No, hash rate changes every 2 weeks, but meanwhile mining capacity is being added or removed from the network.  So we got (IIRC) blocks every 7 minutes on average or (for example) about 4200 coins per day during the big mining rise.  Over the last 9 months the market has gotten used to these extra coins.  If we drop to steady hashing, 600 coins per day will have a cumulative effect.  Sure this is a LOT less then volume but remember the same coin is traded many times.  If the hash rate actually drops then for 2 weeks fewer than 3600 coins will be mined.

I need some Bitcoin bling.  I need a tee that says "Ask me about BTC" or "I'll sell you some BTC".  I don't want some politically edgy slogan, and I don't want to pay $25 + shipping for a $5 shirt.  Same for keychain or pin.  What did you buy?

I am so confused in this world of race-to-the-QE-bottom, and where US, EU, China, Russia pairs have serious trust issues why these IMF economists don't realize that Bitcoin the currency is the only solution.  Even a currency backed by gold fails because gold must sit in a vault in some country and could be filled with tungsten rods as soon as the inspector is gone.  In fact, its so obvious that I think these guys are actually using blockchain-as-a-technology as a way to assess sentiment.  There is either going to be NO global currency, or its going to be bitcoin...

I have suggested watching the hash rate to find the bottom.  Why?  Well, if miners start taking machines offline, it affects supply by reducing the coins mined to the normal 3600 daily or less.  But more importantly, it indicates the lowest price that miners must sell at to make a profit (of course every miner will have a slightly different level).  Any lower and miners must hold and hope for a price increase.  To sell would guarantee that they couldn't pay the monthly bills.  That behavior could dramatically affect supply.

It looks like we are at the point:

https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate
https://blockchain.info/charts/difficulty

LOL @ esperanto.  there are SOME small differences... like being able to accept Bitcoin using your phone in about 5 min.  Compare that to learning esperanto (2+ years), or even accepting a credit card (a week+ for the signup & to receive the reader, etc).

can we get excited about this wall?  Or do we have to naysay it like we do all the ask walls?

"It must be a seller trying to push the price up"

EDIT: I've got to say if I was one of the 12k shorts on BFX that wall would be giving me the fear :-)

Not necessarily... if the glass is empty and you fill it there is no problem.  If the glass is full and you pour in a half-glass of water... problem.

You haven't presented any "evidence".  Evidence would be something concrete linking Pantera to the action, like a screen capture of a bank transfer, or a bitcoin transfer from a known Pantera address to a known BitStamp address.

But you've certainly presented motive and opportunity.  You've shown us that a path exists, that Pantera is a likely candidate, but not that Pantera actually walked down it.  That's enough for me because I'm not interested in whether Pantera itself was able to do this, just that someone is able to do it. 

The fact that people will manipulate financial markets for fun and profit is evident by the last 100 years of history.  People are in jail for doing so in regulated markets.

ditto that!  Can someone translate this finance speak into english?

The meeting will focus on issues related to clearing Non-Deliverable Forwards (NDFs) and the digital currency bitcoin. The meeting will consist of two panels. The first panel will discuss whether a clearing mandate   is appropriate for NDFs, with a particular focus on how such a mandate would impact foreign exchange contracts  . The second panel will discuss CFTC’s jurisdiction with respect to derivatives contracts that reference the digital currency bitcoin.

I literally WAS taking a walk in the woods for the last few days, and so missed out on this buying opportunity.  Not that that matters much.  

But you need to consider the difference between true tin-foil hatters, who actually believe unsubstantiated theories, and cypherdoc's posting which is not so interesting because it MIGHT be true, but is interesting because it COULD be true.  In other words, he has identified how a trader could get an edge in the current btc ecosystem.

Also, one thing that he didn't mention: it is unlikely that a major investor in an exchange would actually need to transfer the money before using it.  The investor would just call up the exchange and say credit my account $10M, the $ is coming.  Its up to the exchange's discretion to essentially offer a swing loan to anybody it wants.  And this is basically a no-brainer in the case of an investor since the loan can be presumably backed by the round of funding from the investor that is sitting in the exchange's bank account.

