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

[ChartBuddy]

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[thebitcoinquiz.com]

I wonder how do these people so easily vote for >300$ in the polls. Do people actually give a thought while voting or do they just vote out of optimism and fun?

[Dilla]

I think many expected more news of Gemini and the ETF by May 1st, hence the 300+, that's why I voted for that. Pretty sensible and thought out. Don't think you're a visionary because your prediction was more correct, no one knows really what the future will hold, we can only speculate.

[macsga]

More info on the Goldman Sachs story:

Circle Internet Financial, a bitcoin start-up led by Internet entrepreneur Jeremy Allaire, said it raised $50 million from investors including Goldman Sachs Group Inc., giving the virtual currency a jolt of credibility even as it struggles to gain consumer acceptance.

Circle said the new group of investors included a major Chinese investment firm, IDG Capital Partners, to help the Boston firm's expansion in that giant market.


“We could not be happier with our new strategic investors,” Allaire wrote in a blog post on the company's website. “They bring unique, powerful capabilities and capital that will help us continue building a new kind of global consumer finance company, one based on open platforms, open source software and ubiquitous mobile devices.”

This is gentlemen?

Sources:
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-goldman-sachs-bitcoin-20150430-story.html
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/05/03/youll-never-guess-who-is-investing-in-bitcoin.aspx

[shmadz]

Tim Swanson (who understands bitcoin's economy much better than most bitcoin gurus) is looking at the miners as an entity that performs a service to the "bitcoin system" (validating and securing transactions) in return for a payment (the block rewards and transaction fees).

That's where you and Tim are mistaken prof. You are completely ignoring the main function of the block reward, which is to distribute the tokens.

That may be one intended function of the block reward; but now it is effectively the main payment that miners get for their work.  (It is far from ideal for both purposes, though.  The 25 BTC reward would be adequate if the price was in the single-digit range; which would be the case, if Satoshi had not been brainwashed by his libertarian friends with that Austrian Economics fiction about deflationary money...)

Thanks to Marcus for bringing my attention to something I had missed.

I'm curious about that bolded part. What, in your opinion, would be a more "ideal" distribution method?

[roslinpl]

I wonder how do these people so easily vote for >300$ in the polls. Do people actually give a thought while voting or do they just vote out of optimism and fun?

Optimism and fun I believe.

:-)

Don't you think that our market needs those two?

I love to see such optimism in our community and even when it's not too realistic point of view at the moment - in the future it will be on daily basis.

Best regards.

[Cassius]

https://bitscan.com/articles/bitcoin-economy-state-of-the-nation

Vaguely relevant to some of the drivel above.

[ChartBuddy]

Coin
Explanation

[tabnloz]

Tim Swanson (who understands bitcoin's economy much better than most bitcoin gurus) is looking at the miners as an entity that performs a service to the "bitcoin system" (validating and securing transactions) in return for a payment (the block rewards and transaction fees).

That's where you and Tim are mistaken prof. You are completely ignoring the main function of the block reward, which is to distribute the tokens.

That may be one intended function of the block reward; but now it is effectively the main payment that miners get for their work.  (It is far from ideal for both purposes, though.  The 25 BTC reward would be adequate if the price was in the single-digit range; which would be the case, if Satoshi had not been brainwashed by his libertarian friends with that Austrian Economics fiction about deflationary money...)

At least we are getting to the crux of where your standpoint comes from.

Dislike of ponzi schemes (like TelexFree and which you conflate with bitcoin & early adopters)

Believe Bitcoin is ruined by libertarians / austrians / deflationists leanings.

Living through the Farias & Collor times in Brazil, wouldn't you think a bootstrapping system that attempted to wipe out theft of funds, fraud etc (own priv keys and -pre-emptively- not in Mt Gox sense). Seems like more cynicism than skepticism

[aliro38]

Tim Swanson thinks transactions cost 25 BTC divided by the number of transactions in a block. That's a complete misunderstanding of not just what the block reward does but of what Bitcoin even is. He has gathered some interesting data, but his analysis is unlikely to be of much use as he has no fundamental understanding of Bitcoin in the first place.

Tim Swanson (who understands bitcoin's economy much better than most bitcoin gurus) is looking at the miners as an entity that performs a service to the "bitcoin system" (validating and securing transactions) in return for a payment (the block rewards and transaction fees).

Right now, that entity gets 25 BTC (~6000 USD) for each validated block, and the average block contains 750 transactions.  So the miners are being paid ~8 USD for each transaction that they process, on average.

In percentage terms, the transactions in a block move about 280'000 USD, on average (excluding presumed "return change" outputs); so the miners' revenue is about 2% of the money that they move.

