Full decentralisation is difficult without atomic swaps to perform the actual trade. And that limits any platform to trading pairs for which atomic swaps can be programmed. As much as I like the concept, having to rely on arbitrators to fall back on is in some ways less desirable that the centralised model. Perhaps this is a good thing though; in a future dominated by p2p trading platforms, if a development team wants their cryptocurrency to be taken seriously, atomic swaps with the major coins they compete against must be easy to implement or else the market may be too thin (and if stable coins can do their job well enough, maybe the same will begin to be said about the currency that a well performing stable coin is pegged to )

Ideally, a fully decentralised trading platform could be more liquid than the centralised exchanges, as the traders can be completely certain that their trading funds will be end-to-end 100% safe if there is no third party custody of coins to be concerned with. We're a long way from that now, atomic swaps are used as a descriptive jargon to advertise DeX website platforms, but it's probably just marketing (not tried it out myself). But I like that idea: a p2p software trading platform with real p2p atomic swaps to trade (plus stable coins that don't need redemption guarantees and controlled supply to maintain the peg). We're a little ways from that right now though, there are few coins that can be swapped atomically AFAIA, and no p2p trading platform uses atomic swaps either (AFAIA).

You can compare the price of 1 grain of rice with the weight of gold in fort knox if you want, no-one's going to stop you


I've been using the term "monetary base" for a while now, and that's because that's what it is. I have no idea why the "capitalisation" expression ever became popular



It can't possibly be a conspiracy if there's is only one person doing it, or if there is no evidence. You are in the market for one thing: a dictionary

This is a pretty big story, and I almost missed it!

There's always been a slight tendency for businesses in touristic locales to accept Bitcoin, but it's surprised me that the travel industry haven't been completely leading the way. I guess they're as skeptical and/or conservative as any other industry. This is especially interesting though; international airports are not very politically neutral businesses, the government has alot of control over what happens on airport premises. Either Bitcoin is not so controversial to the Dutch political class (which is possible considering the Dutch have a very liberal cultural tradition, not least in innovative financial concepts), or the controversy doesn't bother them. Probably a little of both.

Does anyone still believe the claims that major market moves corresponded to direct trading of Tether on the Omni meta-chain? I didn't before, and I certainly don't now. How can there possibly be enough liquidity in the market for Tether/BTC when Bitfinex must control a majority of the Tether in the Tether/USD market to avoid big traders using Tether to bankrupt them?

Another issue with this research is: Omni uses Bitcoin's blockchain, and during the timeframe this was supposedly happening, Bitcoin transactions were the most expensive they've ever been. Is it in any way realistic that traders were doing enough Tether/BTC trade to move the entire BTC market, paying the high fees needed to settle the trade ASAP, and making a profit? It's far more likely traders would use off-chain settlement on exchanges, the argument is that people were afraid of losing out on Tether's failing peg, and overbought the entire BTC market to get out of Tether. Really? I think not.

Thanks BitCryptex (and stick of course)

I might put together a guide thread: Using TREZOR 1 on Qubes 4.0 if there's any interest. It's certainly taken a little configuring so that it works smoothly (Trezor Bridge service needs a little modifying to get it working, for example).

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@mods: shouldn't there be a "Trezor" sub board in Alternative Clients? Or maybe just change the names so that it makes more sense, i.e. replace "Alternative Clients" with "BTC Wallets/Clients", then have separate subs for Bitcoin Core, Armory, Electrum, Trezor etc?

Any updates then BitCryptex?

I was unsure whether I needed to use the BIP 49 or BIP 84 derivation path, or alternatively that some other argument needs to be supplied like when the address itself is queried (the python-trezor documentation seemed to imply that extra arguments can't be supplied to the trezorctl signing command).

• 1st bottleneck is internet connection speed
• 2nd bottleneck is CPU speed
• 3rd bottleneck is hard disk speed

Improve your setup in that order, or all 3 simultaneously. Improvements to Bitcoin Core can also increase blockchain sync performance with any hardware. RAM is not so much of a bottleneck; even basic computers have 1GB+ RAM these days which is good enough (if you look at Settings -> Options menu in Bitcoin Core, you can improve the syncing performance a little if you increase database cache size to 1GB from the default value)

That's the best summary I can provide you.

So, what you're saying is that Bitfinex will happily buy USDT from all their customers at 1:1 with USD, despite traders buying it a couple of seconds before from other traders on Bitfinex at $0.50? Are you sure? Because that's a pretty easy way to suck every $ out of Bitfinex, and leave them bankrupt with 50% of their USD obligations to customers still outstanding

Bitcoin 0.17.0 will speed up a little if you have fast (>10 Mbit/s) internet, fast/modern CPU & SSD disk

• Changes to the way leveldb handles blockchain I/O will speed things up 5-10%
• Validation will improve <5% for a range of CPUs with SSE4 and AVX2 instructions (maybe including ARM)

Most of the big gains have already been leveraged, but the developers often bounce new ideas around on the bitcoin dev mailing list.

