Guess we can count on seeing these posts every few months. I'm not by far the most experienced or elite Bitcoin user, but I must have done hundreds of transactions by now (and received more), all since 2016. While I try to shy away from transacting during these periods of heavy demand, I've still managed to spend reasonably well, in terms of percentage.

I think the normal Bitcoin user, as DH points out - and hopefully I am like them - will be using Bitcoin for larger transactions, and not longer dollars worth. Percentage-wise, I still find Bitcoin to be the cheapest mode of transfer, at least when I'm the one responsible for paying my own fees. This percentage is not really affected by every ATH.

Good analysis indeed. Futures to me are just a different way of gambling, since it's all speculation and so called hedgers buying the contracts. Why it's important for Bitcoin is that at the moment, there is no real way for investors to hedge against Bitcoin, more importantly to short it. You could count selling against alt pairs or Tether, but that's still not in fiat currency, which is how all the new futures next week will be settled.

Most investors feel this shorting ability will bring downward pressure on Bitcoin, making price a little more realistic. If they're right, I wouldn't mind. But this is the logic behind forward contracts, not the single-day self certified ones that will debut next week. They're strictly speculative, and hastily approved, rightly to the concern of the FIA expressed yesterday in an open letter to CFTC: https://fia.org/articles/open-letter-cftc-chairman-giancarlo-regarding-listing-cryptocurrency-derivatives

But as the above analysis points out, it may eventually be meaningless.

Not until the quarterfinals, though! UEFA rules mean teams from the same league cannot match each other in the last 16. Chelsea may feel a little inferior that all other English teams have topped their league, but to be fair, football is football and Liverpool still found their group tricky until the very end!

Anyway, reflections on last night's Europa League action. I swear Everton are on a huge roll, that's now three consecutive wins with a clean sheet. I didn't recognise a single goalscorer on the sheet last night though, so I must be either getting old or out of touch with them. Now they are meeting my team for the Merseyside derby, couldn't have come at a better strength. Hope the Reds are up for it, and then on to spoil their FA Cup party soon after.

Yeah I've heard about them, since they are based in my region (based out of Singapore). Singapore was always going to become a blockchain and Bitcoin hub, and this isn't the first project that's launched from there in the past six months. Very few of them have more than two or three nominal Singaporeans, though, actually, the rest of the team - as with Taklimakan - tends to be outsourced from a certain European region.

Bitcoin's been making some waves there, though, with the first Bitcoin related trial about to take place in the Singapore International Commercial Court, so you see there's quite a bit of recognition there.

As for the platform itself, I haven't seen any product from them, and as for trading skill/experience, can't say for sure if the team have it. They would need to do a lot more with their dev plans though, as I've seen competitors trying the same thing look a lot more solid.

Hmm, not sure if your assumptions are on the spot. All the research I've seen or used myself to calculate the cost of electricity used for mining (not the cost of mining) aren't at all related to Bitcoin price, but the current algorithmic difficulty. The more difficult, the more hash power is dedicated to the network.

If your correlation were true, then the cost of mining today will have risen more than 10 times that of in January. Instead, the correlation to difficulty is more true.

Nevertheless, Bitcoin price does have the consequence of attracting miners (thereby also increasing hash power), and the case is made clearer with miners switching between Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin, motivated by price of either (and difficulty). Were the price to crash today to sub 1k levels, a lot of miners would be forced to switch off as mining wouldn't be profitable.

Also, there's enough research also to show that a lot of that electricity isn't yet the cleanest...

I think you meant, Child pays for parent (not other way around as you wrote!). Hence your CPFP acronym... Anyway, not to worry.

What you essentially did is you've told miners that your second tx (the newer one you just made) will also carry enough fees to pay for the first one. If a miner feels that the CPFP tx is suitably funded with enough fees, it will pick up BOTH transactions and include it in the next block they find. So basically, both will confirm at the same time.

You can find acceleration services in the Services section: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=52.0

After nine months on this forum, you really should spend some time reading the highly informational posts here. The sticky, for example! Nevertheless:

1. Use an estimator like https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ to estimate how long your transaction will take to be confirmed. As of now, your 19.7 sat/byte fee has a 90% chance of confirming within the next 23 hours. This will, of course, keep changing as the network fills up or empties.
2. You have several options at disposal. As aleksej says, try RBF or asking friend to do CPBP. You can also wait it out but good luck with that, mempool is close to 200k txs.
3. Try to submit the tx for acceleration. You can try https://pool.viabtc.com/tools/txaccelerator/ or https://antpool.com/user/prioritiseTransaction.htm?m=savePrioritiseTx
OR
Search for users offering acceleration services here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=52.0

P.S. That's a lot of coin. Tell your friend not to skimp on fees next time!

