Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion

[byronbb]

Can't recall last time when sell-side order book was out-dwarfed by the buy-side....

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[koryu]

I wouldn't use Germany as a shining example of a worker's paradise if I were you. It's a place where they work year round to bail out Greeks and Italians who take summers off.

billiyjoeallen, I wish your facts supported your bright rethoric.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/06/08/countries-most-vacation-days/2400193/

It's incredible how far this "northern Europe workers" vs "lazy Mediterraneans" lie has gone.

Disclosure: I'm Spanish.

Germany doesnt apply minimal wages. 

here in germany we are just introducing a minimum wage of 8.50 euro. its not much and a lot of people here work for less.
with good education its a very good place to work but without its terrible except if you just want free money from the welfare systems.

but we do not only sell cars. take a look at the dax companies, they are all global players.

must be said

[JorgeStolfi]

I googled for 'Neo & Bee March' and got this:

  Bayer kills bees: neo-nicotinoid pesticides proven toxic to bees
  http://bayer-kills-bees.com/

Is this bullish or bearish? 

[raid_n]

So here is a stupid question to kill time: Suppose the Evil Lords decide to use the bitcoins seized from Silk Road and other places to kill bitcoin by spamming it with billions of tiny transactions, as fast as they can.  How would the network defend itself from that attack?

I am guessing, but I thought that the network just processes transactions in the order received, and if there is a fee attached, then those transactions are processed first.  

Billions is a lot... and I suppose that the problem could be made worse by creating some repetition of the transactions - after the first ones are processed, they are put back into the cue.

 If there are so many transactions that the network is overwhelmed... the network may go down for a period of time. and then maybe a fork in the code to restart?  YES>... I am continuing to guess.

You know you have an anti-fragile system when the worst thing your enemies can do is throw money at you.

Like, dumping ten tons of pennies over you.

For concreteness, suppose they have 100,000 BTC previously spread out over that many addresses, and start sending out 10-satoshi transactions between those addresses with 1 satoshi of fee.  They can send 10^13 (10 trillion) such transactions before they run out of coins.  Would the network handle that?

Are you being serious here Jorge or is that trolling? You have a Ph.D. in the field of computer science yet fail to come up with your own answer.

Using a priority queue you can sort transactions and the nodes will simply drop the oldest transactions with the least fees if the queue overruns.
There already exist rules for how transactions are ordered and small value transactions require more of a fee to be higher in the queue.
Ultimately you will either quickly burn up your bitcoins in such an attack or your transactions will be dropped and ignored without affecting the others

[edit] the only effect you can cause is that zero/low fee transactions for tiny btc amounts coming from other parties will also be pushed off the queue

[edit2] here is a link to the unconfirmed tx queue from blockchain.info https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions
basically miners can include transactions (they are not forced to) and they will take the ones from the head of the queue that can fit into the block mined

[porcupine87]

I wouldn't use Germany as a shining example of a worker's paradise if I were you. It's a place where they work year round to bail out Greeks and Italians who take summers off.

billiyjoeallen, I wish your facts supported your bright rethoric.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/06/08/countries-most-vacation-days/2400193/

It's incredible how far this "northern Europe workers" vs "lazy Mediterraneans" lie has gone.

Disclosure: I'm Spanish.

You can work in a German factory and then work in a Greece factory. Then maybe you get an idea what is meant with "lazy". The Mediterreans work just more relaxed. You can not just compare working hours, the working mentality is different. So the mentality towards savings. Germans tend to save more, so they can build up more capital per employee which makes the labour hour more productive.

I am German. I don't say which approach is better. But in my opinion it would be fair, that the Germans are richer in an materialistic sense. The Mediterreans have less money but aren't as streed out at work. 

[vonBerlichingen]

And don´t forget the long an cold winters in Germany.  

Because of that fact the intelligence grew up over the centuries.

Then they went to several areas in the East and the South an brought the culture to the world.

So the Spartans were Germans too and worked also hard in their battles. But today there ist not much left of these glory days.

[raid_n]

I'm very disappointed by Jorge since a long time. His signature is very misleading! He claims to have an academic interest, but formed his opinion way before he really researched and understood how the network works. There is nothing academic in such an approach. Its okay to have a negative attitude towards bitcoin and being sceptic. But I kind of hoped that he would bring in some reasonable claims inside this circle of enthusiasts.

