uncovering those trends is what technical indicators are designed to do, imperfect as they may be." (emphasis mine)

In a weird way, too - was able to access it via TOR, but not otherwise, and downforeveryoneorjustme.com said it's up.

Third-party payment processors banned from dealing with BTC exchanges, uncertainty over whether that includes banks... What do you expect? My guess is, we may finally see what it looks like when users exit an exchange for good.

I have, unfortunately. They stopped trading altogether, that's not what I meant. Mt. Gox's withdrawal issues have led to some theories about what happens when cashflow to or from an exchange is cut off, the chinese exchanges look poised to give us some real-world examples.

What's with the poll, no date, no sub-540 option?

It would be interesting to know how many Chinese traders held all or most of their coins on exchanges. If most of the coins were already on an exchange, a larger portion of those looking to get CNY out while they can would have sold by now than if they had to access cold storage to send coins to sell. The buyers, it would follow, would be those who didn't manage to pull their bids, those who expect things to clear up, and those who can withdraw BTC and sell on some western exchange. If the majority of buyers were of the last kind, we could expect to see the volume on Chinese exchanges dwindle rather rapidly as users exit via CNY or BTC.

I did that for a while on Bitcoinica back in the day. Lost a few percent. I think many "traders" did much worse than I did.

I documented it here, the thread is buried somewhere way back on this forum.

Sorry, count me out. Property is such a hassle, cars doubly so.

I don't follow - who's going to pay the miners? Not Gox, we're assuming they lost the coins, right? So what leverage do they have? And if a cartel of miners decided to create a fork with, essentially, counterfeit coins, why would they give any to Gox?

1: no indication it's Satoshi
2: again?

Sorry, I'm not able to follow this forum keenly enough to know all the trolls...

Is there any way to find out the amount of tips withdrawn from the system? Is there a fee for sending a tip? I ask because people tipping each other back and forth could easily run up the volume, especially if they didn't consider their tips of much financial value.

Remember that interview with Karpeles saying the bitcons weren't technically lost, just unavailable? Either gox are lying through their teeth or they had some seriously poor practices. I can't say which is more likely. I've found a few old wallets I'd forgotten about, and no amount of people pointng at the blockchain would have helped me remember where the private keys where. Then again, I have never been entrusted with hundreds of thousands of BTC of other people's money, so my laxness is somewhat more excusable.

How many accounts have you made here by now?

Bitcoin allows the forcible return of stolen property just the same as any form of tangible property does. You find the person in possession of, or with knowledge of how to obtain, the property in question and you persuade or coerce them into handing the property over. Bitcoin simply doesn't contain a back door for anyone claiming authority to alter ownership of the property the public ledger keeps track of.

And now that we have 666 on stamp, the price will find an eerie stability for the foreseeable future.

How much was taken off the table? Could the offers simply have been snatched up by speculators in a panic not to miss the train?

I'm leaning towards confirmation bias - you look for the price to approach 666 since it seems significant, but don't notice if it hovers around some other number much more reliably.

That said, the idea some practitioner of The Art somewhere might have been an early adopter and is now using the wealth gained for ritual purposes - or as a joke, if there's a difference - makes about as much sense to me as the whale conspiracy theories that get thrown around here.

Finally a bit of action on Stamp.

OT, but: The devil's resistance again?

I don't know, I'm starting to feel kind of bearish. The volume in this thread is pretty dismal right now, and while bots can inject some liquidity, there's only so much they can do if the fundamentals aren't there. Maybe we've reached saturation and it's all downhill from here.

On a "serious" note, though - does anyone have a way to get the growth rate for this thread? that would be an interesting chart...

I was talking about the thread's prospects. Financially, I'm sure it's priceless.

about 26% yearly growth, then? So far it's been rather a lot higher than that.

Jorge, Did you read Ladislav Kristoufek's paper yet?
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1406.0268v1.pdf

Any comments?

Why rely on belief? Historical market data is freely available, any trend like the weekend slump should be visible there.

ANd here I was, just this morning, looking at the same phenomenon and thinking, here we might have an example of how speculators organically stabilize the market for once. Everyone's antsy, but without a clear opinion on where the market will move in the short term. Speculators therefore go into range trading mode, hoping to catch peaks and drops. They do so by placing relatively low or high bids and are unwilling to trade much near the recent average price. The result - a relatively stable price and low volume, for now.

At least that's one explanation. But if this was someone desperately selling to keep the price below a certain point, I'd have expected much more volume of late.

Oda.krell, you seem like someone who might know - how much rigorous statistical evidence is there for different TA methods? Do you think the idea TA can provide an edge can be realistically tested?

This. When it comes to security, procedure is king. Trust is bad procedure.

Their API seems to be experiencing load issues of some kind. I guess any bots that may be operating on Bitfinex are out of the game for now?

I don't know, I was able to code an arb bot that was reasonably profitable, but in the end I found I wasn't up to the task of accounting for all the possible failure scenarios and decided the risk for me was greater than the reward. At the time there was a big differential between a small exchange and a larger one, and sometimes good opportunities arose when prices were fluctuating. Unfortunately, those times were also the times the API on one or the other exchange was most likely to bug out due to heavy load, and figuring out how to deal with the risks introduced by an unreliable connection seemed too much for me. Someone with actual coding skills could probably do a better job than I did, though.

A wild guess: Bots had their trigger conditions met?

Sounds like business as usual to me.

What are you talking about?

Not at all! I just don't think price fluctuations of a few dollars mean we're going in any direction. It's a choppy market, the last move was up from 610 to 640 or so. I don't see how 630+ is 'down' in any meaningful sense.

You could also say the same when the price goes from 634 to 633. I don't see the point in fretting about fluctuations that entirely fit into the normal intraday price range for BTC.

So... No moon without commies?

What is this, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Bear? What happened to Dell news meaning the only way is up?

It doesn't have to be manipulation. Say you're laundering coins on a regular basis. Say you're using Blockchain.info to do this. How many throwaway wallets a month would an automated system built for this purpose generate? What about several of them?

Because the wallets used would be disposable, single-use. I'm assuming a launderer savvy and paranoid enough to use anonymizers of one kind or another to connect to the wallet provider. They'd want to avoid reusing wallets to lower the risk of correllation analysis blowing their operation. Each transaction would therefore involve creating at least two new wallets.

Now, an automated system for something like this would probably stand out  other users, at least in sufficient volume. I don't know to what extent this is happening, but I do believe it is being done - it just makes sense. My point is, with activities requiring the constant creation of new wallets, you'd expect the number of wallets to keep rising even if the number of users did not increase.  Rate of change may be a more interesting statistic to look at.

on the bright side, volume is up!

Didn't they just decrease it to 1.5 recently?

I can give you a psychological one: It's all in your head. All kinds of things happen all the time, but the pattern recognition engine that is the mind mostly ignores it until it can link things together in a narrative. A lot of the time, that narrative is entirely fictional.

BitcoinBuilderGoxBTC pump? What's the record for longest chain of IOUs traded?

I'd love to see analysis of correllation between wall observer off-topicness and bitcoin price rate-of-change... I seem to remember the last time it was this OT was last fall.

Actually this is a bolt-on use for the Bitcoin blockchain that for once makes some kind of sense to me. Assuming we've set aside the issue of whether or not electronic voting is a good idea in the first place, and solved or accepted the issues you outline, what is needed is a trustless (or low-trust) consensus-finding mechanism. Providing one is the main innovation of Bitcoin, and it's a system that's already running and proven to be resistant to counterfeiting. You could roll a new blockchain or similar system for voting purposes, but it would be much easier to tamper with due to not having the huge aggregate hashrate the Bitcoin network has.

Maybe it's possible to come up with a different protocol as you suggest, but I'm not aware of any better. If such is invented, it should have uses in the crypto currency field as well.

The market has to absorb newly minted coins - is this a surprise somehow?

So, about them walls... Is the Bitstamp one at 515 having chunks of 500 BTC added and removed all the time or is the datafeed buggy?

Maybe stop quoting them? It's not like you need to read more than the username to see what the message is going to be.

I remember, back in the day, this subforum had a rule against "sell sell" or "buy buy" spamming...

The coinsman article says the operation currently accounts for "perhaps 5 % of the total network". Taking that claim at face value, that's 180 BTC per day, or 5400 a month, 2,700,000 USD at current rates. Minus electricity, 1,700,000 USD is left to cover other costs and startup expenses if the price remains stable (ha!). Is that reasonable? I don't know.

