I see issues with Ripple's solution.

The only thing missing is the one thing I wanted to know as soon as I saw what he made: what are the rules for verifying price quotes and how can we trust the sources not to manipulate the signal for their own gain?

If you can solve that problem, you're golden.

Exactly.  Any fool could have made USD profits in this market the past couple years.  If you can't increase your btc, don't trade unless you need fiat or are looking to exit the market.

How about you just post an image?

You've been around long enough that you should know not to do that unless we have been trending down for the week already.  In other cases it is too risky precisely because people do it anyway.  Bulls know this and will ramp it on the weekends when they have control.

I hope you are right, but you just described sentiment at the top of wave B perfectly.  If that is the case, just remember to not get shaken out in wave C.

Here's some of that attention you are seeking.  Feels nice, doesn't it.

Anyway, my point is be careful who you label a "professional" on this forum.  There are very few high quality posters and most of them don't make strong predictions (such as we will not break $1000) because they know this is a market, not a data series generated by deterministic processes.

The pros keep their mouths shut for the most part.  Only those seeking attention or validation run around acting like they can predict the future.

I hope you were able to change your position as quickly as the "facts" change:


Any "facts" in a market are only temporary beliefs.  Yes, the government statement happened.  That is a fact.  But when you apply that to a market it becomes a belief because there are other possible interpretations of the available facts.  It is you who added the word "negative".

P.S. Your communication style makes you seem like a cocky asshole.  Mine does too at times.  I recommend spending less time on insults and more time on substance.

Do they payout merge mined coins?  If not, perhaps they are merge mining and paying their expenses with those.

A few things about p2pool.  First, you don't have to run a node to mine on p2pool.  You can connect to one of hundreds of public nodes.  As long as you use your address as your username, you will get paid out.  You can even fall back to other p2pool nodes with the same address and keep mining if a node goes down.  The node can have a fee, but there are plenty of low fee or free ones available.  Running your own node locally can reduce your latency and thus lower your stale shares, but you suffer the same issue with a centralized pool.

That said, the issue with p2pool is that you have to be able to get a share within the 24 hour payout window.  At the moment it takes around 44 GH/s to average 1 share/24 hours.  I believe this can be solved with tiered share-chains and m-of-n addresses, but there are some sticky issues.  Basically, 100 lower difficulty sharechains are formed where all participants on a given chain mine to the same p2pool address (the sharechain address), but they also encode their individual address in the block.  The sharechain address is an m-of-n address that requires a portion of the individual addresses in the recent chain to spend.  When the sharechain address receives a payout, sharechain participants send out their signatures for a transaction to spend the payout to the individual miners.  Of course, there may need to be some accumulation allowed so that minimum payout levels can be instituted to avoid spamming dust, which is where it gets sticky since we need to ensure they are spendable.  Bitcoin blocks currently couldn't support paying out each miner with every block (which would be the case if we had everyone on p2pool and set the payout window long enough so the smallest miner could have reasonable variance).  But it's tough because we need to ensure that the accumulated btc can be spent and micro-p2pool nodes with the keys might disappear, so finding the right m and n may be tricky.  Also, the sharechain address will have to change as the individual miner addresses change.

Like I said, it's sticky, especially with the 1MB blocksize limit.

Sell Sell Sell

Just because you haven't seen any indication doesn't mean I haven't.  Clearly others have as well, but continue to reject it if you wish.  It certainly won't restrict me in any way.  Now why don't you go to a TA thread and complain about drawing lines on charts.  That's pretty sketchy too, but it seems to work for some people.

I've always been a turbobull, but even I tend to agree here.  We have a clear 5 wave A down from the high, and we are somewhere in wave B.  C down still to come before this corrective sequence is completed.  Bitcoin's a honey badger though, so often the C waves are terribly weak.  If that's the case, buy buy buy when C comes in a few days/weeks.

You've been given names and descriptions of studies.... if you are a scientist, finding the research mentioned should be something you could do in your sleep.  Unless you're one of the "scientists" that is too wrapped up in their own mind to consider the work of others, in which case you might not be familiar with the tools and techniques of literature review.

You're going back to "only one explanation" again.  Sometimes, things are a bit more complicated.  You can't always separate everything out neatly.  But the fact that Crawford has beat out thousands of people who were using all the same methods EXCEPT astrology indicates there may be something to it.  Of course, it is just one small indication, but all science is built on a mass of small indications.

If you believe science proves anything in the positive you are in the minority.  Science is generally considered to only proves things in the negative.  From the wikipedia article on science:

As for your "simpler explanation" argument, two paragraphs down we have this:

So it would seem your beliefs about science are different from the mainstream.

As a more mainstream scientist, I ask you: Can you prove false the hypothesis that the relative positions of the nearby heavenly bodies influence our thoughts and actions?  Evidence that it does has been presented, we await your evidence.  You don't have any, because this hypothesis falls outside the realm of science at this point in time.  We may one day be able to move people to different planets, which would enable a real study.  But our current technology does not allow us to conduct the experiments necessary to falsify astrology.  As such, the tools of science can be applied to study correlations, but no proof can be had.

Clinging to the idea that you if you can't prove it, then it is not real is very dogmatic.  I used to be the same when I was a teenager, but then I opened my mind and found a much bigger world.

My intuition about M=PQ/V disagrees with your characterization.

The higher V, the smaller M (the total money supply).  Smaller M means less money in circulation, means each individual unit is more valuable.

Of course, you can't just change V and keep PQ constant, so it's pretty much just an academic exercise to consider.

I hope you are right that Bitcoin is the Linux of currencies.  Linux may not be widely used on the desktop, but it has long dominated the server and embedded markets.  It is now taking over the mobile market.  Everyone who uses the internet uses Linux nearly every time they open a connection to a server.  Sure, they don't know and they don't care, but they don't have to know.  The professionals know it is the right tool for the job.

If Bitcoin fills a similar role, it could very well be the backbone behind thousands of "easy to use" value transfer and storage solutions.

Edit:: As to your "no recourse/insurance" discussion, for US citizens, there is Coinbase which has a very reasonable security model, proper licensing, and is fully insured.  They are able to do this and charge a 1% fee, so it can't be too expensive, and will only get cheaper as more competition comes to the Bitcoin insurance market.  There are a lot of insurance companies that would like a piece of the action once there's some more data to go on about how various security models hold up in reality.

Besides the point that the US accounts for only 4% of the global population and assuming "the govt" will be interpreted as "the US govt" is silly, there is also the issue that the US government has delegated its currency issuance authority the the Federal Reserve, which is a privately owned bank.

I buy and sell goods and services all the time for both cash and bitcoin.  Doesn't that mean I trade in "real" markets? (Not that I agree that Bitcoin markets are unreal, but I'm trying to play along).

If that doesn't count, why does commodity trading before Christ count?