I've been wondering about that myself a bit. The only reasonable conclusion apart from Jorge trolling is that he is conducting some form of sociological research on the bitcoin community but I somehow doubt it.

[hdbuck]

I wouldn't use Germany as a shining example of a worker's paradise if I were you. It's a place where they work year round to bail out Greeks and Italians who take summers off.

billiyjoeallen, I wish your facts supported your bright rethoric.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/06/08/countries-most-vacation-days/2400193/

It's incredible how far this "northern Europe workers" vs "lazy Mediterraneans" lie has gone.

Disclosure: I'm Spanish.

Germany doesnt apply minimal wages.  

here in germany we are just introducing a minimum wage of 8.50 euro. its not much and a lot of people here work for less.
with good education its a very good place to work but without its terrible except if you just want free money from the welfare systems.

but we do not only sell cars. take a look at the dax companies, they are all global players.

must be said

well, didnt know that but i guess its a start

[octaft]

Thing is, I run into people like you all too often. You have been provided answers (and you reject them for good or bad reasons depending on your point of view) then you run around crowing that you have not been provided answers and expect someone to spoon feed you and then you still reject those answers and the cycle continues. Worse, typically you don't actually have arguments against the answers you have been provided, you just reject them out-of-hand. It becomes tiresome.

There is much good literature out there if you care to educate yourself. Check out some Popper, Hayek etc. There is undoubtedly also much good counter-argument should you wish to properly be able to refute positions you disagree with. You might even find yourself altering your perspective. I used to be quite the socialist myself.

You say that you have dealt with "people like" me "all too often," yet if that were truly the case, one would think you would have immediate answers to these issues I've brought up, because they are so painfully obvious concerns. If you can't show me you have some understanding of what YOU want, and that you haven't thought critically about the negative aspects of your idea, why should I bother taking your word for it and waste my time reading your books? If those books didn't provide you with answers to my questions, then why do I need to read them as of right now? I'll read them after I'm convinced that it's worth my time to, and I won't be convinced until obvious counter-arguments are addressed.

I've committed myself to the pursuit of knowledge, but nobody can learn everything, and we only have so much time to do things before we die. Convince me that this is worth my limited time if you want me to read those books. You've read the books, you're passionate about them, and you think they will help me learn, so save me hours upon hours of time and sum up the parts that are relevant to my issues, if indeed those books contain any.

If you are trying to say that you have provided me real answers specifically to the issues I brought up, please quote yourself, because I am actually interested and must have missed it the first time around.

[ChartBuddy]

Explanation

[JorgeStolfi]

I'm very disappointed by Jorge since a long time. His signature is very misleading! He claims to have an academic interest, but formed his opinion way before he really researched and understood how the network works. There is nothing academic in such an approach. Its okay to have a negative attitude towards bitcoin and being sceptic. But I kind of hoped that he would bring in some reasonable claims inside this circle of enthusiasts.

I've been wondering about that myself a bit. The only reasonable conclusion apart from Jorge trolling is that he is conducting some form of sociological research on the bitcoin community but I somehow doubt it.

I have written several times what is my opinion of bitcoin. Please read it (you may be even more disappointed then).

No, I have no interest in sociological research on the bitcoin community. 

And yes, I have a PhD in computer science, that I got by asking stupid questions.

[flynn]

And yes, I have a PhD in computer science, that I got by asking stupid questions.

Weren't you supposed to answer those questions instead of asking them ?

[octaft]

A voluntary society cannot be designed at all. It will be emergent. When a critical mass of people realize that the rules we tell children to live by (namely don't hurt people, don't mess with their stuff, and keep your promises) should be applied across the board, and that no other general rules are necessary, then such a society will form.

There can be no formula for dealing with people in need. As soon as such a formula is known, most of the marginally needy and some of the non-needy attempt to game the system. Subsidizing poverty creates more poverty. The best way to deal with those in need is on an individual case-by-case basis. It's too important of a problem to be left to monopolists. Concrete answers are wrong answers.

Killing and stealing only works until the productive people stop producing, and then everybody starves. The productive people started leaving South Africa in droves when the anti-capitalist Nelson Mendela took over. There's no place on earth with more natural resources per acre than South Africa. If people are starving there, then it's because the government killers and thieves created an environment hostile to peaceful trade.

