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Personally i'm hedging at the moment because nobody knows for sure.
My current theory is that the recent price increase was people pricing in the reward cut that is happening in June. Therefore i don't expect a huge price rise this summer.
Long term i would still hold. Bitcoin adoptation is still growing, which should drive the price up a bit.
Short term i see a lot of sell pressure competing with some firm buy pressure from people still believing in a price increase. I can't tell which is stronger but the trend has been slightly downwards. If that breaks stop-losses we could see a short term dump. The current mempool problem (full blocks) could be the catalyst for a sell-off.
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And you think keeping the limit low is appropriate now because... Why?
The 'only' ~6500 full nodes. Of which i am one (or 3 actually). I wouldn't mind to double the size, i'd keep running the nodes. I feel a lot of others won't. I just don't see the urgency at this moment. Tell me why a high mempool forcing higher transaction costs is a bad thing. Unless processing time for transactions with normal fees will take too long there is no need and it takes away the need to pay the fees. |
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Never had to wait 3 days for a transaction... that's insane. If you are waiting 3 days for a transaction you are paying a shitty or just no fee, so that's you deserve if you want to go the super cheap way. If you want to be just cheap and not super cheap, pay the default fee and the transaction will be confirmed in a matter of minutes.
Indeed, damn you africa and other development countries that just started using bitcoin for the low fee transactions, being able to feed their families on a daily basis with their 4$ a day salary working in another developing country, creating stadiums that wealthy people can watch the top athletes shooting a ball around and passing it to each other. Damn you for being so cheap and not wanting to pay 44 usd cents of your 4$ income in fees like you did with western union. You cheap, silly bastards, go use another coin with network stability and trust and almost 0 cost fees if you wanna be so cheap. Or don't pay the high fees and wait a little longer...  |
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>As those rewards are built into the bitcoin eco-system
Those rewards are a part of the bitcoin protocol, not some *ecosystem. One fucking word, learn it if you must use it.
The block rewards are there *specifically* to allow miners *not* to rely on tx fees this early in the game.
You should also understand that the miners are free to reject any transaction right now -- nothing stopping them from rejecting junk transactions.
My sincere apologies. Bitcoin protocol it is. Block rewards are the incentive to mine at the moment, but we're not 'early in the game' anymore. Come June the reward will be cut in half for the second time. I understand miners can reject junk transactions. They can also be selective. They should be, and they are. So now transactions with low fees are waiting to be processed, if they are processed at all. My point was that this is a good thing and blowing up the blocksize to counter a high mempool size is not a good sollution in my opinion. |
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The miners bonus is a sweet poison because it generated mining bloat which with the current design no transaction fee can replace. (Transaction fees of 1 - 5 USD will make people flee.) The fees can only replace the miners bonus when the transaction capacity is increased by more then factor 10, better target for factor 100. From what I have read this is not easy and research should be done soon for this.
But ecological lower mining benefit would be better. At the moment mining costs about 300MW. I don't know why 100MW oder 20MW shouldn't be sufficient for this task. But this will only happen when the mining benefit drops.
It will be interesting to see what happens in june when the reward drops to 12.5 BTC per block. Mining difficulty seems to stay at a level where on average it pays for the power that is used. Difficulty increases only with more power-efficient mining gear. With that in mind and with no other sudden change in value or tx-fees (or powercost if you want to be thorough) we will see the difficulty drop. With less miners i worry about someone taking 50% of the network. That, combined with the worry of full nodes shutting down because of a 100% increase in bandwidth and storage they need makes me feel higher transaction fees are a good thing. |
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... Bitcoin needs to stay self-sustaining. ...
You do understand that it's not "self-sustaining" now, right? Transactions currently cost ~$7, and are paid by Bitcoin base money inflation (block rewards). As those rewards are built into the bitcoin eco-system they are an essential part of it. In my mind that still counts as self-sustaining. At some point the rewards will be zero and by that time fees are the only incentive for miners to mine. My point is that increasing the blocksize will only help process transactions with low fees (spam or otherwise), blowing up the blockchain and causing more people to stop running full nodes since there is almost nothing to gain from running a full node as it is. There will always be a bunch of these low fee transactions waiting to be processed. Eventually they will be discarded by the network. Not lost, only put back into the senders wallet. A large mempool isn't a bad thing, just an incentive to pay a higher fee. |
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I guess to keep mining profitable after june we would need to see the difficulty half (not likely), value double (really not likely) or fees increase to about 0.005 BTC per transaction on average. Or a little of all 3, and that's what we're beginning to see.