So if you had the idea of setting a sell wall at X, buying at X-profit margin, and rolling your sell wall down as your buy-back average lowered, would that look like this? Insufficient volume for that to be the explanation? Too high risk to make sense?

I guess we're due to see some volume, whichever way it goes.

Frankly, I'm not aware of anything to prevent the exchanges front running the market. It would be profitable and very hard to prove, therefore it is probably happening.

round 2 - fight!

I have to say, ever since I started ignoring not just the trolls, but the people who insist on quoting the trolls, reading this thread got a lot quicker!

Please, please stop quoting content-free trolling.

Those fees are set by the lenders, right? Or are you talking about something other than interest?

The same as every other bubble - market action. Most people act in reaction to price movement - the price is going up so they buy, or it's going down so they sell. Lacking heavy liquidity, the market swings violently and usually overreaches in both directions, only to correct back to something perhaps resembling fundamental value, or perhaps a longer-term speculative cycle not yet fully visible.

Miners will sell at whatever price they can get, if they have bills to pay. A small loss is better than a big loss, and a big loss is better than a huge loss. If prices drop below production costs, miners will shut down and the hashrate will decrease until production costs get low enough.

That's essentially a bullish statement. If the price goes low enough, the hashrate will have to come down, unless a significant portion of hashing is done by people without a direct profit in mind. Even then, they'd better have very deep pockets.

why's  btc-e constantly lower than bitstamp? Harder to get money in? Easier to withdraw fiat? Less stringent KYC procedures?

If getting fiat in and out is equally difficult, you wouldn't expect it to affect the price, would you? Unless the methods for withdrawing have benefits like anonymity.

Bearbots then? Or is my recollection of btc-e being lower during the last big rally, too, wrong?

Let's be serious for a moment. No sane Scot is giving any thought to making Bitcoin the official currency.

Taking that claim at face value, no-one there is considering Bitcoin as the national currency anyhow.

All of them, ASAP. He needs coins to burn for some major Openbazaar rep. Something about buying Texas, I think.

Mining costs do not drive BTC price, BTC price drives mining costs.

What, blockchain.info's glitches? Totally unfounded Alibaba speculation?

The market stagnated at a decision point below 500. It wasn't going up, so people started selling before it went down. Business as usual, aka price discovery.

This is why the recommendation is to use a linux livecd on an offline computer to create paper wallets. That's what everyone does, right?

Right?

I was wondering about that myself, the only reasonable answer I can come up with is their fiat withdrawal options allow for tax evasion or laundering of criminal gains better than other exchanges. This is just me speculating btw, I don't know what kind of KYC procedures they have or whether they offer withdrawals via anonymous channels.

Same thing?

Edit: oops, unless you just meant Bitcoin withdrawals and deposits are available without ID. That's a bit different then, though I don't see how it would lead to increased sell pressure

This. The market price appears to be have been dictated much more by speculative demand than fundamentals for a long time now. It's entirely possible we're still far, far above any price supportable by non-speculative use. In that case the fundamentals are catching up to investor expectations, but may be lagging significantly behind.

TL;DR: Bitcoin appears to be doing fine. That doesn't tell us much about what the expected price of BTC should be.

So we don't get into an argument on semantics here: I was trying to make a simplification to the effect that there is some amount of Bitcoin usage apart from speculation. I think that's what people mostly refer to when talking about fundamentals - developments that affect non-speculative use. The point is, we don't know what the price of BTC would be in a philosophical la-la land where price is driven solely by non-speculative uses, so we can't argue that an increase in such uses must lead to a proportional increase in BTC price.

This is good news IMO. I hope people remember the lessons learned from getting burned in a speculative bubble for a long time. Bitcoin will continue to gain usage if it is going to, fewer incautious speculators will lose their savings, the world will be a slightly better place.

That seems unlikely.

That's quite some selling, too. Looks like interesting times!

Isn't the whole point of their circuit breaker to stop cascading stops from getting out of hand?

Presumably they're looking for the option to buy and sell on their partner exchanges. To me, that implies they feel they may need to handle more volume than whatever off-exchange trading options they have in place can offer. This isn't necessarily bullish though: The assumption here has been funds like GABI would buy from miners directly, but who would they sell to when they need to? It's possible they need avenues to offload coins through more than they need avenues for buying them.

Let them dump. If Bitcoin is a viable idea, it will survive. Bitcoin's survival depends on its utility, and market price of a coin mostly doesn't affect that. If bitcoin is useful, anyone trying to suppress the price will lose their shirt if they're insistent. If not, they're doing everyone a service.

Some price support exists based on non-speculative usage. BTC below this price is unsustainable for long unless usage contracts and unsustainable above it unless usage grows. We just don't have a better way of determining what this price should be than this market aproach, which invites speculation with its benefits and excesses.

Re: days destroyed, the convention for wallet software appears to be that change addresses are hidden from the user. Change doesn't count as spent coins, and shouldn't contribute to days destroyed.

Have you heard of mBTC? Cheap!

Miners selling to cover costs, for example, would not be left with a bag of fiat. They may instead be left with debt.

It's like the good old days again. Just remember - Bitstamp knows who it is with the wall...

Maybe someone fatfingered their bot, adding a few significant zeroes in their ask_amt variable...

Otoh, if this is not a mistake, and whoever is behind this, how long could they keep this up?
-Place huge wall at 300
-buy under 300
- replenish wall with bought coins (hasn't happened so far)
- watch your money bleed away gradually

if you wanted to buy around 300, and needed to wait for fiat to arrive, how much would you be buying for it to make sense to risk 30k btc on it? What would you be looking for?

It would help if you knew there wasn't much USD on bitstamp waiting to buy your wall. It would help if you had some fiat ready. Then, if you made a deal to sell X BTC at some price above 300, you could make sure you can buy that amount back for less provided you can get the funds on stamp before others do.  Is there a set of numberd that would make this play reasonable?

Some people do risk assesment and base their actions on that. Those people accept that while the odds may favor a market move in one direction, the movement may end up going the other way. Market action after the fact doesn't make a rational choice based on a reasoned analysis any less valid.

On topic: remainder of 353.x wall pulled, moved to 360?

Assuming no leverage, it's like you sold at 390 and bought back in at 350 - you profit 40 usd minus any fees.

If you're on a service that allows leveraged trading, you can post 1 btc (or a sum of fiat) as collateral to borrow more btc that you then sell to open a short position. Your potential profit is increased by the amount of leverage you're using - say 2x - but so are your potential losses, and you're now at risk of getting a margin call. This is when your position is forced to close before you're so far in the red your collateral is no longer sufficient to cover the amount you have borrowed against it.

Mr. Piggles: You don't buy BTC first. You borrow some, promising to pay it back later and then sell the btc you borrowed. If the price moves down, you profit. If it goes up, it will cost you more to buy the BTC you need to repay than you got from selling them, so you lose money.

What about growth in existing markets?

What would imply growth?

Well, we've been following a pattern of attempted breakouts to the upside followed by more downward movement for a while now. Since people seem to consider trend continuations more likely than reversals, shorting on upspikes must seem more and more tempting the longer that pattern continues.

I wouldn't be so sure. "Active" to me seems like the counterpart to a swap offer not yet taken.

Btw, the BTC interest rate bumped up slightly late saturday UTC, then jumped to the current levels between 03:30-09:30 UTC, sunday.

You know what that means.

The swaps are being used to foil jonoiv's prediction of 377 USD/BTC by monday.

I did a little legwork to compare the recent spikes in BFX BTC swap taking (in terms of interest rate on loan) and price movement. I make no interpretation of the following, but this is what I found:

I list large changes in interest rate as "peaks", the timing, and any price action at the time. Times in UTC, data from bfxdata.com. Prices and times rough estimates.

1st peak: sat 25th 15:00, post drop, price moves 341 -> 349

2nd peak: sun 26th 01:30ish, prev price rise petering off, local bottom @ 342.

peaks of swap taken at high interest rate until finally dropping down around 8:00-9:00. here price goes from 346 -> 358 at the same time as interest rate on BTC swaps taken drops.

next peak at monday 4:30-5:00, price relatively flat around 350.

