right. so you're telling me that a wave 2 which took two years time and a wave 4 which took 1 weeks time are proportional? they occur at the same degree? that's a bit hard to believe.

and the rule of alternation is not a hard rule. it's a guideline. it's no reason to force counts.


that is not proper negative divergence. you're ignoring the middle peak. i used to try to paint bear divergences like that years ago, and i recall being punished for it a lot.

buy the rumor, sell the news.


i'm guessing that LN will be a vibrant network in 2+ years, but i think it'll be a slow process with growing pains. bottom line, i can wrap my head around technical analysis. fundamentals are a lot murkier and difficult to quantify in terms of price.

in a bear market, all it takes is some bad news to trigger selloffs. it doesn't matter what the news is.

logically, the collapse of mt gox in february 2014 didn't fundamentally affect BTC---if anything, it removed BTC from the spot market that was still held in their custody. but since the market was very bearish and price was getting hammered down at every resistance, it was a natural trigger for another selloff.

if tether collapses, it'll be interesting to know whether it happens in a bull or bear market. in a bull market, it could look more like the silk road or btc-e busts---just a blip in a bull run.

xxxx123abcxxxx, why do all your counts have such long wave 2 vs. extremely short wave 4 (in terms of time)? this is not against hard rules, but it's very uncommon and the proportions don't look quite right. impulses should roughly fit within trend channels---impossible on your charts.


if anything, as a bull, you want to see more overenthusiastic bears and permabears. the more bearish the sentiment, the more shorts there are to squeeze.

i'd say the bitfinex situation is multi-faceted and we haven't heard the end of it. in time, i think the collapse of bitfinex is inevitable, but timing it would be impossible.

the US government is obviously watching them closely. the subpoenas are enough to establish that. the fact that tether severed relations with friedman rather than proceeding with the audit is telling---it doesn't mean they are insolvent, but it suggests they won't risk giving account access to auditors who then might be subpoenaed by regulators. i believe that's what this is all about.

bitfinex has done a very good job keeping their money hidden, and that's the main reason regulators would bide their time. the feds made a massive blunder last year when they took down btc-e but couldn't recover any funds.

another situation which has not been resolved is the €400M seizure from a tiny polish bank tied to bitfinex. the thing about tether is this: it only takes a couple of these seizures to make bitfinex insolvent. don't get overconfident that it can't happen. you should definitely limit the funds you keep on bitfinex or in USDT.

i think you'd be hard-pressed to find a single person whose long term predictions come close to masterluc's over the past several years.

and you shouldn't be betting your kid's college fund on anyone's calls. that's crazy. a 50% win rate for a trader (assuming proper risk management) is great. that's how you should approach this.

i wouldn't risk more than my lunch money on someone else's analysis. charts and predictions from other people should be nothing more than ideas---they shouldn't constitute your trading plan. they should be used to challenge your own biases more than anything else.

they didn't compensate 80%. they gave back ~55% (slightly more if you stayed) and then allowed you to sell your debt cheap on the market to facilitate their repayment of others. no matter what, they can never compensate 100%.

and US residents were forced to leave. if they were forced to verify, they lost 100%. some people had their accounts suspended when wex launched and those people lost 100%.

also, btc-e was notorious for locking "inactive" accounts and then enforcing verification that was impossible to satisfy. eventually they would just stop responding to tickets and steal your money. i believe this is why they are red tagged on this forum. wex has apparently carried on this tradition, refusing to verify old accounts.

i don't think it's about technology per se, although that probably has some indirect effect. for example, gold has very limited applied uses, but it has a huge network effect.

you're right that current pricing is largely tied to speculation. if we're being specific, and talking about actual value vs. speculation, i'd say it's more about adoption than anything else. meaning, the primary driver of value is network size.

