eah something fishy going on.

my biggest concern that i wish i paid more attention to my balance for, is that I dont know if when the second spam txid is broadcast - does it cause my wallet balance to read lower?

Ie: if I have 3BTC and I send 1BTC, and then a spam rebroadcast goes out saying the same 1BTC transaction but never confirms, will my bitcoin-Qt wallet show 2BTC in it or will the client misread this to think that there is only 1BTC left?

imagine if it were to basically abandon coins when it creates te change address - it could be rescanned but there could be serious losses to some people who dont notice

great - so my exported transaction list DOES NOT ADD UP.

it includes the duplicate transaction of -0.2201 marked as 'Confirmed=FALSE' and a partly-confirmed mining income from an hour ago of 0.1674

please help me out here:

Wallet Status: Balance: 0.2146 BTC   Unconfirmed: 0.00 BTC    Immature: 0.1674 BTC
using the exported csv and adding all the transaction amounts, I get a total of 0.1363 BTC - this includes both the mining income and unconfirmed double spend.
Why does the math not add up? No matter how you add/subtract the renegade values my wallet amount isnt right

thats basically my POV as well. There is nothing fundamentally worse about bitcoin - in fact things are much better with infrastructure, ATMs, and many small retailers getting interested.

The real problem is the public opinion - there has been no good news in a while, everything is blurred or focused ont he incompetence of GOX. and while gox keep shoving its foot in thier mouth, all of bitcoin looks less beautiful.

I have two techniques for this:
1) sell a few coins at btc-e or another exchange, just in case it goes lower. if it doesn't, who cares you hedged your bets slightly in case.
2) step back and look at the big picture: more people know what a bitcoin is. they dont know much about it, and most give me a sly 'hows your bitcoins doing?' recently, but the point is people know. Those who it interests will read up on it and start looking for a place to buy in.

i think we are not yet at the bottom, but that we are close. Weve entered an area with major support twice before, and I feel like we could see one or two more bear rushes to slam BTC/USD down to about $500 before the media decides to turn around and give it a few positive articles to swing it up and get some attention

In decmber, I though we would be $1500 now, and >$3000 by year end. I still think we will be $3000 by the end of the year, but the individual dips are hard to estimate without being in charge of a media outlet (sadface'd lol)

everyone watches the car crash until its over, then they go in to loot the survivors.

I just bought some at $560 - I think we are at the bottom, the charts flattening out and weekends are notorious for random moves on no volume.

take a step back - things are well aligned to start putting out positive spin again and knock this up by 20% in just a few day's work. For traders, that is a golden opportunity, considering its dragged  down 25% or so in the last week of bad news. Most of the money in the markets is traders, rather than new buyers or sellers of old coin.

https://blockchain.info/charts/bitcoin-days-destroyed?showDataPoints=false&timespan=&show_header=true&daysAverageString=7&scale=0&address=

we have had very few bitcoin days destroyed in the last 2 weeks - this means that old wallets are still staying put and that the trading volume is mostly buying and selling the same coins around

asic-resistance is nonsense and any coin touting it will not succeed.

the massive hashrate of the Bitcoin network on ASIC devices is key. If financial entities and professional mining firms are to arise it would be insane for them to be based on hodge-podge GPU mining. ASICs create a slick, powerful design and are already creating a market with good competition, and mining power is truly being dispersed worldwide.  (The cost of saboutauge goes up and up, including the inability to covertly do it because of the huge power draws required making it easy to pinpoint the greater mining firms in a few years from now.

It would be stupid at this point to build a 50-million-dollar, 5,000kW facility in order to attempt to overthrow the blockchain.  A year ago that would have been a real possibility

one thing that ive rarely seen come up in solar power conversations is the fact that you are capturing a huge fraction of the solar energy onto the black panel, rather then reflecting it back into the air/space like if it hit water or hit green foliage. Solar Panels effectively act like blacktop pavement in that regard.

MO, the future is wave power and nuclear.