Last peak to 0.6% daily 15:30-16:00, volume of BTC swaps taken significantly higher than before (2x at a glance). No significant price action.

Might explain a thing or two....

I'm not sure that makes the conclusions to be made here any more pleasant.

As I understand it, the theory is that mtgox lost a lot of coins to one or several hacks way back, and kept it quiet. They then proceeded to "buy" BTC with fake usd on their platform, hoping to leverage that into sufficient arbitrage profits to recoup the coins they had lost.

I'd like to point out it didn't work so well for gox in the end.

Soo... about 120 coins to go down to 324 USD on bitstamp, about the same to go up to 347... Of course, the walls dance around like hell.

Yeah... That looks very organic to me. Is this data for real?

I think the demographic has simply shifted.

Remember when you could come to Bitcointalk and read about how the mainstream media would never mention Bitcoin because the Banksters don't want people to find out, and anyway the Illuminati would have anyone remotely connected with Bitcoin assassinated soon enough if it keeps growing? (Slight exaggeration here.)

The further back you go, the more likely anyone who's bought BTC was mainly interested in the tech and/or political implications, and less in making a profit. Sure, people talked about how the price must go up if adoption grows, but it was much more pie-in-the sky before the first bubbles. Furthermore, anyone still holding from back has likely recouped their -probably modest - original investment many, many times over and is not terribly emotionally attached to the price now.

When the big headlines came, it was the price the media talked about. That draws a different crowd, one more interested in profits, and more likely to invest personally significant sums. Also, it would draw people already into trading e.g. Forex markets. So you'd expect the focus to shift from holding to trading and price anxiety.

Is someone sending you a package sufficient proof you ordered said package to base a prosecution on?

How long until the next bust? Will the users have their identities revealed to law enforcement? One bust is a fluke. Two busts is worrying. Three... One may start to think the online drug market business is too risky.

To accidentally put up a 30k askwall, you have to have 30k btc on an exchange. Who in their right mind would keep that kind of money on an exchange if they don't intend to do anything with it?

What if price and news are not very correlated?

By selling them for more than 1000?

What about the Russians?

That's new, then...

It's a proven tactic, works for both bulls and bears - just keep hammering your over-the-top message and eventually the market movements will match your bias.

Well, this looks like a totally sustainable rate of price increase.

What I was saying is we've now entered choppy waters. IMO a smooth leveling off is pretty much off the books now. Expect a big correction, either from these levels or from some level above. Not exactly a bold prediction, I know. But don't sell the house to invest just because BTC went up like crazy....

There are plenty of experts who get vocal on downtrends as well!

Off to sleep. I'll be slightly surprised if we're above 400 when I wake up, suitably impressed if above 420. Have fun!

Choppy waters! Still, impressed it took this long for any correction.

AFAIK the auth tokens it spits out are generated from a seed which is not stored elsewhere. Nothing to do with your google account per se. This is why you must backup the seed when it's displayed in the app.

I guess it would've been cooler had I posted this a few hours ago, but: Look at the mini-trend from about nov 9th to nov 12th, and extrapolate where that kind of slope would have had us at, had the price not spiked even more steeply on the 12th. About 380 on stamp...

What leads you to this conclusion?

Maybe the problem is there is no clear explanation as market movements are mostly not based on news? Maybe looking at what happens and trying to puzzle out why it happened leads people to see causal links where there are none?

Me, not exactly. I thought a drop was likely at some point after the nov 12 rocket launch, but didn't care to guess when. When we got back to 430, I had this idea there was a very good chance of going to about 380. Why?


Did I trade it? No. I have hunches like everyone, this one happened to be supportable by drawing a line on a chart. I don't have cause to believe my hunches are right more often than not, so I don't trade.

I notice the amount of trolls posting here is a lagging, contrarian indicator of the price...

So is that why we were going up, or the reason we took a bit of a dive again?

Shroomskit thinks the price is driven only by traders, and further thinks that means everyone should buy and never sell, to keep the price going up. Selling is evil, not buying is evil, there is no underlying value to BTC but hiking the price up by buying is a great thing regardless. Go buy! Damn you for ever selling!

That about sum your position up, shroomskit?

What's going on is we're up over 16% since a week ago. That in itself is pretty crazy, anything above 400 at this time is just incredible.

Yes, you'd expect a correction to follow a frenzy like we saw the past few days.

From nov. 2nd to 9th there was a moderate uptrend of roughly 0.6% gains a day. From the 9th to the 12th it was about 4 % a day. Then things really heated up and the price went up over 20 % in two days - 10 % a day!

Had the ramping up not happened, at 0.6% a day since the 2nd, we'd now be at about 340 usd / btc, up over 7 percent. With just the first steepening of the slope with no downward action, we'd be around 411 usd. That's up 28% from november 2nd, yikes! And had the last spike continued as it was going, we'd expect a price in the region of 500+ now, up over 56% since the 2nd. Holy hell!

And yet, to judge by the way people are pouring ash over their heads here, that last scenario should have come true, and since it didn't, Bitcoin is clearly doomed!

Some perspective, please.

Well, see, it's a matter of supply and demand...

Was your collateral BTC?

If yes, perhaps the margin call price is calculated using the USD value of your collateral at any time - as the market moves against your long, your collateral loses value and the margin call limit goes up. Maybe?

I'd hardly call it dumping. The market was ridiculously overextended and even at these levels the price has risen exceptionally since two weeks ago. Did you really expect BTC to just keep gaining several percent a day?

So where's Adam, anyway? This thread is mostly a long list of "this user is currently ignored" for me, these days...

There are no blockchains with the same properties: The property of block history will be different.

A large part of why Bitcoin must be considered experimental and dangerously volatile now, and for a long time to come, is that the trust model it proposes relies on building a history of flawless operation. No technical innovation can create this out of thin air, the only way to build it is by letting the system run and see what happens. The longer Bitcoin keeps working without being overtaken by an altcoin or succumbing to some flaw, technical or political, the greater its perceived reliability becomes.

There are a number of questions the Bitcoin system is seeking to answer right now, like what economical effect will the distribution model chosen end up having. One such question is: How much security does first-mover advantage provide in the crypto space? The only way to really find out is to wait, potentially forever. In the meantime, people act on their expectations.

If we go up from here again, everyone will of course remember how the last spike ended in a correction, and not just blindly panic buy. Any rally from now on will therefore be reasonable and moderate.

Right?

It's just a correction.

Should we shift the decimal point yet?

So... any interest in an actual not-joking wall observer thread without all the crap, or is the situation unsalvageable?

My ignore list is up to 137 accounts now - growing rather slower than this thread, but perhaps more steadily. I do suspect the growth rates are correllated, though.

That's pretty damn contrived.

The article.

up 13%, or about 0.48% per day since the 320 low. So far, so good.

That's nothing a couple more presses of the ignore button won't cure...

I don't see much difference between the output of  a bot and that of most people I have ignored. The variance in content is close to 0, even if the delivery sometimes varies.

This guy again?

The poll says most respondents think the price will be over 400 USD tomorrow. Shouldn't those respondents be buying with all they've got, then?

AFAIK it's a common strategy for long-term investors. By spreading out your buys you reduce your risk of buying at a local high but also reduce your chances to buy in on the cheap.

Alternatively, most bidders bid high this time, and the lowballers didn't bother bidding, having learned their lesson from the last auction.

We don't know who won what at what price, and most likely we won't unless the winners are publicly traded companies and the buys show up in their quarterly reports. USMS isn't telling.

Assuming they move the coins in a single payment per bid winner, that could actually yield some accurate information on how many winning bidders there were and what amounts they bought.

Certainly seems like the most reasonable explanation to me. BTCUSD is a highly speculative market, where most action is from people looking to profit on price movements. The longer the price remains flat in such a market, especially when in a long trend up or down, the more uncomfortable traders get with their positions. Sooner or later, traders start to decide the price isn't moving their way and start to cut their losses, which convinces others with similar positions to do the same. I'd say what happened just now is exactly what you'd expect in a market, absent news-driven price movements.

It looks like about 1k coins traded hands on Bitstamp and the price went up to all of 354... What happened there? Did someone put up an ask wall that someone else took as a buying opportunity?

A failure at making you rich on the quick, maybe. Sending and receiving coins seems to work just fine, though, as does trading those coins for other things.