Guess you don't need a third person telling you what kind of ridicule you've just opened yourself up to... but shill opportunity aside, you're free to choose an alt of your preference. Lots of Bitcoin merchants like you anyway are ready to accept alts with lower fees and quicker confirmation times.

With the price increasing the way it is though, every 5 dollars you earn is potentially more with each passing ATH so I don't see why you'd give upon that.

Fair game to any merchant who adjusts business models to current conditions, that's the beauty of decentralisation isn't it?

Sums up my thoughts over the last weeks, increasingly so over the past days. Bitcoin's price simply can't be stopped at the moment, and I'm beginning to doubt even the opening of futures markets will do much to dent it. Traders who've been waiting impatiently to short Bitcoin since $10k will be breathing a quiet sigh of relief in the face of BTC raging past $15k now.

The good news in all of this is, if indeed we see $20k before end of the year, whatever bubble is going to burst, whatever major correction will happen, whatever crash is coming, it'll have an extremely healthy cushion to fall on. Biting my lips, but none of this will change my mind about holding on to all of my keep coins.

So many people betting on an immense tumble. More cheap Bitcoin for me if that happens, then!

Chill, OP. You sound a lot like the people you're trying to describe here, and seem to have lost the point about what Bitcoin is... and what else it can be, depending on who uses it. Bitcoin isn't about "we should make Bitcoin this" or "Bitcoin shouldn't be that"... if you wanted a crypto which wanted those aims, you're welcome to go to one of the alts where centralised decision making is common.

By the way, you're contradiction yourself.

1. "Sell and exchange is the same thing"
2. Let's not go back to fiat... but you want a Bitcoin state?

I don't know about astonishing everyone anymore. Anyone still surprised by Bitcoin's non-stop runs must be seriously doing their best to ignore its volatility since crossing 10k. Was just saying yesterday that there's still more than 3 weeks left to the year, and there will be a lot of people who psychologically want to buy in before 2017 is over.

Then there are all those futures contracts coming up next week. Experts are predicting bearish trends after that, and I'm only guessing that some part of this sky-high price is in anticipation of futures. Was expecting myself for that to trigger the long-awaited heavy correction but I suppose with today's reaching towards $15k, even a 50% drop still leave Bitcoin well above $7k.

Oh it would have been a wonderful night for whomever parlayed the underdogs Besiktas, Feyenoord and Shakhtar last night. Doubt many punters would have bet more than 3.5 goals on the Liverpool game I'm really surprised only 8.5 for over 6.5 goals!

But what a night for the Fab Four, this was the game everyone was waiting for, for all three forwards on the pitch and fed by Coutinho. Once Lallana is back, we'll have the best firepower of any English team. Sturridge even almost got on the scoresheet but for his point blank miss. Bleeding Ronaldo still tops the CL top scorer wih 9 but Salah and Firminho on 6 could pip him and Neymar quite easily.

Maribor may have been expected but shipping 7 past a team with only 1 loss in 16 is a statement of intent. Liverpool to have an outside chance of winning CL?

Definition of expert: someone who has a great deal of knowledge or skill in a particular area.

So, by definition, you don't need to be skillful gambler to be an expert, nor do you need to have a lot of knowledge. And the proof of life is in this forum, lots of experts who claim to know how to win with incredible strategies they've spent years honing, or those who know a lot about the industry, having worked for years with this casino or that gambling house.

No need to back it up with actual profits, no need to back it up with whitepapers. Just launch your own service, sell your strat or create an ICO. Kinda like crypto, you know?

Totally with you here, tokeweed. Not knocking the Spanish league or style at all, quite enjoyable at times but as a spectator who also loves playing football, there's a lot of entertainment value with English football even when fused with continental styles depending on their manager. That rough and tumble, bursts of speed... I can recall when eras were defined by which leagues dominated Champions League - we've had the Italians dominate, then the Spanish, I think it's about time for an English showdown. The best thing right now is that if all 5 qualify, they still won't meet any English team at least until the quarterfinals.