Not sure if that was phrased properly. The correct (at least in my mind) cycle is this:
1) price is low; mining profits are meager against power costs and effort. Most coins are mined by a few larger farms that use thier size to make a reasonable profit against the lower distributed power/space/cooling costs.
2) The bigger miners are responsible for selling coins or using them to add equipment. Thus, much of the fresh coin supply can be controlled by the miners.
3) price goes up; media attracts new attention, mining becomes more feasible, more small-scale users are interested. Many more people are mining and thus capable of selling their coins for the faster turnaround, price is allowed to slump, which also scares out buyers and puts us in a position like now.
4) mining farms and larger entities are gathering coins. Mining looks less attractive with seemingly overpriced hardware. summer is coming. This should restart the cycle.

This is just with relation to mining. the bigger image is the balance of people who are not scared to invest in a bearish market vs current holders who want to cash out in case it drops further.

don't forget the smaller bank of klondike - 3TH churning up coins like a storm

I don't want to say we are at the bottom, since i said that at $600 only a week ago. however, I feel like we have fallen far enough outside of the trendlines that there is a major, visible upside that the market has yet to rebound towards.

Bitcoin is in a better place than it was at $130/$1200 - ATMs are out, the IRS appears to have a basic understanding, and more people than ever know about it and can use it for everyday stuff via gfty and overstock/tigerdirect.  We could fall lower, but it should not be difficult to break back above $800 by early summer, and I feel like $3000 is still a reasonable high to be hit in 2014 (possibly as the peak of a brief bubble)

noone wants paid TA services when there are many great free options.   Its like paying for the foontass P&D email list

tl;dr

Lots more people were looking up information about bitcoin when it was peaking in price. That chart starts in January when the price was still over $800. As the price relaxed there was less interest (other than when significant, fast drops in price occurred)

The chart would be FAR more meaningful if it extended back to about april of last year, when the price was stable at $90-120, so you could see the change in interest from then through the price jump and to now. I am sure its a few times higher now than a year ago

if you are confident take advantage of the low price, or chase the rally

I know the time will come, just need to be patient. gains rarely happen overnight

I agree that 100 is extremely unlikely since this drop is based on fear/manipulation rather than a failure in the protocol.

300 would be the bottom i expect, the charts already gone from a waterfall to a vertical drop, and i suspect it will bounce hard this afternoon somewhere between 300-350 and get back to 420+  by the evening

THE BEARWHALE BULLWHALE

Here's a thought - what if the bearwhale was actually a bullwhale?

1) dump some coins and put a massive 30k sell order wall at $300
2) purchase some long position calls on bitfinex or elsewhere.
3) eat it away using at least one other account, including an 11k purchase. Includes buying any coins being sold below $300.
4) remove the sell order for the last ~10k coins
5) watch the markets increase by 50% in a week, while still holding most of the original number of coins, plus extremely high-profit calls.

seems like by sacrificing ~10k coins to others at $300, the bullwhale effectively reversed the price decline, increasing the value of the remaining coins and probably selling the call positions for a tremendous profit.

is this feasible, or is the bearwhale just a bearwhale?

these types of intersections are so open to interpretation though. If you created the same model about a week ago, it would show that we fell below the cross and thus right now should be bearish.

IMO long-term we are going up, but short-term its volatility until something happens to change that - either the coins distribute from big holders to dedicated smaller HODLers, or wall street gets involved and opens up bitcoin use to investors

no way - the rest of the world is moving forwards, including the rest of the USA, and if the bitlicense ends up being bothersome many will simply avoid operating in New York State, or skip reporting to the IRS in general.

hard not to be bullish when you look at the bitcoin environment only ~12 months ago when it was at $100. A 4x growth in technicals seems like a bare minimum to me.

Because.... turban?

ive been aboard and buckled in too long it seems. I have to sell about $3k worth of coins soon to cover some $$$ costs but would hate to have to sell coins at this low a price.

what the f---? not remotely what i want to see at christmas, thats just wrong.

assuming that PoW is the decided mining method, you would need it to be an SHA-256 algorithm, to allow the Hundreds of Millions of dollars in existing equipment to be relevant. Interestingly, the brief paycoin rush demonstrated that with minimal co-ordination more than 20% of the bitcoin network moved over to an altcoin in the span of a week.