Never mind that, how about the problem that the entire model is based on trust? From what I can tell, it seems like a recipe for a huge chain of defaults on IOUs if it ever takes off.

+19% in 24 hours?

Where can I short XRP?

It may do that, however the use case for Ripple is completely different from the use case for trustless currencies like Bitcoin.

With Ripple, you're transacting in IOUs and must trust the issuer of those IOUs to be solvent and willing to pay. Hopefully, that means IOUs from large institutions only will be accepted by most people. Otherwise it's a credit bubble in the making.

So Ripple seems best suited for activities that don't differ much from what you can do with banking nowadays. Maybe it can provide real value in that space, but any radical shifts to the status quo like uncensorable currency? I don't see it. That's what Bitcoin aims to do.

someone who wants to offload a lot of coins in a rush, or above 320. They got pretty low slippage for that size of order.

Some might say we've hit peak troll...

It seems hard to me to ignore that the Russian Bitcoin ban coincides with Russia's Ukraine intervention. Seeing as they were apparently analyzing the economic ramifications of military intervention, closing off venues for cashflow out of the country seems logical. Russia hasn't put capital controls in place yet, but I'd be surprised if they didn't have plans for such, if things deteriorate beyond their ability to reasonably prop the rouble up.

I'd wager that's actually pretty close to what Stolfi's motives are here, except what you call wisdom he believes is poison. Lambchop, OTOH seems to be in it for some kind of demented kicks.

Maybe, but apart from market sells, there's not much action lately. Not many seem to be comfortable buying at the moment, although some appear happy to leave their bids hanging in case of a dip.

Looks like traders are doing their job and stabilizing the price for once. Rare times.

You'd have to sacrifice a large exchange and expose yourself to criminal liability, though.

I haven't seen a decent analysis to show it's financially viable to manipulate the market by buying and selling. It seems risky at least.

So, who's to say whales' expectations are correct?

IOW there's about 5% profit to be made by anyone with cad on virtex and btc on stamp. Only up to 300 USD profit, though

Is it time to start posting "300" memes?

If you already have a short position open, any bids of yours that get filled will close the relevant amount from your short position.  

Shouldn't you have looked into this before shorting, though?

You're speculating on one of the world's most volatile assets with your rent money?

Would you like to elaborate on that?

Why's that?

They're mostly one and the same, if you ask me.

5%?  unless you're selling thousands and really want to do it all at once, any large exchange should do the trick for rather a lot less.

You'd still have the issue of there being some hurdles to overcome before buying BTC to spend it on anything. On one hand, this is a disincentive to use BTC for transactions, on the other it is an incentive to 'hoard', as you put it, if you do prefer to use BTC for some purposes.

That aside, I think we can agree any tradeable asset will see some speculation. Looking at your formula, it occurs to me you might add two variables to account for this. One is the growth rate of the BTC price and another is the average speculator's patience - how long they're willing to wait for profits to reach their targets.  Of course both are unknown and actually somewhat interlinked, so it's no wonder price discovery is a messy business.

Have they blocked fiat withdrawals?

I don't follow.

Now that's what I call volume!

That's USD 755 according to the official exchange rate - you'd have a hard time actually exchanging the Bolivars you got from selling condoms into USD at that rate. According to the zerohedge article, the price difference according to the free (black) market exchange rate is about 4 USD per box of condoms, compared to prices in USA.

Is this something that actually happened or some kind of sarcastic jibe? Serious question, I kind of wrote neo&bee off when that rather detailed render was making the rounds, purporting to be their soon-to-open offices.

Sources for the 30% above market claim so far include "anonymous sources" and a tweet linking to a coindesk article that says the number of bidders went from 11 last time to 14 this time, which I guess you might loosely call approximately a 30% increase. In the amount of bidders that is.

You mean Coinapult's hot wallet loss? If so, your numbers are a bit off - they say they lost just under 43000 USD worth of BTC, or 150 Bitcoins.

http://www.coindesk.com/coinapult-loses-40k-hot-wallet-compromise/

Bitcoinity seems to display bids and asks wrong. price looks correct at 255, but there's supposedly a bidwall at 230 which makes no sense...

edit: n/m, it's just rounding.

Is the clock synced on whatever device you run the authenticator on? If it's offset, you'll get the wrong code.

How about a SEPA transfer to Bitstamp? Is that expensive for you?

Man, any reasonable discussion just flows right off this thread! Should we finally just rename it "The Pit" and be done with it?

In a fork, the chain with the most miner support (hashpower) is the most secure. Users can decide not to follow miners but risk getting stuck on an insecure blockchain, which miners backing the other chain could sabotage given their hashpower advantage.

In the event of a fork where users and miners disagree on which chain to support, which chain is Bitcoin?

Doom and Gloom and books, presumably. Try to find a source for the existence of project Prophecy other than this guy being "interviewed"...

How much BTC would a Greece-sized country need to obtain to use it as an official currency? I expect quite a bit, and at rather high prices given the upward pressure such a decision would put on the price. It's one thing for a small country to adopt a much larger country's currency, and quite another for them to adopt a currency with a total market cap far smaller than their GDP.

Even assuming a country adopted cryptocurrency, picking an existing one instead of rolling their own would be hugely expensive.

Is that staggered bid wall formation on Bitfinex relatively new or did I just not notice it before?

Is there someplace to short LTCBTC?

I guess I should look before asking, I thought that was just for ltcusd. Thanks, I'll check.

edit: I guess I missed the opportunity, when I asked LTCBTC was up 26% over 24h IIRC

As far as I can tell, the grexit -> BTC rally theory hinges on the idea that capital controls would immediately follow from Greece leaving the Euro behind. Doesn't make much sense to me - to escape capital controls, you'd need to get your funds out of reach of the Greek government/banking apparatus before capital controls were in place.

A bit early to say, don't you think? Up 2 USD on about 1k BTC of volume...

Looks like about half of the bid stairway went poof?

That's because it's a bid wall, not an ask wall. Any swap used for it would be in USD. Now to check if the swap sum has changed today...

Edit: USD swaps have gone up by 600,000+ in the last 24 hours. It doesn't seem likely the wall was halved to save on swap interest.

I still don't get why we call "how many USD per BTC" BTC/USD and "How many BTC per USD" USD/BTC.

You'd have to find someone with cash, needing to deliver funds abroad, and unable or unwilling to travel. The recipient would need to accept Bitcoin. Then you might have a captive audience for BTC sales.

Otherwise... If a Greek has cash, why would they value BTC over that cash? If they don't have cash, would you take an IOU from someone with funds locked up in a Greek bank?

I guess there may be a niche that has a lot of cash, can't organize transport of cash outside Greece at all or simply not fast enough, and needs to pay people abroad. Some might even be running a business with cash inflow, however long that may last. It seems like an edge case to me, since you'd still need to get the cash money out of the country.

How many separate IPs can you easily hide behind? Tor exit nodes seem to be pretty well known to the forum filter, and there are only so many free VPNs. So it seems likely this troll is willing to put quite a bit of effort into the spam, perhaps paying the evil fees for using known dirty IPs? Which would mean paying BTC to spam here...

Try creating an account over TOR. Likely you'll get a notification your IP is either a known exit node or otherwise an IP previously used for bad stuff, and is associated with X units of 'evil'. Then you'll be given the option to pay a very small fee to be allowed to post.

I wonder, do the evil fees get channeled to mods? Might there be an equilibrium between fee size and mod incentive under such a scheme?

How do they get the BTC? Cash seems in pretty short supply. They can transfer EUR within the country by bank transfer, but who'd accept that as payment?

(Is there a market for IOUs backed by greek bank deposits yet? I wonder what the going rate would be...)

Zoom out a bit on the charts. Look at, say, the last 30 days or even 6 months. This is just noise.

You think a court is going to order the coins to be sold on some sketchy exchange? An auction seems more likely.

He just resigned anyways, due to not being very popular at the negotiation table.

Insufficient USD supply on BTC-E?

So, how about that bid stairway on Bitfinex? It looks like most of the bid side is still controlled by one player, but the price is now about 20 USD higher than when they first appeared.

It certainly doesn't seem like this is someone panicing to buy.

Was wondering the same - Bloomberg thought it important enough to put up an article with only the headline "NYSE suspends trading in all securities" and no text besides "story developing..."

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-08/nyse-suspends-trading-in-all-securities

And if they instead insist NYSE wasn't hacked, it's an obvious coverup to protect the 1% from having their infrastructure scrutinized (or something). Right?

