Can anyone speculate as to what has been up with all the dumping? Where are all these coins coming from?
My first guess would be that is the BTC that Karpeles stole. I think the missing Gox BTC took us to $2 in 2011-12, this is the start of capitulation and whale re-balancing. i sincerely hope that most whales are rebalancing as it would be the most bullish thing yet --> distribution into stronger, more numerous hands.More numerous: yes (at least I hope so). Not "stronger" hands, though, that's a naive classification and you should know better than to use it. The key point is: distribution into hands that don't have experienced major returns on their investment yet and are therefore not tempted to lock in a guaranteed profit vs. a potential higher profit. We don't argue with peoples' risk preferences, otherwise we don't need a market. |
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Thoughtful post Oda.
But I don't see many bulls voicing that opinion left on the forum either. In fact this downtrend has be dragging on for months and this forum has been an absolute bear fest.
I would probably suggest bringing back newbie jail or suggesting more vigilant moderation if I thought it would achieve anything :p
Thanks. Point is, I even understand why the "crypto enthusiasts slash bulls" would react like that. This is "their" place. One of the few locations where they are among themselves. Since I'm an enthusiast myself, I can understand it - if almost everyone in the outside world tells you how dumb it is to put money into crypto, it's nice to finally have a place where you are among likeminded. But the problem is of course that you then get to cases like TERA, or JorgeStolfi, who are *anything* but trolls (in a meaningful sense), just smart, opinionated people with a dissenting view (TERA on the market direction, Jorge on the long-term success likelihood of Bitcoin in general). So here's the dilemma: If you take offense at those positions (and people still do - go to the wall thread... if you quote Jorge, people will ask you to "not quote the troll") to the point where you prefer to mute them out, you're reducing signal/noise, because what you're left with are the real trolls and their incoherent posts. If, on the other hand, you are more inviting to those dissenting opinions, this place will more resemble the "outside" world, where a large number of people are very skeptical if Bitcoin has a real chance of success. So, like I said, I get why this dilemma exists. No matter how the most enthusiastic, optimistic posters in here react, it's going to have consequences they probably wouldn't like. |
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The trolling sure is reaching a new level these days. This is what the speculation main page looks to me right now:  Depressingly low signal/noise ratio. That said, even though most of the trolling is done by "bears" (they're not really bears of course, just people that either hope to buy back cheaper, or that genuinely enjoy trolling), I have little sympathy for the bulls, to the point where I'd say, they had it coming. Remember how any - well motivated, non-trolling - bearish response spawned accusations of "perma bear" and "FUDster"? People like TERA who were being hounded for being trolls when they were simply bearish at times? So that's what you got. With most of the real bears gone (because what's the point arguing with people that, after 10 months of almost uninterrupted downtrend still insist that the magical recovery and rise to 3000 is just around the corner), this forum is stuck with the pseudo-bear trolls. If I sound bitter it's because I am, to a degree. Had a number of interesting discussions in here, and I understand the pain of people who run a pure buy & hold strategy and see the USD value of their holding go down 70%, but it's not really an inviting place for an exchange of opinions if well argued dissenting positions are regularly accused of being presented by trolls and paid shills. tl;dr The place is poisoned, but it's because bulls drove away most of the reasonable bears. |
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Possible. Less than $100 away from it at the moment, definitely not "impossible" anymore, as was the claim a month or two ago.
I would add the caveat that, if everyone expects a drop to x, it often stops just a tad /short/ of x, so I don't know about the exact target, but going back to the 200s now looks like a real possibility, unless we see a drastic return of buying pressure (to the point where the weekly closes green).
Quite the bear market we're in :/
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Epic thread, if only for that picture...
En taro Tassadar!
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Hey, Bitcoinwisdom A quick question: How do you calculate the aggregate (or average?) price of a currency on the frontpage, https://bitcoinwisdom.com/Is it weighted by volume on each exchange? If so, volume of a period, or by trade? Or is it simply a non-weighted average of the last price on all exchanges? Hey, any chance you could take a quick look at my question from a few pages ago? It is weighted. The weight is volume*volume. (Price*Volume*Volume+...) / (Volume*Volume+...) Cool, thanks. Also, congrats on 'hero'  |
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Alright, let's give this a shot...