1minute blocks are the future, but come with a lot more blocks to store on drives, and i hope we see it become an issue by late 2015. right now the system works - improvement is second to security

unlikely it will drop like that. The cloudmining contracts might end, but the hardware will still exist. It may likely just be used for CEX's private mining.

I expect a 0% diff change because a lot of 1w+/gh gear will shut off but be replaced by newer S5/SP20 gear

thats my guess. a push down to meet resistance around $200 is possible, but i think that looking at the past month of chart, a rebound to $300 is appropriate, settling at $280 for the next move

im sick of drops. im loaded up and ready to roll! The dips and bumps are nice because i use 2-3BTC for some fun day-trading (im up ~5% in the last two weeks), but I thought bitcoin would have achieved the $600/BTC plateau again by now.

ever since i started daytrading with ~5% of my BTC, ive been enjoying the volatility a bit more  These 5% daily swings are nice for setting up a few buy and sell orders on each side to see where it goes. I'm up about 3% this week (which is only ~$10, but still) by playing the different LTC/BTC/NMC/USD spreads

IMO it can go either way. On one hand, a high number of shorts indicates a lot of bearish mindsets. On the other hand, an upward move of 5-10% is typically sufficient to cause a lot of shorts to cover or close, and that can make the upwards move even more drastic.

personally, i think we are headed upwards for here, its time to move back into the 280-320 region where there was resistance last month. I really doubt we will see <$200 again with the fundamentals of the blockchain and the hashrate where they are

more in the way of 'anti-fragility' (which IMO is a stupid expression) - when bitcoin was 2-3 years old a lot of people just assumed it would be hacked or broken wide open. In 2013, there was still the impression that it was new, and would eventually collapse on itself. Its now 2015 and Bitcoin is 6yrs old, and BTC worth over $200/ea

I cant think of any way in which the fundamentals or services offered by bitcoin are any worse today than they were 2years ago, when the price was ~$110. The recent low of ~$160 hit massive resistance at those levels, because it seems entirely reasonable that bitcoin is worth more today than it was 2 years ago.

how much is the question. 1.5x, 3x, 10x, 50x? The market is levelling out above the current $180-220 bottom, and tipping above some of the longer trendlines that it followed down from $1000

not much other than consider closing them at a loss or taking your chances.

thats the whole point of the squeeze. weve seen it a dozen times on the way down, maybe its time to punch upwards again

+1. i expect that technology will scale more quickly than the blockchain.

you can buy a 1TB harddrive for $50 (or a 128GB SSD for $100), and >2MB/s bandwith is pretty common now in major cities.
in 2-3 years from now youll buy a 1TB SSD for $100, and the majority of people in developed countries will have access to 5MB/s or better, with major cities having 10-20MB/s

Ps: i recently moved my blockchain files from my 128GB SSD to an HDD, and was shocked how much longer loading bitcoin-qt took. It went from being about 40-60 second loadtime to 3-4 minutes. SSD drives are the future, and will make read/write/storage of the blockchain quick and simple

+1

its probably going to drop 5% today and find support around $255-260. after that it could push back upwards. later this week it may break $280, $300 will arrive quickly after

I got involved in 2012 and was around for the entire bubble. Your assumption that that bitcoin will reduce to pre-bubble levels is silly.

first, why do you take $100 as the starting point? There was clearly a bubble a year earlier that went from ~$25 to $260 to $80, before another bubble formed.
secondly - if you think $100 was a correct price, how can you look at the mainstream acceptance of bitcoin today and not recognize it to be at least 2x that of what it was then?

theres a lot of resistance sub-$220, and limited upwards resistance if a bull market emerges (small plateaus around $300,$400,$600 are the only major resistance levels on a longterm chart). If the price breaks abouve $260 it could very easily go to $300 and test resistance and a trendline. Breaking that, it would be a bull market

this. I just don't see much ability or drive to break lower than 210. Charts have bounced off the 180-200 range several times and it looks like a bottom with decent support. At some point even the bears have to become bullish (they need coins from somewhere)

Most of the coins sold are from two sources: early adopters, and current miners. If someone bought $2000 worth several years back (anything from 200-2000BTC) its only logical that since the peak of 2013 they would have been slowly selling off some of those coins to lock in a profit, while likely retaining at least $5000-20,000 worth and which point they would likely hold and wait to see another price rally.