Don't look at this too much as a debt conspiracy.  The truth is that withdrawing cash is pretty much irreversible just like bitcoin.  So it suffers from the same "impedence mismatch" as CC to BTC conversions (for example).  Here's a scam I heard about from a banker when opening a checking account:  The perp digs thru trash for a bank statement.  Then gets a good fake drivers' license made up.  Showed up in person and used it to change all the account details, PIN, etc.  Go to ATMs, etc and withdraw maximum daily cash for weeks until the account owner notices.  Rinse and repeat.  This happened in NYC so there was essentially an infinite # of ATMs to withdraw from.  The only downside is of course his face on all the banks and ATM cameras...

I like your theory, especially because it explains the trust required to have fiat on BitStamp.  

Let me add to it by suggesting that a blockchain analysis (which I didn't do) might prove that large miners exist who were holding coins.  These miners might be holding hoping for a price reversal, but they would have a must sell price to ensure continuity of the business (better to sell at 5% profit and keep mining then at 5% loss and have to turn off the electricity).  It would not be too hard to guess that approximate price.  

Therefore the Manipulator^(TM) could do better then just hope for a weak hand.  He KNEW weak hands were out there, their approximate holdings, and what their approximate sell price would be.  

Some confirmation of this miner-seller theory:  The BTC price is approaching the marginal cost to mine (the trigger point for miner sales) if the hash rate levels off or drops... its too early to tell, but it definitely looks like there might be a hiccup happening: https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate

Yes.  A semi-reliable time allows a bunch of entities to collectively decide that another entity is "dead".  This makes non-Byzantine distributed consensus easy (by non-Byzantine, I mean it handles "normal" failures -- node death, network split -- but not pathological cases where a node is deliberately trying to break the election).  This is all that is needed for distributed consensus in most tightly coupled distributed systems.

EDIT: I want to say one more thing about this which is about physics. 

The BGP and Bitcoin's solution problem is fascinating because there are parallels with quantum mechanics which is also incapable of making a decision.  Particles are modeled as probability fields until that is collapsed by observation.  Block/txn validity is probabilistic and collapsed by work (building on the chain).   

But another way to think of that collapse is simply that you have been incorporated into a specific case in the probability field but an outside observer is now unaware of your state (schrodinger's cat).  From the outside observer's case, the probability field still exists; you are just now part of it.

So the universe only has state because it observes itself.  Bitcoin is the same... it only has state (validated txns) in the eyes of observers within the system.

Allright I took fischer's provability class so I'll give it a go:

First of all whether BGP is solvable or not depends on the "powers" given to the honest vs. lying generals.  Can the honest generals "broadcast" a message to everyone else?  Can lying generals "intercept" and rewrite messages?  Do you have a mostly-synchronized clock, or even a local sense of time?  So papers basically define these "powers" and then prove a yes or no result based on them.

Let me try to couch why BGP is sometimes unsolvable in what you are familiar with: bitcoin.  Let's just say we choose one node to grab all txns and add them to the blockchain.  That node can't steal $ because it can't sign the txns.  But it could insist that there are no txns, or disappear.  If it insists there are no txns (but there are) then no progress is made (algorithm is halted).  If it disappears, can you just choose another?  No because you can't prove that it is really gone vs just slow.  That is, it could seem to disappear causing the rest of the network to pick another "issuer".  Then both nodes post a block at the exact same moment resulting in half the nodes using block A and the other half B [1].  Could you then get the network to "settle" on one of the 2 blocks?  Well, doing so is equivalent to solving the original problem (picking a block in the first place), so the above strategy made zero progress solving this problem.  

But note that if you had some relatively consistent sense of elapsed time (an additional "power"), say all nodes have time accuracy within an interval E (say 5 min), you could do something like:  the announcer has until time X to announce a block, at time X+E, we choose another announcer [2].  Ok that works but it requires a synchronized clock.  No clock is ever synchronized perfectly.  So in practice it solves 99.99% of the problem, but what happens if the announcer issues the block exactly at time X+E.  So half of the nodes will think that it is valid, the other half will reject.  So now we have to decide whether to accept the proposed block or not.  Doing so is equivalent to the original problem.  We have made no progress.

