Oh, marriedtothesea, you little rascal you...

Not really, if seen on a reasonable time frame, say: ~1 year.

Of the top 5 alts, some are dropping (Ripple), some are flat compared to a year ago (Litecoin), and some are rising (Ethereum). Over the same yearly horizon, Bitcoin is doing pretty good compared to a weighted alt basket (eyeballing it here, don't care to calculate it).

Now, Ethereum is clearly going through a major pump right now. Not just by price, but also judging by how I've received several spam messages in the last week, suggesting to "get in while I can". Which probably only means, the pump is likely to come to an end soon.

For someone who's into short time frame / high risk trading it might make sense to trade that Ethereum pump. But for an investor (or even: swing trader) I doubt the current price to be a good entry point for a long(er) term position.

Ripple on the other hand has been correcting recently, but based on the previous swing up, it looks like it has some upward potential after the correction is over. So if at all, I'd actually rather go long on Ripple than on Ethereum right now, but not really, because: fuck Ripple and their fully de-decentralized model.

On a complete tangent: For someone who seems to have a pretty decent grasp of market directionality, your actual trading seems to be kind of lackluster. (Unless those "look at how my last trade spectacularly failed" threads are some kind of diversion metagame). Did you ever consider changing the time scale of your trades, i.e. going from sub-daily/daily, to something closer like daily/weekly?

So you are a Nazi?

(Did I do that right? :3)

I've already answered that: hashpower (slight majority to strong majority) plus major companies plus the fact that only a fringe of the posters in here, and nearly none on reddit or otherwhere, defend artificial scarcity means (most likely) an economic majority rejects the latter, but seems to be doubtful about technical issues (or doesn't understand them).

You'd rather see a poll? Sure, we can have one, maybe in this thread, or anywhere in this forum - however, I'm pretty sure whatever result we get will be challenged on grounds of manipulation, brigading, whatever.

The real test will be in case we're getting a hardfork. I don't think these should be taken lightly, but I'm also not convinced they are the 'death sentence' some make them out to be. This really runs down to a few basic psychological assumptions people seem to make: will "getting used to hardforks" inevitably mean crypto will be subverted, and capital diluted? Or can they become a (carefully) employed tool to bring about required major changes in the software, without dividing the network beyond repair. I'm leaning towards the latter, in case that wasn't clear already.

True. I believe the (likely) majority I cite above doesn't really care how a total tx capacity increase is achieved, only that it is achieved.

That said:

1. Segwit likely constitutes a somewhat smaller increase in tx capacity than a maxblocksize change to 2MB. Bitcoin core itself mentions "1.6MB to 2MB", depending on the type of transaction.

2. What the consensus (I claim exists) really shows is that - technical questions aside - the economical assumptions of the smallblockers arguments are rejected by miners, community, and large economic entities (several of the major companies, and at least a few known cases of major capital holders).


In other words: 2MB maxblocksize or not, segwit now or later -- in any case, the majority of the Bitcoin economy seems to be against artificial transaction scarcity.

This last point is something the economically motivated smallblock proponents (as opposed to the technically motivated ones) need to wrap their head around, but seem unwilling to do, so far at least.

52% to 72% of hashpower*, two of the most respected developers**, plus what looks like a majority of community sentiment in favor*** are saying otherwise. Oh, right, and I forgot to mention loaded posted he's in favor of 2MB****


* Depending on whether you believe rumors of "false pledges of 2MB allegiance" by some pools.

**  Yes, yes, we know... "Gavin is a government shill!", "paid for by the banks", etc.

*** In here, across all forums of btctalk, perhaps doubtful -- but much less so on r/bitcoin and r/btc.

**** On reddit. Caveat: not via signed message, so could be fake.

No. He suggests that a naive attack that succeeds to only create a majority in the least capital intensive of the three areas (nodes, mining, capital/economic majority) in isolation is doomed to fail -- due to a reaction of the rest of the network out of pure self-interest.

Well, maybe not exactly the same





(neither in terms of volatility, nor direction, recently)

You've got to love this little market of ours... going full retard in one direction, few days later, full retard in the opposite direction.

It's a pleasure to read you cutting right through the bullshit 'thought experiments' arguments based on economic naivety.

Glad to see you're back on the speculation sub.

My post office guy does exactly the same, but tends to end his sentences in "top kek".

Yeah... that's exactly the kind of post-partisan discussion I had in mind hahaha.

Very much worth reading. Thanks.

I've had some reservations against Falkvinge previously, not even entirely sure why - there's something vaguely pompous about his online writing I've read before - but this post of his is quite different. Fully agreed with what he writes, how he writes it, and what he's saying between the lines (about the form of governance).

Anyone from 'the other camp' wants to take a shot at it though? I'm always interested to hear a coherent argument against something that appears completely natural and obvious to me - makes me nervous almost if I think it's "natural" and "obvious" hehe

As in: running a full node on that instance?

What about bandwidth / number of connections? I vaguely remember some recommendations not to bother with running a full node unless meeting certain requirements wrt the previous two variables, since otherwise you're not really adding much to the network. Is that a problem with the EC2 node?

If not, I'm going to start running a few of those instances as well. The reason for me not to permanently run a full node is that I don't have a machine that I don't use otherwise, and that I don't mind being dedicated to the network. But outsourcing it sounds exactly like my kind of deal

Please give us a rundown on how to set one up over there, at some point.

Credit where credit is due: taking the painting observation as a sell signal (~$450), which I figure is how you interpreted it, was justified.

Hearn+Cryptsy events added theirs, but the erosion started before that on purely technical grounds, so: you called it.

Nice try :)

Might have noticed I gave up the book talking a while ago. You?

Seriously no gloating here (I know how promising, fascinating, but also retardly difficult ML can be ), but I think your algorithm might need some tweaking...

For the past days, it's been predicting a strong upwards trends, basically: starting about *now* at each time step.

A few days ago:



Today:



By now, there's a wide gap between actual and predicted price, non surprisingly:




This doesn't per se invalidate your algo (could be that it aims for long-term correctness & profitability, but accepts short term deviations), but it leads to a few questions, mainly: did you properly *test* the network?

As in: did you keep training and testing data separate, and did you perform (several) runs on the testing data?

Assuming you did that, perhaps the current situation is an exception, and the predictions will 'snap back' to a more correct level (or price 'snaps back' to your predictions - though I doubt that a bit right now ).

Otherwise, it's possible your model needs to be made more 'reactive', i.e. when model and reality diverge, the model must be able to adjust faster and revise its previous output direction. I could think of a few ways to get there, but this likely requires changing the network architecture, which maybe you'd rather not do.

I'm not overly sad to see Mike go. He seems to be a seriously competent developer, but on the political and economical dimensions, his absence is a net benefit in my opinion - don't we all fondly remember his 'redlisting' suggestion when he was chair of the Law & Policy committee?



Huh. A r0ach post I entirely agree with. Either I'm getting soft, or you are.

(Also, add to the list of this article's bullshit arguments: "Chinese miners are the reason we don't have bigger blocks". You can blame China's influence (by mining, exchanges, investing) for many things, but causing the blocksize deadlock is not one of them. The big pools have been on record for a long time that they're in favor of raising the limit in principle.)

(EDIT) Agreeing with everything, except maybe for your PoS pet project. But that's a decision to be revisited long into the future, so it doesn't bother me to think about it.

Sure. It seems to be more of a colour the mid-Blockians are supposed to rally behind for now, rather than a fleshed out proposal.

That said, there's quite some difference in complexity between Segwit and "change the maxblocksize int", right?