That means fewer and fewer coins in the sell wall are from early adopters, and instead come from mining (which is becoming more costly and will undergo halving in about a year)

so make it a bad investment?


thats basically how it works now. people buy bitcoin for that the market feels it is worth. economics 101


do you mean to keep the value low such that people dont need to use "mBTC/uBTC/satoshis/etc"? Most bitcoin software allows you to send payment in mBTC or $USD (converted to BTC value). having decimals is not a bad thing, and if that is a problem for some people even when thier wallet software does the 'mBTC/satoshi' conversion its an issue of ignorance.


you already pay fees like this via transaction fees and via the network currently inflating at ~12% (dropping to 6% next year). The concept of 'inactivity fees' is sheer insanity and does nothing but make miners rich like bankers.


again, you talk about making bitcoin unappealing so that it is not desirable as a store of value, why?


when block rewards are low, bitcoin becomes MORE centralised, because only those with cheap power can profit. home users are squeezed out by residential power rates and you're left with only datacenters that get power for <$0.05/kwh. your 'solution' would serve to drastically centralize the network by pushing out the small-scale miners


anonymitity is a problem? or is the problem that anonymity only goes as far as methods used by the user (such as mixing)
non-reversibility is a fundamental concept of bitcoin. As is the ability to lose coins (or rather, being unable to forcibly remove coins from an address you don't control).


with respect, many of your ideas to improve bitcoin fundamentally damage its functionality and value

whats with the misconception that small miners need to run a fully-validating node?

anyone with <$100,000 worth of mining hardware will be mining through a pool (such as eligius, slush, etc) and only needs to be capable of downloading very basic speeds (<20kBps)
anyone with >$100,000 worth of hardware can afford to pay an extra $200/month to operate a top-of-the-line satellite/fibre node.
any pool with more than <$100,000 worth of hardware mining to it should be getting enough fees to host the pool in a location with insane levels of bandwidth (like a datacenter)

bitcoin becomes decentralised when the mining payout greatly exceeds the network difficulty. everyone, even in places with expensive electricity, can make money when the value of block reward+fees exceeds the deployment of new hashrate. In that case, its desirable to increse the number of users/transactions to produce more fees.

take a look at the canadian exchanges:
     cavirtex; $515 CAD ($395 USD)
QuadrigaCX: $565 CAD ($432 USD)

not sure why the spread, but i just bought 3BTC on cavirtex and am just waiting for them to clear my Quadriga account. If all goes well, easy 10% (minus ~1% fees)

That was a bubble with 10x price movement that took about a month to cover most of the volatility.
This time was just a 2x price movement that took about a week to occur in earnest.

I think its safe to say that it bottomed just under $300, and will probably stabilize in the $320-$360 range over the next 2 week. Its obvious theres a lot of support at $300, and moderately around $320 (july peak)

fundamentally, there is no reason for bitcoin to fall below $250 after the way it broke the 2015 price trend, and signifigant evidence for it to be much higher than it was in mid-2013 (waay more venture investment, more legitimacy, more uses, better security and storage methods like trezor or multisig, and insanely higher hashrate. I honestly believe the price should be in the $400-800 range, but its more likely that volatility will send us much higher if the bullish long-term indicators continue

weekends always have fairly inconsequential jumps/dips, i dont take them into account for trend direction unless it maintains through monday.

i expect within the next two weeks we will see a "crash" into $410-415 range, bouncing off (or just below) the lower trend line, and then pulling back up to $425 again over the span of another week to the point that it breaches the upper trendline and we see the rally begin.