I don't think increasing the blocksize is the right approach. It would only blow up the blockchain. Bitcoin needs to stay self-sustaining. If you want your transaction processed fast, pay up. If you don't want to pay a higher tx-fee then you will need to wait.
Just my opinion ofcourse...
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I dont think that the police can help at all. They simply have no experience dealing with cryptocurrencies with the exception of a few people in the DEA and FBI.
Maybe not directly with cryptocurrency but if this is a result of a serverhack there is some real expertise nowadays. We need to consider those BTC lost but there is real experience with internet crime. |
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Bitstamp have been running a fractional reserve for years. This hack story is an obvious lie, copied from Karpeles. During the next weeks we'll learn about Stamp's insolvency. Then they'll declare bankruptcy, and all your precious coins and fiat will be lost.
And if the story was true: What's stopping the thieves from hacking them again, stealing even more?
I would love to see where you get that information from. Bitstamp has been relatively open about their reserves for exactly this reason, consumer confidence. And about the hacking again theory; if you own a boat that has a hole in it, you don't let it sink to the bottom, you plug the hole and move on. Finding and fixing the leak is exactly why they have suspended their systems. |
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Bitstamp was audited by Mike Hearn, a Bitcoin dev back in May 2014. He said that everything seemed OK and all the funds were fully backed in their cold storage wallets. This was just 8 months ago and I'd be surprised if the situation has changed since then.
From what i can read this only pertained to the BTC balance, not the USD balance. On the other hand i don't think Pantera would have invested $10 million without a proper audit. |
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Yes, I would not expect it to be instant. BitStamp would need to have a strategy to transition back to equilibrium but in the meantime they would have a fractional reserve thing going on.
So, what would be the best approach to return to equilibrium?
I don't think they are unbalanced at this stage even. So only when everyone starts to withdraw their BTC and fiat there might be a slight problem. I don't see this happening. If they reopen quickly and restore customer confidence trading will continue and may even get back to normal levels. Business as usual. |
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I will be open here and say that a few days before this hack happened I was tinkering with the idea of cashing out a hefty sum of my Bitcoins to speculate with and I would have sold at a good price but would be stuck with " fiat" stuck in bitstamp while they recover from said hack.
Glad I didn't follow through on this. Dodged a bullet there.
Small transfers over time are better risk management than sending one large chunk of BTC to cash out.
Thanks, thats exactly what i did do...  |
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I don't think Bitstamp is going to disappear overnight like Mt. Gox. They've got a lot to lose. The company has generally been respected within the bitcoin community. In May 2014 it passed a proof-of-bitcoin-reserves audit overseen by BitcoinJ developer Mike Hearn, and in June it beat other bitcoin companies to win the Europas' Best Virtual Currency Startup Award. A lesson learned from the whole Mt.Gox debacle is that they need to keep communicating. This doesn't seem to be a priority at the moment. I'm still wondering where that statement on coindesk came from. It isn't on their website or twitter. So how would customers know (apart from reading coindesk). Having said that I don't think they'll go bust because of this. I've been using them since long before Mt.Gox started to slide and they've proven to be a reputable exchange. |
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I can view a statement on their site. It just shows a maintenance page at present with a short statement about the compromised wallet. It's the original statement released, with less information in it than the one in the coindesk article. https://www.bitstamp.net/Right, i did notice that. That statement hasn't been changed since this morning. The statement on the coindesk article is (according to coindesk) an official statement from the CEO of Bitstamp. My original question was where coindesk got this statement from. It has no source but does contain new information which i cannot find anywhere else. My guess is Coindesk has spoken with him at CES but if so that, imo, should be added to the article. |
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The 19000 BTC isn't even half of the volume that was traded per day the last couple of days. It is a big hit but i suppose it is recoverable. I'm more worried about the wording in the statement where it states: We are working to transfer a secure backup of the Bitstamp site onto a new safe environment and will be bringing this online in the coming days. Customers can stay informed via updates on our website, on Twitter (@Bitstamp) and through Bitstamp customer support at support@bitstamp.net."
I don't think it should take days to copy and check their environment, why would it take this long? And updates haven't been provided since this morning on either Twitter or their website. No source for the last statement on Coindesk. I'm worried we won't hear anything for a few days now. And that reminds me of Gox... |
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No, that still has the old statement. The coindesk article contains a new one from Bitstamps CEO admitting the 19000 BTC are lost. Maybe through email , try to check because I'm not registered on bitstamp. Impossible to login on their homepage, you can check that yourself :-) |
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No, that still has the old statement. The coindesk article contains a new one from Bitstamps CEO admitting the 19000 BTC are lost. |
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