this is true for two reasons. the first is metcalfe's law, which ties in with your utility argument. the bigger the network, the more useful it is, which incentivizes further network growth. the "first mover advantage" ties in with this. the second reason is that we are talking in the context of a limited supply. that means that as the network grows (i.e. adoption is increasing), demand is increasing vs. a limited supply. that necessarily means a higher price.

no, that's inaccurate. intermediaries on LN are not creating new transactions. they are not issuing "notes" or "checks" or anything like that. they are only routing transactions, like bitcoin nodes. the only difference is they are routing transactions via their established channels rather than propagating them to any and all connected nodes.


as pointed out, there are no "bank notes" in LN. there is no trust involved.

miners charge fees on the bitcoin network too. so what? the only "penalties" are if you're dishonest and try to broadcast a stale channel state to the blockchain. if someone can prove that you just tried to steal their coins, yes you can be penalized.

no one can seize control over the collateral unless:

• your private keys get compromised (same as bitcoin)
• you don't monitor channel states and thus permit others to steal your coins
• you broadcast a stale channel state attempting to steal others coins

how will LN intermediaries know which transactions to censor? and you know bitcoin miners can censor transactions too, right?


no. all LN collateral is cryptographically secured. a channel participant can close the channel and broadcast the last state to the blockchain. as long as bitcoin miners will confirm the resulting transaction, the funds will be released. if you are saying bitcoin miners won't confirm the transaction, your gripe is with bitcoin, not LN.

yeah i get that. i'm just wondering if the fee incentive to run LN nodes is substantial enough to encourage a widely distributed network (as opposed to hub-and-spoke).

this question is sort of analogous to that of base layer node centralization. except i've always felt that trustlessly validating payments was incentive enough to run a bitcoin full node.

here, the question is more about whether people will bother becoming highly interconnected vs. just opening a channel with major nodes like exchanges or bitpay.



that seems doubtful. routing transactions doesn't equate to being a party to them. LN pre-images are just bitcoin transactions that aren't published to the blockchain. you realize that bitcoin nodes propagate many thousands of transactions across the network every day, right? if bitcoin nodes aren't financial institutions, how are LN nodes?

what's the incentive? how much can you expect to make in fees? i guess it matters how well-connected your node is. you have to weigh that incentive against the risk of keeping your private keys online too.


indeed. i do like the idea of private, off-chain transactions. that's definitely one of the appeals of LN for me.

that's not necessarily true. if a hub-and-spoke topology emerges, it doesn't follow that LN nodes will magically become distributed if hubs act dishonestly. avoiding those hubs might just make some LN payments more difficult or impossible to route. if bidirectional connectivity across the network is lacking, you can't just "route around" connected hubs. that can mean your payment not getting routed at all.

it's not a huge issue because there is no trust involved---no funds are at risk from counterparties. but i wouldn't overstate how connected nodes on LN are.

lol @ your telegram channel. it only exists to recruit followers to dump on. palm beach confidential is a joke anyway.

how do you distinguish between institutional money and retail, on the charts? how do you know institutions aren't gearing up to sell into short term retail demand?


personally, i'm looking for much higher. $14k-$17k range would be a proper post-bubble trap. in the short term the daily 200 sma might provide some resistance. it's in the $10k area.

i think this is just old money sloshing around. old dip buyers finally exhausted supply, but it's probably just an intermediate bounce that will be sold into.

the fractals i'm mainly watching for are mid-2013 and early 2014. both call for a 60-80% retrace before the downtrend continues.

but the difference between mid-2013 and 2014 is this: the second leg down in 2013 ended on a higher low. the parallel would be never dropping below $6000 again. i can't rule that out yet.....

without a backlog, it's still batshit crazy to accept 0-conf. people have double spent against both bitpay and coinbase; peter todd did it publicly once. if you close out the invoice before confirmation, there's nothing stopping the consumer from pushing a higher-fee transaction using the same inputs.

the "tx backlog" really seems like a red herring. 0-conf has an inherently weaker trust model. satoshi acknowledged this:

accepting 0-conf transactions doesn't mean trusting "Wu, Ver and Wright".....it means trusting the payor not to steal back his money from you.

fair enough---at least you understand the possibilities. it seemed like you kept re-shorting and stopping out based on your one preferred count. when that happens to me, it usually means "time to step back and re-assess."

do you have any bull counts, where the december-march move is all/part of an intermediate correction?

