Agreed: on the economical side, I'm not seeing much merit maybe But I've had a few pretty good discussion with Jorge on more technical issues in the past, and that's worth something in here, imo.

You realize that, in all likelihood, the opposite is true?

The more mature the market, the more it seems to tend towards efficiency (or at least, efficiency as "unbeatableness by retail TA methods").

If you're interested, I'll dig up the financial research articles on the matter, but I have  feeling you're not overly interested in that, right?

Could be related to your co-existence in r/bitcoin and r/buttcoin. Mutual dislike, mutually nervous trigger finger for bans, as far as I can tell.



Probably said something like this before, but then again, your detractors never fail to repeat themselves either in here, so...

I'm not entirely unhappy having you post in here.

I disagree with plenty of your political and economical premises, and more importantly, I believe you show a certain bias in accepting evidence and arguments depending on which 'side' it is coming from -- which is, imo, a cardinal sin for someone from a formal field.

That said, your (extremely critical) contributions are intellectually still leagues above what passes for "criticism" in here otherwise -- which otherwise tends to be FUD'ish meme spam and barely coherent ad hominems against "bitcoiners".

So, in that sense: Thanks for your contributions in here, even if, more often than not, they happen to be wrong-ish ;)

*sigh*

Less than 6 hours in between...

Somebody submitted an entry with lower and upper bound values switched around. Unless there's a clear objection to doing so, I'd like to accept the entry (with the values switched around), since it's pretty clear that it was intended to be the other way around.

Also, note to self: next time, set the form definitions to check for this stuff

Noted.


Don't think there's a clear consensus among traders (that I keep track of) where this is heading, mid-term -- some expect a more serious correction before moving higher, some expect more upwards rather soon. One thing that I don't hear or see much (and don't really believe myself) is an extended flat period. Unfortunately, maybe, but the last swing up was so violent, I think it's more likely that it's staying volatile for the next month(s).

+1

I know the speculation subforum isn't exactly, well, universally loved among all older members and staff, but it's good to see mods are keeping an eye on it anyway. Thanks.

Couple of brand new accounts discussing with each other esoteric antisemitic conspiracy theories. Almost cute, given how clumsy it comes across. I guess Lambie is going for False Flag type spamming these days.

Most amusing part is, this community has its share of "native" nutters of course. Difference is that they're not quite as obvious about it like the posters above... At least the former had the decency to get a few hundred posts under their belt before they started letting everyone know how the subterranean spacelizards run the show in reality.

For fairness sake, the following is probably the more appropriate metric to track (among other things, because "no. of unconfirmed tx" is a raw value that needs to be seen in relation to the total no. of tx per day/hour/etc.)





Rising, but not critical yet.

To be clear, I'm very much not a Small Blockian. Just wanted to point out that, at the moment, the network still seems to be doing okay -- although it likely will reach a point where it won't relatively soon.

For fairness sake, getting 1 satoshi through the network might require more patience than anyone realistically would have

Wondering now, what's the smallest amount of dust or near-dust you can currently get through if you're willing to wait, say, a day or two. Anyone happens to know that? I guess it depends on the number of nodes that are set to relay non-standard transactions, right?

(EDIT) Let's say the goal is to spend the absolutely lowest amount in total. Which likely means you want to cross the dust threshold (546 satoshis ~= 0.0019 USD), with no fees attached, so you're at the mercy of miners to have it included in a block, but at least it'll be relayed. (Someone correct me if I'm wrong here).

In other words, participation is not 1 satoshi like I claimed, but more likely 546 satoshis, or about 0.2 cent.

Look, I get it, you're trying to re-frame the discourse and/or perception of the market. No idea why, but your behavior makes little sense otherwise.

However, may I suggest to start a bit smaller? Looks like you're trying to bite off more than you can chew with such claims. Let's take a look at the larger market picture:



That's the market on Bitstamp since April 2012. "Ancient history", you'll shout, but shush -- it was your idea to talk about the big picture, not mine.

So, realistically, you had about 1 year of time to buy at a "loss" compared to current prices, between Nov. 2013 and Nov. 2014. Buying at any other time means you're not in the red, and, in fact, made a profit (on paper, assuming you're long).

That's going by daily price. If we're more cautious, and instead use some smoothed-out price proxy, say the 200 day simple moving average as plotted above, then the picture still only slightly shifts, to around 13 months chance to buy at a loss (Nov 2013 to end of 2014).

What do we get then? As of now, the market (since mid-2012) gave you a chance of around 1 year of "investing at a loss" vs. 2 and a half years of "investing at a profit", by current (smoothed out) price.

However, that's not even including the pre-Bitstamp period. Let's say Bitcoin trading seriously began in May 2011, when volume (in USD) crossed the 1 million USD mark. Which means, looking at the market as a whole, we get: ~1 year buying at a loss vs. ~3 and a half years of buying at a profit.