Question:
- Is MEW tied to forum persona, or RL identity? I'm alright with signing up with the former, but not the latter.
- Membership and voting weight is tied to donation, right? As denominated in XMR, correct? I know we're in this entire crypto project (not just XMR, I mean) to bootstrap distributed currencies, but as units of account, not even BTC performs that well, let alone XMR. Seems to me that, apart from idealistic reasons, USD denomination would have made more sense. Possible though that this was discussed already and a conclusion was reached, so the above is more of a question than a negative judgement.
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Hey, Bitcoinwisdom A quick question: How do you calculate the aggregate (or average?) price of a currency on the frontpage, https://bitcoinwisdom.com/Is it weighted by volume on each exchange? If so, volume of a period, or by trade? Or is it simply a non-weighted average of the last price on all exchanges? Hey, any chance you could take a quick look at my question from a few pages ago? |
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So in practice it solves 99.99% of the problem
by "it", do you mean the timeclock? Yes. A semi-reliable time allows a bunch of entities to collectively decide that another entity is "dead". This makes non-Byzantine distributed consensus easy (by non-Byzantine, I mean it handles "normal" failures -- node death, network split -- but not pathological cases where a node is deliberately trying to break the election). This is all that is needed for distributed consensus in most tightly coupled distributed systems. Very interesting post. Question: would the problem of the time interval case you describe (with an imprecise time signal) possibly be solvable by having the clients decide on a time to accept the block in the form of a probability distribution, peaking around the agreed upon time point? that way, assuming a majority of clients would use that rule, we could assume a majority of clients would accept the block issued *around* time E, even if it is not issued at the *exact* time. |
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I'll say again what I said a few pages ago: XMR is in a fragile balance now that almost eerily resembles the fragile balance BTC is in. If there is only one prediction I'd be allowed to make, it would be that, short-to-mid term at least, XMR won't escape a breakdown if BTC enters another breakdown, but has a chance to outperform BTC if BTC stabilizes in the region of high 300s, and moves upwards from there.
Of course, Monero is just Speculation right now and for now, almost no real use except it being proved a good altcoin for storage of value. Maybe, but in the longer term speculation on future valuation of XMR might well detach from speculation of future BTC valuation, since there are good reasons to assume different usage cases and adoption scenarios. |
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Without GUI, adoption will remain sluggish. With sluggish adoption, not only will price be pressured, but more importantly - and this is a coin killer - the emission will run its course to the point that XMR will considered to be a "community premine" despite all our good heroic efforts.
Since changing the emission also can be considered to be a premine of sorts, we are between a rock and a hard place with (yet) no solutions that would have the unanimous support of everybody.
I can also be wrong concerning the future perception of "community premine".
Good high level summary. I would add one more corner to the rock/hard place picture: To break out of the status quo, we'd need to actively encourage user adoption / make XMR go "live". Devs have (understandably so, given their already taxing time constraints) said they think the project isn't ready for that yet (hence: the GUI delay). |
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I'll say again what I said a few pages ago: XMR is in a fragile balance now that almost eerily resembles the fragile balance BTC is in. If there is only one prediction I'd be allowed to make, it would be that, short-to-mid term at least, XMR won't escape a breakdown if BTC enters another breakdown, but has a chance to outperform BTC if BTC stabilizes in the region of high 300s, and moves upwards from there.
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I came across this interesting oddity on http://btccharts.com/on one of the screens you can click on 'Top Traders' and up pops a window like this --  Clearly this is not data from Stamp (how would they get such data) but must be from btccharts users although I'm still not sure how they would harvest such data. But it is interesting in terms of sentiment: out of the top ten seven are classed as bears. Funny discovery... 1. Overall you're right, more bears than bulls, but interestingly the top spot is a "bull" 2. don't really know though what the "bull" or "bear" label means. maybe it's just their last trade/currently open position (and whether they're in btc or usd). in that case, the current "bull" could have earned his spot by being a bear before, and vice versa. 3. unclear if the usd amounts are trading volume? profit? in either case, relatively low numbers. 4. none of it really matters, but it's fun to speculate about. thanks for sharing |
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The point of my post (and graph) above was a slightly different one, though. Aimed more at Peter R.'s models, now that I think of it (since he is the one who uses 'no of tx' as a proxy for adoption in a Metcalfe based model).