and then its choo choo MF right up into the $600 range for summertime

ive learned to not always short the bubble, since sometimes they take weeks to pop, and can even trail higher first.

ethereum as a long list of benefits, but its far less simple than bitcoin. nobody can give you a direct answer for when PoW switches to PoS (before it was said to be july-september, now its being said to happen as late as october-december, if not 2017). Couple that with more 'phases' and codenames (homefront, frontier, etc) than an android phone, and i expect it to simmer back down to the $5-8 range for a while

pretty sure seawater doesnt go INSIDE the structure

As bullish as it sounds, this is also what im seeing in the charts. sometime around May 21st the price will likely begin signalling an exit from the current flag, likely in an upwards direction.

crossing $470 will probably mean little resistance at the $500 mark, then a brief rally into the $620->$520->$580->$540 range depicted, followed by another few months of slow bullish consolidation through halving

edit: the range depicted actually looks like a peak at ~$750, which i dont beleive. $600-$650 range would provide massive resistance and it could take weeks or months to eat through it during consolidation

You're thinking of Etheropia:

my impression was that it was a fox rater than a cat (watch te tail)

that how margin trading works

I think we will see it hit a low of ~$580 in a few day's time, when we can see how many miners dropped out and if there's any signs of the feared (and virtually impossible) "death spiral". If 20% leaves, blocks will get longer, fuller, and we will have more fee pressure as the miners look to replace the subsidy's lost value

I plan to HODL because we are bullish longer term, and any halving crisis would simply be a bear trap. I closed my longs at $640 (from $625) and have a bunch of buys set up in the $580-610 range to catch the knife

once we break 700, we would be in full bull market and id expect some serious rally in the next 6 months (perhaps less time, but we've been seeing a lot of sideways in the past year.

but i think we will fall below $600 on finex, though i expect it to be brief, quickly bouncing back into the $640 resistance. Theres likely to be some serious FUD in the next 72hrs about blocksize, fees, miners leaving, etc  that are just noise and a few whales throwing weight $600USD is about 4000CNY, and both will be a huge resistance/support level

changes in the hashrate can affect the block time, such as a drop in hashrate making blocks a bit less frequent (lets say 12minutes if ~15% of the network leaves). In turn, full blocks get fuller and transaction fees climb a little as teres more fighting for a spot. As the fees grow, so will the incentive to mine the block. today we see ~0.7BTC/block fees - wit 12min blocks we could see >1BTC in fees - an extra ~3% incentive to compensate. If things got particularly bad with ~15min blocks, fees could reach 1.5BTC, almost a 8% added mining incentive.

I dont see it causing a doomsday - but i do expect we will see some evidence of lower block frequency over the next 10-14 days until the next adjustment. beyond that point, difficulty will change and some miners will probably return.  I expect that a lot of major facilities have a $300-500/BTC production cost right now and will not change thier hashrate. only smaller home miners and older gear like S5/SP3X will leave


as for hashrate security - the halving will disincentive any major hashrate growth in the next few years unless/until the price rises considerably.

stabilize at 720-730, for a few days, and then push up again. either passes $760 and goes for $800, or deflects down back to $700 or $680 again

it jumped on minimal volume, so it could revert pretty easily back to $730.

IMO, we stay flat in $720-740 range until 2017, then move up. passing $780 would almost certainly mean a runup to a (brief) ~$900 peak

i see it bouncing between $880-925 for a few days, before blowing past the $1000 mark to burn all the shorters hard again

falling under $850  could put the rally on hold for a few months of slow growth again

i think $1000 will come within 24hrs of it crossing $940. but its hard to predict how long it takes to move past the current 880-920 range. maybe 3-4 days, maybe we sit here for a week or two

i want to say that the realistic next step is a 50% retrace, to ~$820, followed by months of consolidation.  But, i think crossing $900 was too significant a milestone, and likely the start of a 2013-esque bullrun that could go up into the $1400-2200 range within a month or two

Ive learned to just keep clear of leveraged trading though, and am hodling the majority of my coins for a longer duration

the trick is the $ retirement accounts are best used to invest in the stock market. basic intelligent investing will have a better return (3-7%) than the rate of inflation (2-3%)

bitcoin doesnt like to do any serious retraces when its in bull mode.