Curses, I took a small short today (unusually for me) on LTCBTC @ 0.031-ish, but got stopped out before the dump. Tough market!

Makes little sense. Like Elwar said:

So that bidside stairway seems to have disappeared on Bitfinex. Used to buy at  market or simply pulled?

They can dump 3600 new BTC per day.

You're off the grid?

Have you considered cogent arguments instead of repetitive put-downs  and your trademark image macros?

Are you sure a virgin sacrifice isn't better? I mean, the maiden is either in the volcano or she isn't - there's no guesswork, unlike with your ritual.

On a zero fee exchange, the only limits to how much volume you can put out by selling to yourself are set by the connection rate...

Edit: I can't find that kind of volume on bitcoincharts.com, though. Is that traded volume or blockchain transactions?

Please educate me - what am I looking at?

speaking of walls, the stairway on bitfinex's bid side has been a permanent fixture throughout this upward movement of late. Accumulating? Trying to shore up support? Some kind of arbitrageur?

OpenAssets they might easily clone. Cloning a chain is different, though, since the whole point of a blockchain is to enable potentially adversarial parties to rely on a shared ledger without trusting each other not to falsify the ledger. A fully proprietary chain, secured by a single party, would not be any better than a regular database. Either they'd have to get significant adoption for their own blockchain, or use one that is already secured by parties without a stake in whatever NASDAQ wants to do.

I don't see how. You can't just declare sovereignty in international waters any more, so a seastead would just be a more inconvenient version of a private compound. Break any serious laws, and the cops are going to come get you. If you don't intend to break any laws, why bother in the first place?

Roughly, you should hoard as many coins as you can, and you need to sell all of them. You should do both immediately.

You'd think so, right? Alternatively, this is someone with sufficient motivation to automate all that. Not sure which is crazier, though.

So how have you not been IP banned yet?

I don't think we're at the autonomous software agent stage yet, so the fees will go to some humans. Might be a weak link there.

Okcoin is at 1693 CNY/BTC, which at the current rate of 6.43 CNY/USD comes to 263.3 USD. Maybe Bitcoinwisdom hasn't caught on that the Yuan has been devalued twice in two days.

Edit: What are you  referring to actually? Bitcoinwisdom is showing Huobi's price as 263 USD

So now we get a year of trolling and catfights like you've never seen before.

Based on orderbook? Or did I miss something?

Spending too much time here, Mr. Stolfi? The more unfortunate habits of the local fauna seem to be rubbing off on you...

It was my understanding the XT fork will only take place if 75% of hashpower supports it. I suppose miners could change their minds after the fact, but otherwise a "half-way state" will not result in a fork.

From what I read, the threshold is 75% of the previous 1000 blocks mined by XT-compatible miners, but in January 2016 at the earliest

1: A limited block size is not the only thing that can force fees up. Miners can choose to not process 0-fee transactions, and likely would if they find rewards aren't sufficient to cover their costs. That's the whole idea, isn't it? Miners choose what fees they require and the market sorts it out. The block size limit was put in to prevent bloating of the blockchain itself. Setting a hard limit on transactions per second was not the goal.

2:
From that chart, and the longer-term version of it, it looks like we'll probably hit 1 MB some time in 2016, assuming the rate of growth remains the same.

4: I'll address this more generally below

5: Hard fork isn't great, I think we can agree on that. Consensus would be better if it can be found.

6: The problem is, there's no consensus on design goals: How many transactions per second should Bitcoin support? Should it be a backbone for serious financial industry or a payment network for Joe Q. Public? Lacking a common vision on that, it's no wonder there's difficulty agreeing on engineering solutions.

I'd recommend reading these posts by DeathAndTaxes and jl2012:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=946236.0 - DeathAndTaxes :"Permanently keeping the 1MB (anti-spam) restriction is a great idea, if you are a bank."
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1054482.0 - jl2012: "What is the optimal block size"

The more salient points:
-currently the network supports about 2.3 TPS. 7TPS average is an estimate based on every transaction being the smallest possible size, which doesn't happen in real life.
-If you wanted Bitcoin to grow, say,  to half the size of PayPal, you'd need it to handle about 70 TPS.
-Given we're likely to hit or get close to the 1 mb ceiling within a year or so, and given you really want to have a solution that's announced well in advance and tested thoroughly, it seems time to start doing something.

Another point that relates to miner costs is that currently blockchain maintenance costs (as per DeathAndTaxes) roughly 10% of the Bitcoin market cap, each year. Maintaining that cost does not seem like a good goal. The question is: How secure does the network need to be? Currently, looking at the amount of money spent securing it vs. the valuation of the currency, it seems pretty damn secure - but is there any reason to assume we're at an optimal point? Why should we try to keep miner profitability up if the result is decreased cost-efficiency? Efficiency is supposed to be a main marketing point for Bitcoin, right?

Satoshi's vision originally was that eventually block subsidies and fees would likely not cover the costs of mining, but that institutions with an interest in keeping the network secure would spend funds to secure it. Even so, 10% of market cap yearly seems like an unreasonable cost. The end user must pay that in the end.

That still means resources expended. Someone must pay for it, and I doubt it's going to be an altruistic cabal of billionaire philantrophists redistributing their wealth by subsidizing blockchain security just for the hell of it.

I wonder, how does 10% costs over market cap compare to the banking industry?

Well, this is even more off-topic than usual! Re: why blackmail is objectionable:

As a blackmailer, you're either threatening to release damaging information about someone who's done nothing wrong, or offering to let a wrongdoer off the hook in exchange for money. Neither seems exactly proper.

Oh, they'll pay if doing nothing wrong can still get you in trouble. For an extreme example, try being gay in a country where that's illegal and/or will lead to death threats if known.

How about a country where what you do in your free time can get you kicked out of your job, because some things are considered crimes although there's no victim?

The interest rate on USD has historically been considerably higher, though. If you're going to risk your funds by keeping them on an exchange, maybe selling for USD and lending it out is the better bet?

How so? Seems to be trading just fine?

Please stop enabling the local misanthrope.

No need, the trash gets swept away by the mods as long as people don't insist on spreading it around in quotes.

Somewhere out there there must be a customer relations manual stressing the importance of only making announcements on downtime etc. in chats, private emails and 3rd party sites - never on the service's own announcement page! And someone must have sent free copies to all the exchange operators.

The flash return rate for BTC swaps is now higher than for USD swaps on Bitfinex. Don't recall seeing that for a while!

AFAIK quite a lot of BTC are mined by Chinese miners.

I'm not suggesting anything, just pointing out that unlike other countries with capital controls popping up of late, China at least has a better handle on the supply side of BTC. The miners must pay for electricity where they operate, and anyone looking to bypass capital controls would likely be willing to pay a premium, so there's a certain amount of opportunity there. Doesn't mean it would happen - for one, any mining operation would likely be leery of stepping on the state's toes in China.

Like I said, they have local costs to cover. If they can get a premium for selling in local currency there's a profit in selling at least enough to cover their running expenses for CNY.

As for legal standing, I'm as clueless as you are. The Wikipedia article you linked states banks and financial institutions are prohibited from transacting in BTC. A miner is hardly a bank, but what constitutes a financial institution, I can't say. Like I said, miners would likely be wary of irritating the state - even if they are allowed to sell BTC to the public now that might easily change.

It's been a while since I saw ANSI goatse... I expect that's about to change.

In an ideal world, this might be the case.

In the real world, when investments are more profitable than holding currency, in some significant cases this is because the economy is in a bubble state. What would happen if investors didn't have a way to step out of the game and say: "whoa, this is getting a bit rich for my blood!"? Selling assets for currency is one way of doing this, and is an important check on the boom part of the boom-bust cycle. This is what the idea of non-political money stems from in the first place - if the valuation of a currency can be centrally controlled, then market cycles can be manipulated beyond what the markets would otherwise support.

Are there lists of known addresses controlled by any of the Chinese exchanges? Knowing how many coins they hold should help.

Keep in mind, for a smalll block proponent, no changes to blocksize are desirable. From that perspective, the status quo is fine and the standard fee will simply need to increase. If it's uneconomical for you to put your transactions on the blockchain, too bad.

Don't remember when I last sawthis kind of back-and-forth on Bitstamp!

