Due to the fact that the selloff started from Chinese related OKEX and Bitfinex and the timing coincide with a certain news coming out on Sina, I think it's that Reuter FUD from PBoC Vice Governor.  Those interested can read it up.  But it fits the general trend (and rumors since the end of last year) that noose is being tightened on crypto again in China.  All those OTC trade after the exchange ban, capital flight to exchanges across the border in HK, and BTC mining now screwing up electricity consumption data in China, means that Chicom is interested in doing something about it.  

I honestly would not worry so much about China or even South Korea, but rather a coordinated G20 action as hinted by Mnuchin and Bundesbank member.  The actual G20 summit is later this year, but they can always come up with some sort of joint communique thru scheduled events or workgroups.  So our fellow brethens who favors on-chain scaling need  to try harder with their "we are only trying to disrupt payment space and provide banking to the unbanked poor" meme.  The banksters and govt never bought that argument in the first place, now they are outright calling Bitcoin for what it is, i.e. the good ole numbered Swiss account, with your personal SWIFT terminal attached, before Swiss sold their soul and bank secrecy law to USG in 2009.

I thought the "Nothing-at-Stake" problem is well understood by now, i.e. large PoS stakeholder will just "mine" every fork since it cost zilch to do so.  So people falling that kind of scam, thinking that they would be earning "interest" from doing nothing is going to get screwed by the whales.

https://vinnylingham.com/a-tale-of-two-bitcoins-20375d49d3d3


From my reading of Vinny's twits and his argument with Core team over the past year, I thought his ideology follows more closely with the ETH and BCH crowd.  

The problem with the above statement is that those who don't care about centralization will probably end up using the upcoming bankster and govcoin in due time.  So I have maintained in the past that ALT isn't really the problem, but govcoin with monthly airdrop in the form of Universal Basic Income or social welfare would be the real competition.  Because Bitcoin is voluntary and based on incentives, people can leave any time if they want.  So it got to be deflationary for hodlers to hold and fee market high for miners to secure.

I mean if you are in crypto only for the money, I think it's perfectly fine for people to play with bankster/govcoin.  After all, crony capitalism is highly lucrative and the overlords always want their goons and hanger-on to be well paid to set an example for others.  Even if you are a diehard rebel planning to pull a disappearing act once the revolution fails, it still may be sensible to hedge a bit because if we can't get Gold Standard 2.0 empowered by Internet, than it's more likely that we will end up with some dystopian Fiat 2.0, paid for and paved with the blood of crypto pioneers.  So with some bankster/govcoin on hand, you can actually claim some plausible deniability or at least as someone being led astray and now repentant.

That 35K BTC whale is still sending out huge batches of "spams" to BTC chain since Dec. 20, 2017.  You know that's the day when Coinbase decided to list BCH in the middle of night with nothing more than a twit and 1 hour notice on blog, and a certain someone go on CNBC and said that BTC is useless and people should keep their BTC on exchange just in case that miner decides to switch off on mass, and satoshilite decides to twit that he had sold all his LTC holdings, and of course that is also the start of correction from 19K+.  

I guess someone had finally decided that everyone can play the same game, except that instead of costing that 35K whale around 500K~1.5 mio fiatcoin per day to "stress-test" the BTC network, it actually cost zilch to do the same to even 8 MB chain.  Ironically, over 2K BTC fee spent so far on stress-testing actually make the fee market and BTC tx count look far better than it really is.  It didn't do jack to the "true vision of Satoshi" chain except to make people "fee arbitrage" to ETH and XRP, with some to LTC.  

Of course, at the current burn rate, that 35K BTC whale can keep this up for more than a year if he doesn't mind blowing away all those BTC on fees.  Even then, it is still possible to pay nominal tx fees and then pay those "out of band" fee via fiatcoin to various mining pool accelerators to take up space in the next block.  So people can play this war of attrition as long as they have the BTC, fiat, and willingness to do so.  But in the end, I suspect that it is still going to do jack, not getting even some personal satisfaction or schadenfreude from all these money that could have been simply used to pump own ALT coin.  

I think the problem with decentralized exchange has always been the fiat link rather than tech. 

There is some hope that some crypto friendly jurisdiction will be issuing their owned pegged crypto, e.g. J-Coin with Japan, that can serve as a fiat gateway rather than sketchy scheme such as Tether.  Once you have a real JPY Tether backed by sovereign, then it's a simple atomic swap or any decentralized exchange, then you can do your usual forex via USD/JPY, EUR/JPY or CNY/JPY pair. 

To be fair, he is probably just warning users about the hazards of using Kraken to trade in a volatile day such as today.  

Since S. Korea is leading the way down (-20% ~ -30% across board), I suppose that Korean are finally starting to discount the possibility that their govt may pull a China-style ban, regardless of whether it's tax authority raid on exchanges or new legislation being discussed.  But on the bright side, newbies to the crypto world will finally get a chance to see what their favorite ALT is made of.  BTC got here today not because it's the coolest kid on the block, but being basically the last one standing through out all the storms.  

Even the Mining Cartel knew that PoW may be a "bug" rather than a "feature" and hence BCH was created as a hedge against the possibility that the Core team may just decide to brick all those ASIC miners.  Then at least they can try to rebrand their pet project as bitcoin thru the definition of having most cumulative work done. 

Actually there was a discussion on dev-mailing-list just a while back on introducing an "intermediate" block using different PoW via soft fork.  So pretty much everything can be done via soft fork.  

There was a discussion on changing block size via soft fork, yep, no need to hard fork to change block size.  There was even a discussion on shortening block interval to have much faster blocks for BTC, via soft fork too, written by none other than Vitalik himself.  But getting those soft forks to activate via miners or even users would be quite a challenge though....