IMO, crossing $940-960 this week would lead to an ATH, and perhaps a peak of 1300-2600. Its pretty bullish, and im not doing any leverage (just HODL), but i dont expect it to peak beyond $2600 (in this rally), and a rally to those levels would probably crash back down to the 900-1200 range for many more months of recovery and profit taking

im trying not to go full bull and leverage my holdings - weve seen in the past that it doesnt take much to make it rally or crash irrationally at the drop of a hat (or attack of the bearwhale)

IMO the consolidation looks pretty complete on the upper side, and looks like it will break up in the next 3hrs. only way to prolong that is if it dips to ~$956 and takes a few more hours to bounce around.

my bet is we see $1060USD by the new year (but im too pussy to risk margin trading that hope) as the whales make the short sellers panic in the final days of the year.

the drama is multiplied by the fact that most financial markets are closed so many days this week, and traders only have bitcoin to focus on

well, step 1 complete. we have new high at $973 and the beartrap looks to be finished. $1000 sometime tomorrow?

realistically, i think $1600, then a fall to $1000 and holding that range for at least a few months

my triangle says it will tighten towards $910 for Jan 13. itll spend the remainder of the week with people making positions, and then itll pump or dump on the weekend

ATH in price is only one side of the coin. the other is market cap.

in 2013 the market cap was ~12B at its peak, and litecoin was less than $100M.

today bitcoin is almost $19B, and the next 5 top coins have a combined $2B.

cryptocurrency as an entire sector is up 8 *BILLION* dollars, or ~66% since the 2013 peak.

duh, thats how market cap works.

my thoughts are similar. somewhere around $1400 i think china will finally hit that 8888 peak, and price will move quickly into the 1600 range, and then the bubble pops and it slides down to a low of $800 and we bounce around looking for stability at $1000

I dont see this being a massive 10x movement like before, unless the ETF succeeds and some other factor sends new users to bitcoin

its a relatively clever/fair agreement actually, since the trade will only occur if the segwit2x chain mines 100 blocks. (without an EDA mechanism). If sw2x fails to gain traction on flagday it might not see more then 20-50 blocks mined before everyone essentially abandons back to sw1x. Its tough to see that chain reaching 100 blocks without bringing substancial support on day 1, and if it gets that support then theres a reasonable chance the rest of the network could follow suit.

it at least offers Ver more safety than a day1 trade would

im not seeing many people calling top on this yet, so i think I will:  $6225

I think weve gotr one more push of ~$100 to hit a new ATH, then we see some corrective action down <$5700 and consolidation in the $5800-6000 range while waiting for either a reason to rally (good news/continued buying) or crash (FUD. china banned us again?)

$6150 was a great top to hit, so im pretty sure this will be a 24hr correction to $5500$5650ish

Just in case i set a slew of buy orders going as deep at $5100 in case the market decides it wants to play rough

i think itll dip further. this is getting topheavy and im sure a growing group of pre-2017 buyers start needing to seize their gains and diversify at least a portion of the holdings. (ie: the "im a millionaire now" bitcoin owners who only have $50,000 worth of other investment types)

half a cent? it might be better now than it was a few weeks ago, but BCH and the majority of altcoins are capable of cheaper and faster confirmation times. It shouldnt obstruct BTC being a payment option though, just a costlier one

I think you underestimate him; in terms of both his contribution to bitcoin and his actual understanding of the consensus mechanisms/mining.

but cool you made a meme

Different paths had different results. I made a killing on antminer S1 hardware (huge btc/btc gains, but in terms of fiat/fiat during 2014 it was less impressive but still a solid profit) and some well-timed GPU/ASIC purchases while $0.12/kwh was considered *cheap*.

however, i also put several bitcoins towards a K16 avalon groupbuy and got burned on 100% of that investment. Same for investing in asicminer/friedcat (hindsight, right?)