So there's no difference between a speculative overshoot and an instance of planned price manipulation?

what was that 4k+ volume spike on stamp a few hours ago? Buy wall sold into? Ask wall bought? Rapid back-and-forth?

it makes your wishing we all burn in hell seem a bit hypocritical when the connection between any individual here and MMM is about the same as that between you and any ills committed by the Brazilian government.

not sure about talks_cheep, but I believe you can add OSCA to that list. That ignore list.

8.5% growth in one day... After what's already a pretty respectable rally. Totally sustainable I'm sure! (In other words, take care out there, choppy waters again.)

How much of a gap is there between the time bids need to be in and the winners receiving their coins? If the auction coincides with BTC in one of its bubble phases, it makes you wonder who'll be doing a better job of price discovery - the auction bidders or the retail markets...

We're now back where we were 2 years ago. A couple of percent over on Bitstamp, actually!

You could animate it in depth. Estimating the vanishing point is simple enough. Once you have that, any scaling relative to that point will behave as though the picture were receding or coming closer in depth.

I'll see if I can find the time to put together a demo today. Richy_T, would it be too much trouble to PM me a link to some higher resolution versions of the slices in that 2013/11/20 chart above?

I hope  you didn't go through with this at 420, or at least had your stops well in place...

OK, this wasn't exactly a huge success... The quality is atrocious from all the transforms and video compression, andy Richy_T could do this much better from the raw data with whatever he's making Chartbuddy's snapshots with anyway. Nevertheless, a run down the canyons on nov. 20, 2013 (16 hours of it only!):

http://vid.me/rGpC

And yet, this feels like normalcy again after all that weird flatness.

All this and the price is still over 7% higher than it was 24 hours ago. Let's see if we can actually get a red daily candle for a change!

Sure seems like it! Bitcoin...

My guess on the poll was 400, btw. With a note-to-self that 380 seems quite likely as well. Definitely not trading on that though!

Is there a theme park ride called "The Bitcoin" yet?

Nursing a hangover.

It's, what, 10 BTC to 380 and hardly anything below that on Bitstamp. A floor?

Aaaand back over 400... for a second anyway. What a show!

I'm actually surprised the dumps aren't bigger. (Did I jinx it?)

How low do you think you'd need to bid to be able to eke a profit out of dumping that amount of coins on exchanges?

Always... Like now, when the chinese exchanges are trading well over 400 USD ? Or like during the run-up we just had, when they were trading 50+ USD above the western markets?

Holliday, I don't think a theoretical 7 TPS (or less than 3, as is apparently the actual case) can support global underground markets. Those are estimated to involve around 1.8 billion people, and account for 15% or so of the global economy. You're still left with only providing settlements for even this limited sector.

Your point about Bitcoin being poorly suited to regular transactions seems valid to me.The blockchain model itself seems inefficient when applied to long timescales and large userbases. Perhaps that's an insurmountable flaw.

Wow, that was some volume on the push below 340 on bitfinex!

Is it just me, or is it unusually noisy here?

Perhaps some tiny inkling of proof would be in order?

Reading this Kaminska's blog, she seems quite reasonable and interested in actual productive discourse. I guess I'd be happy to learn our NLC has a respectable side after all, but I'm not buying it just because you say so.

You know what, the only thing more tedious than NLC's constant trolling is everyone else discussing NLC. Good night!

Since when has the Bitcoin price done what's healthy for the market?

Do you expect all miners to go bankrupt in one blow? If not, then what will happen if mining is unsustainably expensive is that the hashrate will drop until sustainability is reached again. Hopefully that rate will be sufficient to secure transactions.

Don't get me wrong, I do think currently security comes with far too high a pricetag. The question is, how much hashrate is sufficient security? The design goal as far as I've read is to make a double spends and other attavks uneconomical, but what does that mean in terms of % of valuation spent on network security per annuum? This worries me. Miners dumping the maximum of what the block subsidy gives them daily doesn't.

Crime doesn't pay, Adam! You should know better than to go up against the banks like that.

Or maybe you could explain what you're talking about? I swear, I can't decipher half this thread because I don't have an RSS feed of every on-line mention of Bitcoin on an IV drip...

It's called Kopi Luwak. Civets are used to, ahem, process the coffee. Apparently nowadays the animals are caged and force-fed to cater to the high demand. What a shitty world.

Just report trolls to the mods. Ignoring is ok, but reporting gets the trash taken out before the thread gets derailed.

Where's Satoshi?

I'm not convinced the majority of Bitcoin users would be running full nodes even if the resource cost were 0. It's just not worth the hassle for most, unless the userbase consisted almost solely of idealistic cypherpunks.

What happened to the  halving !?

So, to pick the more relevant strain of off-topicness here: Do I understand correctly that the Ripple ledger is unaffected, but the main way people traded XRP for other currencies is now being shut down? And some way to transfer XRP from user to user will still exist even after Ripple Trade closes?

I haven't followed Ripple closely, but frankly, I think it's good news if it fails this way. The failure mode I was worried about was a series of cascading credit defaults if the system really took off. Never saw any reason to think that wouldn't happen, so good riddance as far as I'm concerned.

How secure should the network be? What's the sweet spot between cost and security?

Are you saying we should change the BTC issuance schedule, perhaps stopping issuance now? That's redistribution of wealth, and it's holding the fee market back.

Or are you saying miners aren't being incentivized enough to keep the network secure enough, so in addition to the block subsidy we need fees to be higher? How do we determine how much security is needed and how much that should cost?

Or are you saying people should pay a fee just because?

We should probably take this to a different thread, I'm already feeling guilty about going off on this tangent here. But quickly:

We already didn't 'leave everything as it is'. This is an entirely artificial system with a number of arbitary design choices. The 1MB block limit is an obvious example, and wasn't even originally intended to serve an economic function beyond limiting spam. It's not needed for a fee market: as block subsidy decreases fees must increase or miners will shut off. Thus, when the block subsidy is insufficient to pay for mining costs, miners are incentivized to require fees in order to accept transactions.

If you say X is the amount of transactions the network should, at most, be able to handle, you're making a policy decision. If you say there should be no limit and miners should decide whether they want to include 0-fee transactions, you're also making a policy decision. You can't pretend one is more of a "free market" solution than the other.

The network is considered roughly secure against economically sensible attacks when the cost of an attack is greater than the profit gained.In rough terms, the greater [network value] / [cost to gain 51% of hashrate] is, the less secure the network becomes. To increase security, you need to either decrease network value or increase the cost of gaining a percentage of hashrate. Both the small-blocks and large-blocks solutions essentially hope that a balance is naturally found where the cost of running the network doesn't hamper usage to the point that fees and subsidies aren't sufficient to provide security.

I don't have a solution here, but I think we're turning a blind eye to this issue of security vs. cost when that's the real question that needs addressing.

If an attacker would profit from destroying the network's credibility (governments potentially), that kind of spending would make sense. For protection against double spends, yes, we're pretty solid. In fact, it would seem we're spending way more than need be on security if that is our only concern.

Put it this way, back in 2011 I bought coffee from someone here who, I later noticed, professed to be a vehemently anti-racist white separatist. I didn't even know there *were* white separatists before that. Also had to look up the word 'miscegenation', my grade school latin didn't include that word.

Hopefully not... That stuff's all tears - tears of joy on the way up, grief on the inevitable drop down. Wouldn't it be nice if people could just keep their cool and not overreact?

Are we looking at the same charts?

My point was, isn't it kind of early to call 467 a high? If this keeps going up, that dump will end up looking like noise.

Is it just me, or is the idea of a proprietary blockchain silly? If validation is done by only a few, or just one, party, why not just have a database?

Lambie is actually on the ball here. Bitcoin's best use case is illicit transactions. It's a tool to reduce the power states have over their subjects. The overhead involved only makes sense if  you can't rely on a central power to keep people in line.

IOW, if you're fine with how the political process works in your jurisdiction, and see no need to curtail the economic powers of the state, I don't see what good Bitcoin is to you apart from speculating on the price. I doubt it's actually more efficient than VISA all things considered, for example.

IIRC, Proudhon said he'd found all the trolling he was doing had an unfortunate effect on him and decided to stop. Rather respectable, really.

There's no minimum fee dictated by the protocol. You can send 0-fee transactions if you wish.

As for no spam attack, what else would you call the "stress tests" we had?