Like I said, maybe rethink your strategy. In order to get the idea into peoples' heads that "the market mostly took away" from investors, you're going to need a much longer bear market than this. Try again in two years from now, if price is still making new lows by then -- but maybe don't hold your breath for that happening :)

Still only 3 submissions... either some of you are waiting for the last days to submit a prediction (not sure why), or there's less interest in this contest than I had thought.

/game theory hat on

(The following is not based on any information of the actually submitted entries, but purely based on the number of submissions, which happens to be publicly available by looking at the address I posted in OP. In other words, I'm not giving away any information that you couldn't have already gained by looking at the address, plus some analytical reasoning.)

To encourage speculators that aren't sure whether they should submit a "guess", I'd like to point out that at the moment, even a participant with no knowledge of the market, submitting as an entry, purely by chance, but based on game theoretic considerations, e.g. the range "between $1 and $1 billion" would have:

(1) either a 1 in 4 chance to win, assuming the other participants also submitted bets without actual market analysis, but purely by chance, and similar ranges (i.e. from "extremely unlikely low" to "extremely unlikely high"). This is simplified of course, because the condition "narrowest range wins" means if you pick a "silly big range" that is just $1 narrower than that of the others, you win. But for simplicity, let's assume each "pure guesser" just picks the same "silly big" range as a prediction.

(2) a chance to win that is a function of the prediction ability of the other participants, in case the others do attempt to actually predict the market. While I'm sure some people have a better than pure luck chance to predict the price, over such a long time horizon I don't think anyone is really close to certainty, so for a very optimistic (imo) estimate that a market predictor has a 2:1 chance to get the price right, you, as the fourth submitter with no market knowledge (and winning by "default" because of the silly big range you submitted) would still have a chance of at least (1/3)^3  ~= 4% to win, without any effort.

However, that assumes that the ability to predict correctly of each trader (which I set to 2:1) are independent, which obviously they are not: if their predictions match, then they overlap, so your chance to win is closer to 1/3, and if their predictions don't match, then the initial estimate that each of them has a 2/3 chance to win is not really tenable. To see why, imagine one trader predicts "1 to 10", the other "1000 to 10,000". It makes little sense to say that each of these predictions has a 2:1 chance to be correct. Assuming that the market can in principle be predicted - stochastically at least - we would probably want to connect probabilities of prediction correctness to some objective, extensionally distinguishable features of the market, in which case, the traders' prediction probabilities of disjoint predictions should -roughly- sum to one, so again, you're sitting -very roughly speaking- somewhere between a 4% and 33% chance to win, without any knowledge of the market future.

/game theory hat off


Summary: Even if you completely suck at market predictions, given the current low number of participants, you still have a real shot at winning this contest. Unless you are already sitting on a rather large coin stash, I'd say a real chance (as argued above) to win ~0.44 BTC is probably worth the minor hassle of submitting a prediction :D


Or even simpler put: only ~4 days left to submit an entry!

Two reasons, I'd say: (a) reduced volatility in 2015, compared to 2014, makes (most forms of) trading less profitable overall, or at least, reduces the frequency at which trading opportunities arise, (b) if and when the bear market ends (and I'm not saying it already did, just stating it as a conditional), then trading by definition becomes less profitable, i.e. in a stable upwards trend, "investors" rule, while in a bear market, "traders" rule (in a very crude binary distinction that isn't entirely adequate of course). /trading philosophy side remark ^_^

I have no idea who Peter Jones is, but you're in indeed. Also, thanks a lot:)

Three valid prediction submissions so far -- and another one with a very generous value attached to it -- meaning the lucky, or hopefully rather: competent winner will get at least ~0.44 BTC as of now.

8 more days to go, by the way.

^ Hell no. Anyone can join.

Actually, I x-posted this in the newcomer forum. Plenty new members seem to be looking for ways to squeeze a few satoshis out of some faucet, so I was thinking maybe a contest like this is interesting because it offers a chance to win more than what a faucet usually offers.

Correct.


I'll be here, and I'll remember, don't worry. Alternatively, I'm sure someone will remind me of it .

And re: using the data for my own purposes. I'll have a ~10 day head start (then the data becomes public, like I said) on anyone else over a 1 year prediction horizon -- don't think there's much I can do with it.


Thanks. Don't overthink it. I'm doing this game because I don't like this forum if it's filled with nothing but {bull, bear} spam. That, and that I want to get a feeling for how good we are (collectively) in far-away price estimates. Curiosity, basically.

^ What's the upper bound of your estimate?

In principle, you are right. But this "discussion" started by an abuse of rigidly defined terminology of the field that has currently the best understanding of the topic in question ("recessive", and "biology").

If someone claims that prime numbers are divisible by some other number (other than 1), do I need to seriously argue against that? There's obviously a difference wrt absolute certainty between a purely formal result (of pure math) and an empirical result (like in biology), but even in the latter case, the result is still a lot closer to "certainty" than to "totally up for uneducated debate".