https://www.binance.com/en/trade/USDT_RUB?layout=pro

USDT/RUB is at 98.82 when the FX Spot is about 108.

Why?

Anyone got any ideas? What does it mean?

As is a nice arbitrage if you have a RUB bank account and can FX RUB->USD and transfer the USD back onto Binance.

Or are Binance restricting RUB withdrawals?

So can only mean there is a lot of crypto holders who want RUB in a bank account. Which seems odd to me... would expect there to be the opposite at the moment...

https://accounts.profunds.com/etfdata/ByFund/BITO-psdlyhld.xls

Interesting to see now that increases today...

Put your best guess below on total Asset Value of the new ETF at end of day 1 of trading!
https://www.proshares.com/funds/bito_related_materials.html

$65m is my guess!

[So WHY is the roll so expensive when you could do a risk free arbitrage I hear you ask!]

I ask this as everyone is very excited about a futures backed ETF. But due to the roll cost is not going to track BTC price - but is going to track its price less 12% (+fees) per year!

You can see this from CME quotes:
https://www.cmegroup.com/markets/cryptocurrencies/bitcoin/bitcoin.quotes.html#

Looking at right now:
Oct 21: 60285
Nov21: 61035

So if you are a futures back ETF what you do is you buy the nearby future - so in this case the Oct21. Then over a period of about a week at the end of the month you gradually sell your Oct21 futures and buy the Nov21 futures. But here you see the problem - you are selling low and buying high - you just lost $750 vs your benchmark of BTC price - over 1%. And you have to do this every month!

Obviously you could instead buy the Dec22 future so you do not have to roll for 14 months. But that has zero liquidity (open interest is 1!), and was $3510 more that the Oct 21 future at the last close - but due to lack of liquidity would have to pay a lot more for it if bought in volume. So this would probably be even worse.


So WHY is the roll so expensive when you could do a risk free arbitrage I hear you ask!

Problem is the arbitrage is very capital intensive. Take now arb would be:
Buy 5BTC @ 60k = $300k
Sell 1 Future @ $60,285 (you just made a $1,425 paper profit by the end of the month!).
But to buy the future you need to lodge $101,842 of margin at CME (initial might be 10% more than this):
https://www.cmegroup.com/markets/cryptocurrencies/bitcoin/bitcoin.margins.html
And you need cash at hand - as you are short and if the futures price increases you need to lodge more margin fast or the CME will close your position.

So this arb you need $450k (50k for some liquidity to cover margin calls - I assume if you need more could close out position) in CASH.
And you are making $750 * 5 * 12 = 45k a year. So a 10% return - but needs to be carefully managed to be sure if BTC price spike CME does not close you out - exposing you to the crash just after the spike - as you are now naked long BTC - and this could easily wipe out years of profits.

Now you might be able to borrow some money from someone and lodge the 5 BTC as collateral which would reduce your capital need and increase return - but not sure who would take on this loan!

We are only a few hours off 24 hours from change and average hash rate still above the difficulty:
http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-lin-2k.png

Surprised that so few miners decided to turn off.

Or is it just that they are so old they contributed so little hash rate that made no measurable difference.

Which is good news! As means Bitcoin has remained as secure as it was yesterday.

I can see there is an active development branch here:
https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/tree/lightning

And list of outstanding items here:
https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/milestone/8

Seems to me that they are not going for the same architecture for LN as they do for BTC.

In BTC the architecture is to compromise on privacy (but not security of funds) in exchange for low resource usage and fast startup times. Achieved by letting the server do most of the work.

But the LN implementation looks like a full LN node? This seems an odd decision. I would expect them to be running a "electrumxLN" server - and this maintain the routing information etc.. As currently maintaining the routing state is 99.999% of the load on an LN node. Opening/Closing channels and sending payments is very light weight.

If there was a electrumxLN server maintaining the routing map (list of all nodes/channels and able to compute a route from a->z), and ideally be the 1st node in the route as then it would get some LN fees for the service then the client could be very lightweight - and the server could re-use an RPC to an existing implementation to get the routes.

[EDIT - Correcting after comment on Reddit]

EDIT - Correcting after comment on Reddit

With Veriblock currently creating 25% of the tx on the Bitcoin network I realised that now there is a direct relationship between the price of verblock and the expected minimum bitcoin transaction fee.

See this post I made on Reddit for background:
https://www.reddit.com/r/VeriBlock/comments/b847ke/what_determines_how_many_transactions_veriblock/ek9uk91/

The expected tx rate that Veriblock will publish (indirectly via its PoP miners) is:

Tx/Sec= (100000000 x 82.5 x bv ) / ( F x 285 x 30 )

where bv is the price of 1 veriblock coin in bitcoins

and F is the feerate in satoshi per byte.

So rearranging this and assuming maximum tx-rate is 4 tx per sec it means that:

FeeRate = (100000000 x 82.5 x bv) / (4 x 285 x 30) = bv x 240,000

FeeRate is in Satoshi per Byte
bv is price of one VeriBlock coin in Bitcoins.

So if we take the current bv of 0.00001785 we get 4 Sat/Byte.

This is assumes that 100% of the bitcoin network transactions are from Veriblock. It you assume as is currently the case only 20% are then the minimum fee would be 20 Sat/Byte.

This is a floor - as if the fee rate went below that the PoP miners could make money by sending more tx. Also currently they seem to be over excited and are currently publishing a lot more than make economical sense!

Other conclusion is that whilst Veriblock price is above about 1/240,000 there will always be mostly full blocks on bitcoin blockchain. As if the blocks are not full the fee will drop - until the point where Veriblock miners start make money by publishing more transactions. But they can not send tx with a fee less than 1 Sat/Byte as will not get forwarded.

Anyone else agree with my logic?