Actual good rebuttal, but this assumes all will be rational and well-adjusted. The killers and stealers won't think like this (or won't care/won't have the skills needed to make it in the world), and people who refuse to live by the sword will not be able to allow themselves to starve if they can help it. If we both turn out to be right, you about killing and stealing losing efficacy over time, and me about killers and stealers doing killing and stealing anyway, that's a potential huge blow for your ideal. Having your reasonable people inevitably starved to death at the hand of greedy murderers and thieves is a likely death knell.

Personally, I'd rather people game the system by collecting more food stamps than they are legally allowed, rather then having them just straight up try to blow my brains out and take all my stuff. While I wish we could deal with them on a case by case basis, under the current system I think that would cost more than the money saved by catching fraud. If you think the ability and cost-effectiveness of doing this would be improved in your ideal world, or even if you think there is a way to improve it under the current system, I'd be very interested in hearing about that.

[macsga]

http://www.coindesk.com/singapore-regulate-bitcoin-exchanges-atms/
did you hear the train?

Train?
What TRAIN?

[aminorex]

For concreteness, suppose they have 100,000 BTC previously spread out over that many addresses, and start sending out 10-satoshi transactions between those addresses with 1 satoshi of fee.  They can send 10^13 (10 trillion) such transactions before they run out of coins.  Would the network handle that?

Not exact numbers, but useful numbers for reasoning, approximately correct: You can pack about 20,000 xns into a block. To outcompete other xns you need to pay > 0.0001 btc per xn.  Filling a block to deny service for 10 minutes requires 2BTC.  100,000 BTC would deny service for 500,000 minutes, about 11 months.  

In practice I would expect fees to rise quickly, as miners observed the attack and began to take steps.  I could see such an attack lasting for a week or two, depending on how quickly measures were taken and how well co-ordinated the major mining pools were.  More likely a day or three.  There are a zillion ways to break the attack vector.   Miners are ever and always the defenders of the network.

[aminorex]

Are they for real? How can they expect to be taken seriously while hosting on EC2. Its so obvious as well their webpage takes forever to load.

Is Reuters for real?  Linked-in?  Netflix?  I guess they're all just scams and don't actually support millions of real-time feeds and petabytes of bandwidth, since they are on EC2 as well.

[raid_n]

For concreteness, suppose they have 100,000 BTC previously spread out over that many addresses, and start sending out 10-satoshi transactions between those addresses with 1 satoshi of fee.  They can send 10^13 (10 trillion) such transactions before they run out of coins.  Would the network handle that?

Not exact numbers, but useful numbers for reasoning, approximately correct: You can pack about 20,000 xns into a block. To outcompete other xns you need to pay > 0.0001 btc per xn.  Filling a block to deny service for 10 minutes requires 2BTC.  100,000 BTC would deny service for 500,000 minutes, about 11 months.  

In practice I would expect fees to rise quickly, as miners observed the attack and began to take steps.  I could see such an attack lasting for a week or two, depending on how quickly measures were taken and how well co-ordinated the major mining pools were.  There are a zillion ways to break the attack vector.   Miners are ever and always the defenders of the network.

Interesting calculations. You forgot to take into consideration that larger sums get more priority so you most probably would only disrupt a portion of transactions

[aminorex]

Interesting calculations. You forgot to take into consideration that larger sums get more priority so you most probably would only disrupt a portion of transactions

It doesn't matter, if you have 100,000 btc.  You just send large value xns to yourself, always to a new address, but daisychaining the wallets.

[adamstgBit]

I ♥ BTC

that is all.
carry on.

[raid_n]

Interesting calculations. You forgot to take into consideration that larger sums get more priority so you most probably would only disrupt a portion of transactions

It doesn't matter, if you have 100,000 btc.  You just send large value xns to yourself, always to a new address, but daisychaining the wallets.

I suppose with 100,000btc it becomes somewhat feasible. But you still need to have 20k larger value transactions per block (I haven't looked at this but is it possible to have the outputs of one tx be the inputs of another tx in the same block?)

[edit] naturally there are many more elaborate ways to prevent this. You could favour transactions of coins that had their last transaction further in the past (is that done already?)