What I had in mind is: if Bitcoin adoption is, against earlier optimistic assumptions, neither accurately captured by your logistic model nor by a constant exponent exponential growth model based on a constant rate of growth, then all the current models could be missing something that the market / price discovery (perhaps) is picking up already: adoption continues, but the growth rate of adoption declines over time.
Your model would "miss" it because the growth function is hardcoded into it (the S-shape), Peter R.'s model would "miss" it, for a while at least, because the coefficient that relates price/mcap and adoption proxy is a global value, and will take time to adjust to a lower value.
Do you see the point I'm (clumsily) trying to make here?
Yes, and thank you for the helpful clarification. Mathematically, the logistic model has the property of decreasing exponential growth, which is most obvious on a log graph as we near full adoption. It is only a falsifiable hypothesis that a logistic model can explain bitcoin prices. My reason for choosing this model was to fit the obvious constraint that exponential price growth must eventually end. Perhaps we are at that point now, but I believe not based upon the steady improvement in Bitcoin transactional infrastructure. http://www.bitcoinpulse.com/There is at least one mathematical theory of price bubbles that could be used to elaborate this logistic model, but I hesitate to combine them for fear of unsound overfitting given the additional number of parameters whose values must be set. The bitcoin logistic model has only two parameters: the maximum price and the full adoption duration. Alright, playing around with my idea some more... Extrapolating from the interpretation of the graph I posted above, we get something like: the first factor 10 increase takes 12 months, the second 18, the third 24 months, etc. In other words, to apply n times the factor g increase of the starting value, we require n-th triangle number time steps. Which leads to the formula: f(0.5*(t^2+t)) = s*g^t or equivalently: f(t)=s*g^(0.5*(sqrt(8t+1)-1))where s is the starting value and g the growth factor. Now, where that one [1] falls in terms of functional growth, I'm not sure. Doesn't seem to fit the definition of exponential growth anymore, but doesn't just grow linearly either... At first I thought it would be another example of bounded growth (similar to your logistic function then), but plotting it, it very much looks like it is still exponentially growing (just as a slightly compressed looking curve, compared to "regular" exponential growth) ... [1] O(c^sqrt(n)) |
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The observation is that, if we ignore the "spikes" into a higher range of transactions, one could argue there is an overall slowing down of adoption (as measure by transaction). The Metcalfe's law based price models wouldn't necessarily pick this up initially, because transactions *are* still rising, but it is (at least to me) conceivable that rate of growth is behind earlier expectations, and this reflects in the current price stagnation (as in: the markets pick up slower than expected adoption than the models do).
Here's the slow-down I have in mind, if viewed from the following point of view: Let's look at "transaction eras" only in terms of powers of 10, and only after the no. of transactions doesn't fall back into the previous order of magnitude.
Any opinions on this?
As stated in the original post, my high price of $1 million is simply a guess. I could get a better fit on the logistic model with the data series to-date by assuming a high price of $2500. But that implies that we are near or have passed the adoption midpoint - which is hard to believe. Alternatively, I am intrigued by the suggestion that the logistic model is a better fit to market capitalization data than to price data, because market cap takes into account the supply of bitcoin that meets the demand of the marginal new adopter. I shall prepare another model using bitcoin market cap, but I would very much like to wait until the new year or a bubble, whichever occurs first because bubble peaks are easy to recognize and bottoms much more difficult. The right hand side of the model graph is hand fit to balance the central tendency and it is not clear yet where that region is for the bubble that peaked in November 2013. Good points. Would like to see the market cap model very much. The point of my post (and graph) above was a slightly different one, though. Aimed more at Peter R.'s models, now that I think of it (since he is the one who uses 'no of tx' as a proxy for adoption in a Metcalfe based model). What I had in mind is: if Bitcoin adoption is, against earlier optimistic assumptions, neither accurately captured by your logistic model nor by a constant exponent exponential growth model based on a constant rate of growth, then all the current models could be missing something that the market / price discovery (perhaps) is picking up already: adoption continues, but the growth rate of adoption declines over time. Your model would "miss" it because the growth function is hardcoded into it (the S-shape), Peter R.'s model would "miss" it, for a while at least, because the coefficient that relates price/mcap and adoption proxy is a global value, and will take time to adjust to a lower value. Do you see the point I'm (clumsily) trying to make here? |
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Playing devil's advocate, for a moment (2nd time today, I just notice)
Not challenging the 'minimum valuation required to perform as medium of exchange' argument. But why can't the ledger be separated from the currency function? For a number of imaginable functions in the future, a minimal share of the supply would be enough to perform the ledger function (e.g. contracts).