EW aside, those last three weekly candles wicking into the $6000s would trouble me as a bear. that was a major rejection drawn out over three weeks. a large bounce was warranted. the question is still, at which degree? try counting the december-march move as a complete WXYXZ and it sure looks like we should expect a sizeable bull correction! at these proportions, it could last months too!

these retrace targets seem....presumptuous. you should have multiple EW counts prepared for multiple outcomes, but it seems like you simply assume that the move from march 4th must be part of a primary (bearish) wave A. and then from that assumption, you derive your retrace targets.

i hate to say, but this is how people misuse EW. they get married to one count and then keep trying to redraw it, rather than being open to multiple counts and admitting when they are wrong.

the entire december-april move may be a primary wave. certainly looks like it could be a complete WXY. in that case, you're gonna get bitten for being so perma bearish. your highest retrace target is under $10k! if this follows 2014, then a correction all the way to the $16000s is possible, even if you're eventual targets turn out correct.

what you're talking about is moderation, which is objective. admins establish rules and moderators enforce them. i support hiring more moderators (seems like a no-brainer) and additional forum rules that discourage spam. these things are objective---we (the regular plebs) can observe that.

but merit is unmoderated. it's subjective. there's certainly no requirement that thoughtful or high-quality posts receive merit. there's certainly nothing preventing people from passing merit among friends or those they agree with rather than awarding quality. * so, solely using merit to decide forum privileges means trading objective standards for unchecked power. that's the distinction.

* wild speculation: i'd guess from observation that merit distribution follows the pareto principle, with post quality being the underlying motive the vast minority of the time.

will it clean the forum up? and if so, at what cost? those are some questions i raised.

if i expected to pay more than ~0.002 BTC across the life of my account (something like copper membership), it's probably too much. more importantly, i don't want the inconvenience of paying per post. for someone like me, the idea of requiring an LN node just to post on a forum is absurd. just, over-complicated.


you're viewing things in a vacuum. i've been here for like five years; i know the forum has gone downhill. i just see no valid solution for how to fairly determine rank (if we're going to retain any signature/rank system). merit seems like a shitty/centralized extension of the shitty/centralized default trust system. you give all the power to a centralized few and then people pass around merit within social groups. the more emphasis you put on these centralized, authority-driven mechanisms to determine privileges, the more you can expect conflicts of interest and abuse. that's discouraging to genuine forum members and i think the extent to which that's true escapes people---particularly those people that benefit from the merit system.

what's the metric for ranking---same as now, but only accounting for merit? wouldn't that make you a full member with your 141 earned merit?

in theory, i agree with what you're saying. in practice, it seems problematic, subjective, if we're basing it on the merit system alone. especially because doing so would erase all past activity prior to this year. there definitely are/were ways to game the merit system (particularly by exploiting social dynamics), and it seems kinda bullshit to ignore any and all contributions over many years in favor of some centralized gatekeeping system that began in late january.

like i said earlier, if you don't completely fuck me on a one-time fee where i can pay and have my account debited per post (at low cost), maybe it could work. i shouldn't have to bother with lightning at a low enough cost. but you're definitely flirting with the idea of encouraging a lot (perhaps most) genuine posters leaving the forum. turning a free forum into a paid/closed model would be a dealbreaker for a lot of people---for good reason even if we ignore the spammers.


yeah, the whole posting quota thing is over the top. it's like an implicit agreement between campaign managers and advertisers to mutually profit at the expense of the forum: unpaid overages and unpaid under-quota = free advertising. it's one thing to pay people for shit they're already doing---it seems like quite another to turn it into a job with a contracted quota.