I have been playing around with Lightning network.

I have a few tx that were created that have a very low fee - just less than the minrelay amount!

They are multi-sig so I can't up the fee and resend them.

Are there any pools I can submit them directly too? Don't mind having to pay a small fee to sort this out!

Not a lot of money - few hundred dollars I think. But nice to get back.

https://blockchain.info/blocks/BTCC%20Pool

From block 490606 till now - 490861  they seem to be only mining 1,000,000 byte blocks instead of the 4,000,000 weight block they were before!

Must be costing them 10% in mining fees!

Seems all the wrong way round to me?

Have tried yobit, Kraken (site not working), OKCoin, Bittrex...

All claim to support it but none are accepting deposits! No wonder the price is holding up is impossible to sell them...

Assuming that with segwit2x we get a hard fork at end of year - and that 80% of miners mine the segwit2x chain. What will happen to the "Bitcoin Core" chain?

I think that all depends on the relative prices of the coins on each chain just after the hard fork.

Scenario 1. Chain with 20% of the miners is also 20% of the price before the split and the chain with 80% of the miners is 80% of the price before the fork.
At this point the miners on the "Bitcoin Core" chain will be in effect getting 1/4 the reward they could if they switched to mining on the other chain. And they will have to keep doing this for about 10 weeks - and they will forgo about $20m-40m in reward. At that point the difficulty would drop by the maximum factor of 4 and so would almost be back to where they were.
So seems unlikely that unless they are very principled all 20% would remain - some would switch to the 80% chain. And the more that switch the longer it would take to get to the difficulty reset.

Scenario 2. Both chains trade at same price.
In this scenario one would get same reward for mining either chain. But after about 2 and a bit weeks the 80% chain would reset difficulty down by 20% and so become more profitable. But if the other chain retained the price parity it would become most profitable after 10 weeks when its difficulty reset.


My thinking is that just after the hardfork there is going to be a lot of people trying to manipulate the relative prices of the 2 chains. And anyone with large holding of bitcoins can do this by sell one vs the other out of their holdings. And it will be the relative price that dictates if any miners mine the 20% chain or not.

edit - corrected error in cost calc was wrong by factor of 12.5!!!

This got merged into 0.14.1.
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/9955

Am I right in thinking this is JUST saying that after segwit activation a non-segwit miner can still mine blocks - they just will not include segwit transactions?

Or is it changing the default for all miners that are currently mining so they would signal activation if they upgraded to 0.14.1

I know there is this:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0009/assignments.mediawiki
That shows status.

And I found this:
https://coin.dance/blocks

But I thought BIP9 used the last 2016 blocks to decide on the 95% and the above is only over 1000.

Anyone know of a website that monitors when a soft fork locks in?

Just asking here as is the most hacked community on the web I expect!

Not an ad I promise! Just wonder if anyone done any research on them?

https://getclef.com/

Really nice way to secure a site (and looks pretty!). To login to site need smartphone/app and 4 digit pin (same for all sites).

App on phone locks you out after a few wrong guesses for a period of time (not sure how long - still waiting!!).

Obvious route in is the "lost phone" web page. You then need to be able to intercept the users email and know their 4 digit pin.
I assume clef have some way to prevent brute forcing the pin, and since you only ever normally use the pin to unlock app on your phone seems reasonable secure as pin never leaves your phone normally.

Also they refuse to reset pins. All you can do is delete account if you can access your email. This seems a bit of a weakness to me - as any attacker with access to you email can lock you out of all your accounts! But that is normally a smaller problem than them having access to them all.

You then enter your gmail password into a phishing site and he steels your bitcoins...

BEWARE. Also on litecoin site.

From blockchain.info fees now up to $20k per day (https://blockchain.info/charts/transaction-fees-usd).
So this is $7.3m per year.

A 50 Ghash BFL single is $2500 and uses about 250 watts (0.25Kwatts).
Power in cheap places costs $0.1 per KWh.
So power costs you about 0.25*24*365*0.1=$219 per year.
Depreciation over 5 years is 2500/5 = $500 per year.

So network can support $7,300,000 / (500+219) = 10,153 BFL 50 Ghash singles.

This is a total hash rate of: 507 THash.

This is the hash rate the network had in September of this year. But only 1/10th of the current hashrate.

We are currently looking for miners as have a 4BTC backlog!

We pay equivalent to 1.2 million difficulty.
https://bitcoinvanity.appspot.com/sp/minerhelp

Please note that this is very high variance - we just pay for found addresses - is more like solo mining for a 2BTC payment at the moment.

Also note that this is quite rare that we have such high difficulty addresses to find. Normally our in-house GPUs are sufficient to meet demand.

Remember to get oclgenvanity.exe to run you often need old GPU drivers.

[bitcoind version]

With the release of 0.8.2 organofcorti and I both thought it would be useful for pool users and merchants to understand the fee rules used by pool operators so that miners could make a choice of pool based partly on whether they supported those rules and merchants could understand the fees they needed to pay. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=104664.msg2312307#msg2312307

To achieve this aim we would like pool operators to provide the information below:

• bitcoind version - version you are using to build/validate blocks
• blockminsize - minimum block size you will create
• blockmaxsize - maximum block size you will create
• blockprioritysize - size dedicated to low priority/fee tx's
• mintxfee - the minimum tx fee to include in majority of block
• mintxrelayfee - the minimum tx fee relayed (although doubt relevant)
• Other - any other unique/special features of your tx selection process

If we manage to get enough responses (50% of the hashing power?) organofcorti agreed to create a new sticky thread called "Mining Pool Fee Rules" to collate the information.

Cross posting from:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=197875.0

If you have a 1000mhash rig there are 2 address that need mining at the moment.
It will take you about 3hrs (expected) and you will be paid 0.08BTC.