I don't think there's ever been 5/8 teams from one league in the CL Quarters has there? Liverpool's game tonight is so mouthwatering, can't wait to see Mane and co splash blood at Anfield. Too bad they're not even 1.3 odds on ML, or I'd have put a nice fat bet down.

I made a recent calculation towards the end of November, roundabout the time Bitcoin was at $10k or thereabout: multiplying all the BTC I'd already sold as a trader by $10k and minus all the income I've made from selling BTC prior to that, I've "lost" over $20k. However, I couldn't have kept that BTC had I wanted to: I earn solely in crypto, and have managed to hold most of my alts, exchanging them for BTC or selling BTC to pay the bills and upkeep, family etc.

So that's completely out of the equation.

Also, I have purchased a fair number of goods and services but none of them could have been paid for with fiat, so I also have to exclude those (and they aren't regrets anyway!).

But the dumbest things I've done is gamble away Bitcoins. Now fiat-wise, I already know I've lost perhaps close to 1.5k since 2016, just a rough estimate as I stopped counting after losing 1k when BTC was below 1k, I more or less put a halt to gambling. But when I login to all my casino accounts and see the various losses... it's over 1 BTC. So yeah. That's foolishnes.

Blockchain wallet's dynamic fee calculations have been known to be wonky, takes a while for it to catch up and adjust to the network's current situation. One should always check the network and calculate your own fees from there.


Nothing is broken. Fees adjust according to demand and network congestion. Simply leave it alone long enough for a miner to pick up, or for it to drop off the mempool. Bitcoin transactions are not reversible and do not bounce back. Rely on estimators like bitcoinfees.earn.com so you can set your own manually.


You're confused. Cryptokitties is a smart contract based game on the Ethereum blockchain, not Bitcoin. It has been causing some congestion there because each player interaction results in a transaction.

How you explain it to people depends not so much on their age but on their understanding of how finance and money works. I tend not to explain so much the underlying technology of Bitcoin's blockchain as a ledger (though that easily comes in later as a result of natural inquisitiveness). I find that, for young and old, start with some of the points of the Satoshi whitepaper: peer-to-peer and trustless.

Without even needing to mention the word decentralization, I simply say Bitcoin is the first time you can send anyone anywhere in the world money, in the exact amount you want, directly, the way you want, while knowing for sure that the person will receive it without ever having to rely on a bank or a third party to get your money there.

The questions will come naturally: but isn't this how money already works? From here, you explain the differences.

No one predicted this. The 10k mark was supposed to be incredibly difficult to break past and maintain... Bitcoin's just gone on like it forgot to wait for us. Just under four weeks left to the end of the year, maybe now 15k even is nothing to break sweat, particularly when it would only be a 20% increase from today's price. What a predicament it seems to me, though, every ATH, every failure to reach stable ground, makes me feel fearful of what's to come. My hands are strong, but my heart isn't!


Are you kidding? Selling volume has never been higher. Proper traders are using P2P platforms where the fees and tx times aren't really a big difference. Majority traders are on centralized exchanges, where the liquidity happens there, off chain. And even at above 100k mempool txs, I never face issues. What kind of trader are you?

Thanks for the research and yes, please do share the findings here. I always fill out these forms whenever I come across them, but very few of them, if at all, ever return to share their learnings... I imagine even if most of them will be tucked away in some obscure academic files somewhere, at the very least posterity will find them a point of curiosity many years down the line.

My first reason: curiosity. I actually stayed away for many years, thanks to a bad experience with digital currencies (e-gold, specifically) but as I ran out of other options re career, I decided to learn/earn on the side, and it's become something of a major part of my life now.

P.S. For next time, put out your clear objectives and then arrange your questions under them, helps you structure your paper, and helps us give you more pertinent information.

Well, what a night. Not exactly the fighting displays I would expect from some teams on their last chance to make it at the largest club stage, but still a few surprises along the way. What's strange for me is that we've got Chelsea and Juventus now in second place, so we may yet see group winners be forced to face a strong team anyway, but that's not uncommon in the last 16. A great outcome for me would now be for Liverpool to win their group and there's a great chance to meet Juventus, but I wouldn't mind them facing down Real Madrid either. It's been far too long since they met those giants.

P.S. I learnt something new through Chelsea's 2nd place. That goal difference isn't all =)