I don't even want to admit how many people I recognize in that teaser.  Though if Episode 6 truly occurs, that would be an epic end to this saga.

Probably not a sold account, at least not by the original owner.  It is far more likely that legendary account, dormant since late 2015, got hacked/sold a few months ago, like crap load of other people, including quite a few on this thread.  

I think one of the reason why the Core team insists on soft fork and no hard fork is for backward compatibility, so that someone can still run their strip-down 0.5.3 node.

But I presume everyone already knows that if you bury those paper wallets in the backyard, it is going to turn into dust in a few years.  Same thing as if someone bury those fiat cash (non polymer ones), you will end up with only those shiny metallic security stripe.  Some govt/bank will allow you to exchange those metallic security stripe into new notes, but don't bet on it.

So if people insist on burying their paper wallet, use something like CryptoSteel or just stamp your private keys (part of it or "encrypted") onto metal sheets or AU kilobars.  

Wait, wait.  People do know that in certain parts of the world, Auld Lang Syne are literally sang by school kids at graduation and at the end of school, right?

Happy 2018 and hopefully it will be another great year for Bitcoin, just as 2017.

This is just to note that there is no reason why a bankster coin should be worth more than the banksters it serves.  Because if that is the case, the said banksters can always just issue another bankster coin mk. II and extract even more rent, and we already know the marketcap for the likes of JPM or GS.  

On a side note, that 35K BTC whale is still sending out large batches of tx and ironically making the BTC fee market and daily tx count looking far better than it is.  Though the fee for those tx have gradually decreased from 1K satoshi per byte to 950, etc., to 650 and now 535 satoshi/byte, the number of tx has doubled.  This is costing him between $500K~$1 mio per day min in terms of fees.  

Can also vouch for HP ProBook with Windows 7.  Still have one of these.  Mined a 50 LTC block with it in late 2012.  Only worth about $2.00 at the time and screwed up the HD and embedded AMD Radeon that cost me around $1K.  But their multi-years warranty allows me to basically replace the components and I learned not to mine with laptop again.   

Uhm, people don't even need to speculate on how much other hodlers hodl.  A certain someone already openly stated that Trendon Shavers alone cost him 1.6K BTC, and that's after deducting "interest" received.  So the principle amount is even higher.  No need to read up past posts either.  People can also make educated guess simply based on the year that they started accumulating BTC, assuming that they hadn't lost it through the million ways that you can lose your BTC.  

This is just to note that just as people can pump and manipulate BTC price, they can pump and manipulate fee market too.  So now if people don't want to get fleeced, they got to look at distribution of pending tx in mempool too.  

Since now we have people still sending out large batches of 1K satoshi/byte txs when mempool was down to 140 satoshi/byte range.  So fee estimator can be way off.  Also, there is only a handful of block found 2~4 hours ago, in fact only 1 block was found in the entire hour, that will screw up the fee estimator even more as those 1K satoshi fee tx do come out in batches and if no blocks are found regularly, they eat up more and more of space in the next block.  But BTC.TOP did just shift back most of their hashrate to BTC chain now, so more blocks will probably be found.  But it's kind of scary just to see how much hashrate Chinese mining cartel controls now and it is still going up fast.

P.S.  This is a good site to see the fee distribution of TX, check it before sending out tx so that people don't overpay.

https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/

Naturally as many people pointed out, a visual version is here.

https://dedi.jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/more/#24h

There are also fee estimators directly on Chinese mining pool websites.  Necessary because people might want to use their tx accelerator to pay those "out of band" fee.

As people can see, those 1K satoshi tx is sitting at one end, with almost nothing in between, but as network clogs up, it will "help" to shift the fee back up again.

You know, the above LN discussion is why pretty much why every time a bankster coin like XRP pass BCH in marketcap, BCH will be pumped to heck to surpass it.  Because that bankster coin also offer unlimited tx capacity with even lower fee, and guess what, it even ironically resembles how LN might look like in operation, if LN ever becomes operational.  If some layer 2 LN coin can be worth more than BCH, then guess what the base layer coin would be worth?

If some easy and cheap L2 can be implemented without serious trust/security tradeoffs, then we would already have Gold Standard 2.0 empowered by internet and bitcoin price would be on its way out of Milky Way galaxy.  

This is merely a public service announcement.  Our 35K BTC spamming whale is back with his batches of tx.

As discussed a few days ago, this 35K BTC whale address started spamming on Dec 20,

https://blockchain.info/address/19Rd2Z4ckdPEs34KEmKpbddpK7ngp1sR6g

but he stopped after BTC bottomed at 10K and specifically with the green candlestick that goes from 13K to 14.8K.

But now he is back, paying 1k satoshi/byte, despite optimal fee for getting into next block at around 400~500 satoshi/byte.  

https://blockchain.info/address/197D9cfnEM3NwBGsmw4N99h18pkosoufkf
https://blockchain.info/tx/56a314ac0e58fe97daf97d75b73f8b6b4660488f099ffd37c22a774d2971420d

Note the coincidental downturn in the chart and those who trade the market can derive whatever conclusion they wish.  

For those interested in fee market, we are now down to backlogs with 400 satoshi/byte txs.  So for those who believes that it's mining cartel price gouging rather than whale manipulation, this is a data point for future reference on possible cartel price fixing scheme.

Like those permanent magnet based on rare earth, as soon as rare earth elements price spike a few years back, all sorts of cost saving process are researched and implemented.  So not a surprise that as silver is like I think 20% (?) cost of solar panel, people immediately shift to thin-film process.  So I presume that future process may not use any silver at all, just like there are permanent magnet without rare earth elements now days, since they are crucial for electric cars.