In order not to gloss over this: there's still the valuation through required security. If contracts on blockchain have a certain total value, the network needs to be at least protected to make an attack economically unfeasible. Since miners are economically motivated as well, this will provide a security-based minimum valuation of Bitcoin in the process.
Still, the two values need not be the same, so the question remains: why can't the 'ledger' function not be separated from the 'currency/money' function?
You could separate the currency from the ledger, but to what end? Seems to me like that would be making the system and incentives needlessly complicated and would still require you to purchase tokens in order to pay your way into the ledger. In some ways, that is exactly what Ethereum has done. Either way the tokens are still required to make the ledger function, so why make them separate? Perhaps someone has an idea as to why this would be desirable? My mistake... could have phrased that more clearly, I guess: I don't suggest we "split up" Bitcoin. My question was, "what prevents the rest of the world from adopting Bitcoin, the distributed ledger, but (mostly) ignoring Bitcoin, the currency"? The usual argument goes "the two functions cannot be separated, so the above is impossible". I'm asking, why? To me it looks like a possibility, and the implications for total valuation in the long term would be drastic. Because there would be no incentives for the miner to secure and maintain that ledger? Maybe I have your argument wrong but this is how I understand it Again, apologies. Maybe not phrased clearly enough. The side remark in my original post ("In order not to gloss over this") was meant to address exactly this point: even if the world only makes use of the ledger function of Bitcoin (and as such, no significant valuation floor is provided by that use), keeping the "ledger only" network secured will provide such a floor. However, valuation in that world could be substantially lower than in the one that includes usage cases medium of exchange / store of value. a) Valuation from the above two usage cases is missing. b) Effort needed to provide security of the network could well be not in a linear relation to total value of ledger usage: - double spends are less of a concern if contracts are to be settled (confirmation time less of a problem) - there is more than just a monetary requirement to overcome to successfully mount an attack on a network the scale of Bitcoin (hardware procurement, mounting the attack without raising suspicion) The point I'm getting at is that the total value of contracts settled through the ledger can be higher than the total cost to secure the network, as long as the cost to mount a successful attack on the network is prohibitively high for any individual actor. So the total valuation / market price per unit could well be below the current (optimistic) estimates that include the medium of exchange / store of value usage cases, even though the security requirements for the ledger usage alone provides some valuation. |
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Same question I have BitChick. It really seems as if more is going on here than just a whale with a lot of coins selling. Someone seems to have an endless supply of coins and is actively trying to suppress a market that would naturally rise if not for the massive sell walls. If they are trying to destroy market confidence, I say it's likely working so far.
Remove those walls, and I guarantee that we'd be at 500+ in 2 weeks, and with rising volume.
But no... don't even so much as breathe the word 'manipulation' on these sub, lest you get completely ridiculed and called a tinfoil hat wearer. Even though the whales' intentions are so obvious an 8-year old could figure it out with the data.
Right. So how exactly is this different from $32 to $2 in 2011? If we're subject to "manipulation" now, we most certainly were manipulated back then. If we were manipulated back then, how exactly did that work out for the manipulator / Bitcoin in general? tl;dr People need to relax. Price goes up, price goes down. Sometimes the latter takes longer than the former. |
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Playing devil's advocate, for a moment (2nd time today, I just notice)
Not challenging the 'minimum valuation required to perform as medium of exchange' argument. But why can't the ledger be separated from the currency function? For a number of imaginable functions in the future, a minimal share of the supply would be enough to perform the ledger function (e.g. contracts).