How about you use a "fitness function" to choose the best block?  Perhaps use the longest block (most txns in it).  This doesn't work because at any time someone could add a few more txns to a very old block and reissue it, wiping out the blockchain up to that point.  That is, an uncooperative node could cause the algorithm to never make progress.  Ok so let's say once the block is issued it can't be "unissued".  But what if 2 nodes "issue" conflicting blocks simultaneously.  We have to pick one.  Oops, we are back to square one!  (and what does "issued" mean anyway -- in fact it is not definable in a p2p network).

Bitcoin itself does not even solve the problem.  At any time, someone could show up with an alternate blockchain that is full of empty blocks since 2009 (say he's secretly been racing with the public chain) and all clients would switch to that chain where no transactions have happened.  So in fact from a theoretical perspective the algorithm can be proved to never make progress.  However, from a practical perspective this is unlikely to happen, and if it did, I as a community we could throw in some kind of hard coded change (essentially a centralized decision hard-coded in a new client) that forces "our" chain to be chosen.  

So what's cool about Bitcoin is if it breaks down it can essentially "devolve" into (worst case) a centralized scheme.  No worse then we had before Bitcoin (and actually a whole lot better in other metrics).


[1] http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/arvind/cs425/doc/fischer.pdf
[2] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/reaching.pdf

Obviously means in some abstract sense not physical extent.  But of course, his statement is meaningless without the additional details.  An example could be "I believe that Bitcoin is larger in the sense that it will transfer more value than the internet does today (without bitcoin),"  or "I believe the market caps of "bitcoin companies" will ultimately exceed that of "internet companies"".

For example, "Internet" companies have exceeded the market cap of "telecom companies", and most people would characterize the internet industry as "larger", yet the internet runs on telecom provided physical cables.
 
Anyway, you get the idea...

What did we call it back in 2012?  "...collecting nickels in front of the steamroller."

Saving money may be bad for the economy if everyone does it, but I think that is an open question long term.  After all if you need something you'd buy it so what saving does is increase efficiency -- you don't waste money on unnecessary stuff (short term, yea, people who work in luxury industries have hardship).  

But regardless of the effect on the larger economy, it is a very good thing for the saver.  So please recognize the bias in your term "hoarding" and how you are inculcated to imagine that saving is somehow "bad" to save the economy at your own expense.

Saving BTC can only be good for BTC in the long run.  Utility gives BTC its marginal value (very small), but saving (scarcity) is what gives BTC significant value.  And there is a positive feedback between savers and merchant adoption.  Merchants start taking BTC because they see more people holding it, more people holding it cause more merchants to accept it.

There's no collusion here.  I'm not "advocating" any kind of "hold the line" fairytale.  People ARE saving coins as part of a diversified savings plan which includes real estate, stocks, etc, due to the unique abilities of BTC to carry value during economic uncertainty and the fact that its an uncorrelated asset.  

Miners and speculators ARE trying to get the best price possible so are holding back in the hopes the price will rise...

But to see this going on 9 months after the "bubble" pop, to see larger and larger merchants and payment processors adopting the coin speaks to BTC's ultimate utility.  

Why did Paypal choose to accept BTC for digital assets?  Because digital assets are not sent to a home address.  So its too easy to get away with fraud buying digital assets -- steal CC, buy Vorpal Sword +1000, give it to another character, sell it for cash.  Police can't knock on anyone's door looking for an 80" TV.  It got so bad that ebay stopped allowing sales of digital assets.  But Bitcoin is perfect for digital asset purchase...

k, that's all I've got for tonight, PM me if you want to keep arguing :-)

For all the bears who think that 2013 was an unrecoverable bubble, please identify another bubble where 9 months after the pop the underlying fundamentals are better than it was during the bubble.

Our situation is simply that a lot of miners and short/medium-term speculative investment have coins that need to be moved to strong hands.  There is simply a reservoir of coins (which is increasing by 3600 per day) that need to be moved before we can make significant moves upwards.  Bitcoin is so useful that someday this reservoir is gonna run dry.

Economics:  Where nobel prize winners introduce concepts obvious to your average 5 year old.

This sort of reasoning and the low rates right now is what makes me think that short lenders are not doing so for interest but to encourage price falling