You mean you disagree with DeathandTaxes on some issue, or that they scammed someone?

Wow. It's been pretty obvious MP is an egomaniac only interested in self-aggrandizement, but I didn't expect his superman syndrome to cloud his judgment quite so far as to publicly offer a death bounty on someone. Unsurprisingly trilema.com is now down, but I checked the cached version of that article and it really is what the URL implies.

This is the kind of thing that gets people locked up.

It's about finding the balance between security and cost. For rough purposes, security = miner revenue. If we're defending against a 51% attack, we should be able to estimate the minimum cost of mining sufficient to provide security: It should be more than the profits an attacker can gain at any given time, but not much  more.

Currently, the cost seems too high to me in terms of % of value spent on mining yearly. Largely this is because of the block subsidy, so hopefully as the block subsidy dwindles, fees *will not* go up proportionally. I'm hoping we're currently overspending on security - if that's not the case and the current resource usage is necessary for network security, I think we have much bigger problems than transaction rate.

Obviously security is important. But 10% of the stored value yearly to provide that security?  That compounds rather drastically over time, are you really saying we should not fret about it?

The obvious conclusion is that whatever the target group, users will not pay that amount. No-one is going to "store their wealth" in Bitcoin if it costs them 10% yearly to do so. Miners will simply have to settle for less in fees than they currently get as subsidy and the blockchain will hopefully remain secure enough to be attractive.

Pushing for higher miner fees is barking up the wrong tree. Either we manage with lower fees or the system fails, if you ask me. This will be the case regardless of transaction rate.

What good would that do? The mining subsidy is the single biggest reason miners suck off such a large portion of wealth stored in BTC at the moment. Mining subsidy coupled with bullish price expectations, that is. (An inflation-corrected BTCUSD chart would probably be pretty illuminating...)

Hopefully by at least that much. 2.5% annual costs would be much more reasonable, but still pretty damn high for store-of-value users. If you're not going to cater to a userbase who sees money transfer as  the most interesting option, it seems like it gets much harder to keep Bitcoin secure and have it be competitive compared to other ways of storing wealth.

The balance of store-of-value (few tx on the blockchain) vs. money transfer (lots of tx on the blockchain) should be decided by the market. Artificially limiting blocksize is making a policy decision to favour store-of-value without knowing what a free market would "prefer"

Edit: This was sloppy writing. Ideally the free market would decide, but probably we have to make policy decisions either way, since there are other considerations for blocksize, mainly resource usage. If tx/sec can be increased without increasing resource usage, that's even better than a blocksize raise, but I'm not convinced of that yet.

AlexGR: That's true about transaction types, but realistically the total spent on fees+subsidy will have to go down a lot either way. Security being cost to attack vs. cost to defend, it makes more sense to look at mining costs as percent of market cap than miner revenue in currency.

edit: erm, meant to say potential profit vs. cost to attack, which is determined by the amount spent on defense

If the price goes down, profit from an attack will likely go down as well, and vice versa if price goes up. Correspondingly, the amount spent on security in currency should likewise go down, or up. The cost of "sufficient" security as percentage of market cap should remain roughly the same.

Does this make sense?

What a year, huh?

I guess I jumped the gun before, my well-wishes got buried in political bickering. so...

That's some crappy volume on Bitstamp, for a 15 USD move.

Stupid question: Why are miners including 0-fee transactions in blocks at all? AFAIK, they can refuse to do so regardless of max blocksize.

The block reward is for finding a block, you don't have to include any tx in a block you find to get the reward.So I only see two obvious resons for miners acceptin 0-fee tx :

- they believe it's in their own interest somehow, good for Bitcoin in the long run etc.
- the transactions don't add sufficient overhead for them to bother configuring their miners to discard them.

What I'm getting at here is:  The service providers freely choose what they wish to charge for the service of including transactions in blocks. Block subsidy obviously plays a big part in that, but the issuance schedule is deterministic and well understood by all. How is this not a fee market?

From the recent dev discussions I read, it seems the change in acceptance hinged less on fellatory skills and more on going from RBF for all transactions to this:

"Opt-In Full-RBF allows senders to opt-into full-RBF semantics for their
transactions in a way that allows receivers to detect if the sender has
done so."

You meant to link to a specific post, but accidentally copied the link for quoting it instead, since the two are right next to each other.

Not a good idea to have all your eggs in one basket. BTC as an investment is, IMO a high-risk, high-return proposition. Either it goes way up or way down. The price staying within even a factor of 10 of the current level in the long term seems unlikwly to me.

So with that in mind, investing in BTC longterm is done in expectation of huge gains in the future. If that expectation pans out, do you think increasing your position with what money you have set aside now will provide any meaningful benefit? If the project fails and price crashes, how badly would you be kicking yourself for going all in?

60% is already a hefty slice of your funds in BTC. I see no reason to increase that unless you see BTC as a safe store of value instead of a high-volatility investment. And if you think BTC is not risky, I'd suggest thinking about it a bit more.

I have to say, you can consider yourself very lucky to live in Germany - no taxes after holding for one  year is a huge plus over most other countries policies AFAIK.

I don't see that in the article linked, and certainly not in the businessinsider source they link to. All it says is: "RBS is bearish on everything", which somehow is twisted into meaning they're "indirectly" advising investors to buy BTC. Does "indirectly" now mean "not at all" or did I miss something?

What was that, then?

Yep, and even when blocks are full, if it's just 0-fee transactions that don't go through, that's not such a big problem IMO.

The interesting question is: When transactions with fees start getting stuck in the queue, what happens to the sum of fees? If enough users need to use Bitcoin, then the sum will stay the same or rise. It could also be that even with some users paying more for their transactions, the fees would still add up to less than if all, or some, of the lower-paying TX's had been included. These would be users who are willing to pay some fee, but not whatever fee a limited blocksize leads to.

A hard cap on blocksize takes away the miners' ability to choose what kind of transactions are most economical for them to process. IMO it also takes away any chance of finding a fair price for transactions vs. resource usage since the resource usage is capped by dictate.

If that happens, the fees will go up, because that's what the market has decided. As it should be.

I thought this Bitcoin thing was supposed to be based on free market ideas. Shouldn't we let the service providers decide what kind of service they want to provide, and at what price?

So the miners would be considering an advantage gained from having better resources than their competitors vs. cutting their own profits from fees, which, as block rewards continue to dwindle can only become a bigger issue for them.

Sure, anyone could fork Bitcoin to force miners to accept feeless tx, or to force a pricepoint for tx. I don't recall any developer suggesting the transaction price needs to be fixed by policy, and I believe it would be a fool's errand anyway. You can't fight economic forces in a voluntary system like Bitcoin. You can try, but you'll just get out-competed.

Actually, scratch thst: I do believe some developers are saying the transaction price point needs fixing - anyone proposing a blocksize limit as an economic measure is doing just that: tampering with price discovery.

I don't think users - or anyone really - are capable of judging how secure any given cryptocurrency is relative to transaction cost, speed etc. It's a bit of a problem - ideally you'd like to see the market settle on an optimal security vs. cost ratio, but mostly users won't know security has dropped too low until something very bad happens. And if security drops low enough to really undermine the viability of a crypto, it's quite likely that coin will see a severe drop in valuation, leading to further drops in hashrate as miners go out of business.

I guess this would be a partial argument for why centralization of mining is inevitable, as only large miners with sufficient bankroll to survive bad patches will endure in the long run.

I don't follow, smooth. Are you being sarcastic?

This. The big issue isn't block size, it's that we're storing all the tx forever right now. That's the tree that we need to bark up, IMO. It's just inelegant right now. Hopefully a reasonable solution can be implemented or we'll see some kludge like automatic pruning of all tx created more than X blocks before... "Move your coins or lose 'em."

Actually, only storing, say, 5 years worth of data would certainly simplify things... Now there's a flamewar to start.

So you're telling us Core is planning an increase to 2 MB blocks and Cconvert2G36 tells us Core devs have found  2 MB blocks bring a risk of an attack no-one knows how to defend against... One of you should check their sources!

Richy_T: Yer right, I read the first parahraph, tried parsing it as a joke and couldn't. Should've read the rest, too!

re Luke-JR and changing over to SHA3: The man seems to go out of his way to find causes to champion, the more hopeless, the better. I first remember paying attention to him when he was acticely pushing tonal notation for Bitcoin. At least that was relatively harmless, if eccentric.