In order not to gloss over this: there's still the valuation through required security. If contracts on blockchain have a certain total value, the network needs to be at least protected to make an attack economically unfeasible. Since miners are economically motivated as well, this will provide a security-based minimum valuation of Bitcoin in the process.
Still, the two values need not be the same, so the question remains: why can't the 'ledger' function not be separated from the 'currency/money' function?
You could separate the currency from the ledger, but to what end? Seems to me like that would be making the system and incentives needlessly complicated and would still require you to purchase tokens in order to pay your way into the ledger. In some ways, that is exactly what Ethereum has done. Either way the tokens are still required to make the ledger function, so why make them separate? Perhaps someone has an idea as to why this would be desirable? My mistake... could have phrased that more clearly, I guess: I don't suggest we "split up" Bitcoin. My question was, "what prevents the rest of the world from adopting Bitcoin, the distributed ledger, but (mostly) ignoring Bitcoin, the currency"? The usual argument goes "the two functions cannot be separated, so the above is impossible". I'm asking, why? To me it looks like a possibility, and the implications for total valuation in the long term would be drastic. |
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must listen podcast of Robert Murphy by Tom Woods on Bitcoin and the Regression Theorum. it's a little past halfway in the podcast: http://www.schiffradio.com/pg/jsp/verticals/archive.jspMurphy's Conclusions: 1. Bitcoin is unique in that it was developed from the start to be a form of money and did not evolve as a commodity. 2. Bitcoin leapfrogged the barter phase whereby it would have established it's own relative value (intrinsic value) as a commodity in the market place against other items prior to becoming a medium of exchange. 3. the Regression Theorum is too restrictive as it could not have predicted something as innovative as Bitcoin.i extend his conclusions to say the Jeffrey Tucker's theory that Bitcoin only has value primarily b/c of it's payment network to be wrong. Woods alludes to Tucker's theory in the interview but clearly disagrees with it. Woods makes the correct argument that the reason ppl value the payment network is b/c the Bitcoin currency has value to begin with. IOW, the payment network would be worthless if Bitcoin the currency was worthless. this is where Andreas is also wrong when he says Bitcoin the currency is merely the 1st app existing on what is the real value, the blockchain and that they can be separated. same argument as Tucker's, same wrong conclusion. also by extension, Konrad Graf's theory that the RT is consistent with Bitcoin's origin is also tenuous, if not wrong, altho not quite as aggregious in its conclusions as Tucker and Andreas. as far as i'm concerned, Mises is a great economist who was right on just about all things except for the fact that his RT did not, and could not, have been expected to have predicted something like Bitcoin which depends on the Internet and a scale of global communication never before seen in human history. my final conclusion is the same one i've had since i started with Bitcoin back in 2011, and that is that Bitcoin the currency is inextricably linked to Bitcoin the blockchain and Bitcoin the payment network. Yes, people need to accept the duality of bitcoin's value origination. I don't think it's fair to say that either one originates the value; they both have value because of the other, and are really the same thing: a distributed ledger, which gets us back to money as memory, and bitcoin as an ideal societal memory facilitator. It's perhaps easier to try and think of things separately, because humans like to think linearly, but the reality is that the currency/network should be viewed is a single atomic unit, or two units that can't be separately discussed (which is equivalent and therefore a mostly useless definition). Playing devil's advocate, for a moment (2nd time today, I just notice) Not challenging the 'minimum valuation required to perform as medium of exchange' argument. But why can't the ledger be separated from the currency function? For a number of imaginable functions in the future, a minimal share of the supply would be enough to perform the ledger function (e.g. contracts). In order not to gloss over this: there's still the valuation through required security. If contracts on blockchain have a certain total value, the network needs to be at least protected to make an attack economically unfeasible. Since miners are economically motivated as well, this will provide a security-based minimum valuation of Bitcoin in the process. Still, the two values need not be the same, so the question remains: why can't the 'ledger' function not be separated from the 'currency/money' function? |
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