Well, the miners are amoral, they will do whatever makes most sense to their pockets.



Changing the hashing algorithm is probably not enough, PoW needs to be redesigned to refine the incentives. The proposed BetterHash BIP (or recent threads in Development & Technical about proposed PoW redesign) demonstrates the need is widely agreed upon. And it's important to the value of BTC that PoW is redesigned as a planned, staged, long term change to improve decentralisation of the mining network. The changes needed could be too disruptive if they are enacted on a "last resort" timeframe, there needs to be alot of discussion, planning and most of all, notice given to make it as smooth as possible.

None of that trade is visible on the Omni layer therefore. Bitfinex are balancing supply and demand for Tether somewhere publcily, otherwise the peg wouldn't be reliable. The report cites blockchain based trade information to back it's hypothesis, and what you're saying is that an even smaller amount of Tether trade is happening publicly than exists overall. Relatively small amounts of surrogate USD still can't move the market significantly in comparison to real USD on exchanges that aren't (or weren't) questionably solvent.

Right, but you're talking about using BTC or USD to move the market, not Tether.

If you dump 10 million Tether (or pump with 10 million USDT instead), can you expect the market to respond as if USD equivalent was used? Tether has to balance it's own value when such events take place; Bitfinex reacts to large amounts of Tether trade by adding or removing USDT bids or asks from it's own orderbook.

Tether is designed to be a peg, and pegs don't lead, they follow. Otherwise, what is compelling actual USD to fall or rise against BTC when Tether does? Tether cannot behave independently of how USD behaves, as it ceases to behave like a peg.

Shit, you're right about that :O I'd always thought Tether was Bitfinex's in house pet (which is sort of true as Bitfinex do manage the supply of Tether themselves)


Still don't find this convincing. Are the authors trying to tell us that the majority of last years market rise can be attributed to people selling falling Tether positions for BTC? To get that information confirming this story, the traders causing the move to $20,000 would all need to have been trading using Omni's platform. And not all Tether is even traded on the Omni platform (therefore Tether's exchange data is not all in the blockchain).

Plus, Tether even now only has a $2 billion monetary base, and that's after a big rise recently. Bitcoin is a ~ 100 billion dollar market. It's completely implausible that Tether was the reason for last years ATH.

Oh no, I do a pretty similar thing to you (the difference being I don't sell at all when the market is in a downturn). Your strategy sounds like it works though, I'd not considered doing things that way. I was making a sarcastic comment about the repeated claims that "Bitcoin doesn't work because no-one sells because the price is always higher", despite the wealth of evidence to the contrary (and was using your comment as an example)

You're doing it wrong apparently, you're not allowed to liquidate assets whose value increases significantly, because that defies simplistic observations about human behaviour in markets. Which doesn't explain why you, me and other people choose to sell highly valued assets when the market seems frothy. Pesky human nature!



There's only one prediction that can be at all relied on: the effect of the block reward halving. People have tended to front-run 6-12 months before the halving (which causes a sizable bull run), then another larger/longer bull run seems to develop 3-6 months after the halving in response to the decreased new supply entering the market (followed by the market topping out). This pattern makes sense, but what the magnitude will be of this effect in future is hard to say. Another 2 years of mismanagement in the so-called capitalist financial system could be all we need to deliver another round of explosive price growth, but we can only wait and see.

Perhaps you haven't noticed, but not everyone lives in England. There are far more valid use cases for Bitcoin besides drinking pints of ale in pubs or ordering cups of tea, and it is only because of those usage types for which Bitcoin is the only option that Bitcoin has any value at all. Pretending other people and their needs don't exist is a great way to make really bad investments (or accidental good investments in something you don't understand)

ZERO evidence for any of this. Just a bunch of people talking, it could all be completely fabricated from whole cloth.



WHAT BLOCKCHAIN? If any of these people (including those commenting in this thread) had done even the most basic research, they would know that it's impossible to use Tether without using a webwallet of some kind. No evidence exists that these people have any data at all to analyse, they're just writing words in a PDF with zero citations or proof of any sort.



Anyone bolstering unverifiable claims should be treated as suspect, especially a firm like Chainalysis whose mission statement is to erode Bitcoin privacy in any way they can.



The apparent standard for believable claims is "someone said it". Why are there a dozen posts speculating about this story when the (absence of) facts are so easily discovered?

So if Segwit is a different fork of Bitcoin, why are the pre-segwit nodes still following the original chain

Which Bitcoin fork used this "transition" feature you speak of? None

This statement is self contradictory. If old nodes without segwit are incompatible, why are old nodes without segwit still following the Bitcoin blockchain? How are they doing it?

ANYONECANSPEND has existed in Bitcoin since before Segwit was introduced, and I think using it as a way to upgrade signing rules was always at least one of the intentions for ANYONECANSPEND's existence. Old nodes understand ANYONECANSPEND, precisely to maintain compatibility with changes in how transactions are signed. Get a job