It's like a variation of schrodinger's cat, with the distinction that when you stop looking, it returns to a state of superposition.

This doesn't merit a thread of its own, so here in the "lounge" it goes:

Is it possible to implement 2 MB blocks in different, incompatible ways? If, say, Bitcoin Classic got the support needed to trigger 2MB production to start, and Core also switched to 2MB blocks, could they still be incapable of operating on the same blockchain? I'm not saying it's likely to be done if possible, just curious.

Didn't you kind of answer your own question? An unresolved fork would be bad for holders, so attacking the minority chain to destroy it would make sense if it's not  too expensive.

Amazing how well the amount of denigrating puns in a post holds an inverse correlation with the attention the opinions expressed therein deserve.

The answer to your question of attacking one of the chains seems to be valid, still.

Maybe this was sarcasm, I'd have to read more from the previous discussion to tell.

In case it's not: It shouldn't be surprising mining is becoming more centralized, seeing as Bitcoin appears to have been designed with that expectation:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=532.msg6306#msg6306

" The more burden it is to run a node, the fewer nodes there will be.  Those few nodes will be big server farms.  The rest will be client nodes that only do transactions and don't generate."
('generating' being what mining was called way back,)

So yeah. From that, it seems if you want highly decentralized mining, you should take a hard look at whether Bitcoin is suitable to your purposes.

This. TX volume is relevant to speculation, total output not so much.

Wait, miners can choose for themselves what kinds of transactions and how many of them they deem economical to include in blocks??

Sorry. I'm having a hard time avoiding the snark in me here. I guess I see why this has all blown up so badly... If only belittling others could be used to secure the blockchain!

I'd say we don't know if it's high or not, and protocol decisions shouldn't be made based on opinions on market pricing. Low-fee transactions aren't any better a design goal than high-fee transactions if reaching that goal requires developers to start intervening in free price discovery.

What I'm getting at: Better efficiency is a great goal, and would lead to a lower unit price for transactions, obviously. Trying to fix prices outside the market is a bad goal.

No-one, since there is no such thing currently. You can push transactions out with whatever fee you wish, including 0. Wallets will usually recommend a fee though, how that fee is decided is presumably decided by the developers of the wallet in question. Miners, in turn, choose what fees, if any, they require for their services. You might say it's a fee market.

Don't amateurs mainly hash for pools? It seems hard to believe there's any significant hashrate operated by hobbyists who actually run their own bitcoind for mining.

I'm confused. I thought you previously argued for small blocks and not worrying about scaling so much? Isn't it kind of clear that at 3-ish tx per second, Bitcoin won't be used for small payments like this as the fees will have to grow rather a lot higher than they are now?

Currently the (subsidized) cost per tx is about 7 USD. It's pretty clear miners are being paid too much at the moment, their income will have to come down in the future for Bitcoin to be viable. So if you assume the cost comes down from 10% of value stored annually to 2% or so, the cost per tx is still 1.4 USD, and that's extrapolating from the current situation where there's not that much competition for blockspace. Now, you can still cram some more tx into 1 MB blocks than we currently have, but then again that should also create competition for tx inclusion, so more tx currently is more likely to raise fees than lower them.

If tx per second doesn't rise and you can still send 1 USD cheaper than PayPal in a few years time, that means hardly anyone actually uses Bitcoin.

Tx validation becomes more energy-efficient.

I don't have time to for a proper reply right now, so I'll just settle for two points : 
-If the miners decide transactions you call abuse make sense for them to include in blocks, why does this bother  you?
-of your numbered points, #2 is obviously wrong. Security in this context is measured as cost to attack vs. potential profit, yes?It follows that as BTC valuation, and therefore the value stored on the network, goes up, you must correspondingly increase spending, in fiat terms, on mining to maintain the same level of security. By this view, it's the BTC cost of mining that is relevant.

Of course, no true gentleman would go around discussing things as crass as money in the first place.

The only thing the current subsidised cost-per-transaction shows is that the vast majority of mining profits come from block rewards, with hashrate mainly supported by a steep appreciation in BTC valuation and, presumably, an expectation of similar price trends to continue into the future. The current subsidy-corrected tx cost has hardly anything to do with actual network usage, and is ridiculously high no matter what the optimal use case for BTC ends up being. Unless you can propose a use case where 10% demurrage of wealth yearly is acceptable.

Re: paper wallets : if you leave them with other people, shouldn't you encrypt them? At one point I had a copy of a paper wallet I stored remotely, and I manually encrypted the key. My nerdy solution was to take the ANSI codes of the characters of the privkey and add the ANSI codes for characters from a password I chose to each character. Password looped because it wasn't as long as the key. Printed out the resulting sequence of numbers along with an explanation of how the addding worked. Didn't encrypt the first character of the privkey since that's a known number and would slightly weaken the security.

You can probably come up with something simpler...

Maybe this bickering has gone on long enough? Obviously no agreement can be found, all that's left is to see what measures the miners adopt. I expect we'll know more about that when the 2016 halving takes effect, or some time after that. The subsidy being cut in half will put the miners on the spot - either they'll take the small-blocks bet that a controlled amount of transactions will lead to bigger profits for them, or they'll take the big-block bet that more tx is better even if the average tx fee is lower. Until then... Let's watch some walls, huh?

I believe that number is tx cost to the network as aggregate, which is basically (tx fees + block subsidy)/[# of tx] * [BTCUSD rate]. Cost to mine a block is a different issue, but would be harder to put a number to, since it depends on unknown variables.

Shmadz, BJA: to comment on double spend risks. You both seem to have missed some details.


If you have 75% of the hashrate, your success rate with double-spends is 100%, since you are guaranteed to be building the longest chain. Sure, 25% of the blocks will not be built by you, but you have the power to discard those from the blockchain. I'd guess a double-spend in this kind of scenario would probably be best achieved by willingly orphaning the blocks containing the tx  you want to re-spend. So the situation, if you assume Chinese miners are all in collusion, is actually worse than BJA is saying.

OTOH, honest miners aren't the only protection against double spends. simple race attacks can be detected by any sufficiently connected node. That won't help against dishonest miners, but the kind of attack a majority miner could pull off seems pretty problematic in terms of financial gains. The attack would be detected too quickly for the miner to exchange their BTC for other assets and take delivery of said assets, so any profits would be counted in BTC. And what do yout think happens to the BTC price if a majority miner goes rogue?

A fork, sure, but a fork to what? Short of changing the hashing algorithm, I don't see what's going to prevent a destructive miner from shitting all over the new fork, too.

So: double-spends for direct economic gain don't seem likely to be a huge problem. Miners disrupting the network for political reasons (or ransom, for that matter) seems like it could be an issue, but it's hard to estimate how likely such an attack would be.

shmadz: I'm not sure an algo change would improve the situation any. Everyone would have to rebuild their mining setups. Some honest miners would probably just quit, while a determined attacker might just find holding onto a majority of hashpower just got cheaper for them.

So, to sum up.
Yesterday's news: We have consensus!
Today's news: We don't have consensus, we have another split!

Oh well. At least the miners are taking action. They'll be the ones to decide how this goes, whatever the devs say. Hard to argue with hashpower.

All the income in the gox data above is listed as JPY. Does that mean they've already liquidated any BTC, that the BTC hasn't been sold but is still listed at the current exchange rate, or that the BTC isn't included in these numbers?

Hey adam - don't like NLC's constant trolling? Remember how, when you made this thread, you turned self-moderation on?

That would be a worryingly abnormal development.

I can't speak for F2Pool, and don't even know if that announcement is genuine, but it's not so hard to think of why it might matter. For example, assume you're F2Pool and think the consensus agreement is a compromise you're not particularly keen on. You agree anyway since it's better to at least get something done and to mend some bridges between the confliciting sides. Then you find out that actually one of the sides doesn't endorse the consensus at all, so you're agreeing to a compromise you don't like for no good reason at all.

AlexGR: Who should decide what the fair price of a tx is?

Sounds good to me! The old supply/demand dynamic, right?

Now, who should decide how much demand there is for tx?
Who should decide what the supply of tx is?

Am I to take it you believe in some cases the mining market should be fixed by some third party? What would constitute an irrational mining market? Who should step in to fix it?

The part where optimal supply isn't left for the market to figure out.