There is not much room for misunderstanding there.  Right now,  the bitcoin network is way too expensive for the service that it renders.  If the price were to rise to 2'400 $/BTC before the next halving, and the volume numbers doubled until then (which is what they barely did over the last 2 years), the miners would be paid ~40 dollars per transaction , or 10% of the transaction amount, on the average.

As you all know, those 8 bucks (or 40 bucks) come entirely from the pockets of new investors -- the people who are buying bitcoins today to increase their holdings.  For the price to increase to 2'400 $/BTC over the next year, there would have to be a 10x increase in the money brought in by those investors.  I hope that everybody here is aware of that.

The money earned by the miners will never get back to the system; therefore, the only hope that those new investors have of recovering their money is that there will be enough new investors' money coming in tomorrow to pay for tomorrow's mining and to buy those bitcoins that they are buying today, hpefully with some premium. 

Thus, at current prices and rewards, the bitcoin protocol is creating every day another million dollars of naked debt: money which the bitcoin holders have put into the system, and expect to get back from it --- but which has been given to the miners, and will not be returned by them.

By pushing the cost of the network to those new investors, the protocol allows the users and entrepreneurs to entertain the illusion that transactions have almost zero cost, and therefore are cheaper than international bank payments and remittances.  This whacky "business model" cannot go on indefinitely.

Thanks!
I wish you were wrong...
Within the big picture as described above, do you believe is still possible to have another future hype (fueled maybe by the interested actors and human psychology) or rather a continuous series of crashes/resistance?

Please keep up the good work!

[ChartBuddy]

Coin
Explanation

[ErisDiscordia]

Tim Swanson (who understands bitcoin's economy much better than most bitcoin gurus) is looking at the miners as an entity that performs a service to the "bitcoin system" (validating and securing transactions) in return for a payment (the block rewards and transaction fees).

That's where you and Tim are mistaken prof. You are completely ignoring the main function of the block reward, which is to distribute the tokens.

That may be one intended function of the block reward; but now it is effectively the main payment that miners get for their work.  (It is far from ideal for both purposes, though.  The 25 BTC reward would be adequate if the price was in the single-digit range; which would be the case, if Satoshi had not been brainwashed by his libertarian friends with that Austrian Economics fiction about deflationary money...)

oh cool, you know the future with perfect certainty, must be nice.

well, no harm then in letting us crazy libtard anarchist criminals try it out then, right? It will just fail instantly and you and your statist brethren will have definite proof that it can't work and you'll get to suck big brothers dick in peace forever and ever

[marcus_of_augustus]

Tim Swanson thinks transactions cost 25 BTC divided by the number of transactions in a block. That's a complete misunderstanding of not just what the block reward does but of what Bitcoin even is. He has gathered some interesting data, but his analysis is unlikely to be of much use as he has no fundamental understanding of Bitcoin in the first place.

Tim Swanson (who understands bitcoin's economy much better than most bitcoin gurus) is looking at the miners as an entity that performs a service to the "bitcoin system" (validating and securing transactions) in return for a payment (the block rewards and transaction fees).

Right now, that entity gets 25 BTC (~6000 USD) for each validated block, and the average block contains 750 transactions.  So the miners are being paid ~8 USD for each transaction that they process, on average.

In percentage terms, the transactions in a block move about 280'000 USD, on average (excluding presumed "return change" outputs); so the miners' revenue is about 2% of the money that they move.

There is not much room for misunderstanding there.  Right now,  the bitcoin network is way too expensive for the service that it renders.  If the price were to rise to 2'400 $/BTC before the next halving, and the volume numbers doubled until then (which is what they barely did over the last 2 years), the miners would be paid ~40 dollars per transaction , or 10% of the transaction amount, on the average.

As you all know, those 8 bucks (or 40 bucks) come entirely from the pockets of new investors -- the people who are buying bitcoins today to increase their holdings.  For the price to increase to 2'400 $/BTC over the next year, there would have to be a 10x increase in the money brought in by those investors.  I hope that everybody here is aware of that.

The money earned by the miners will never get back to the system; therefore, the only hope that those new investors have of recovering their money is that there will be enough new investors' money coming in tomorrow to pay for tomorrow's mining and to buy those bitcoins that they are buying today, hpefully with some premium. 

Thus, at current prices and rewards, the bitcoin protocol is creating every day another million dollars of naked debt: money which the bitcoin holders have put into the system, and expect to get back from it --- but which has been given to the miners, and will not be returned by them.

By pushing the cost of the network to those new investors, the protocol allows the users and entrepreneurs to entertain the illusion that transactions have almost zero cost, and therefore are cheaper than international bank payments and remittances.  This whacky "business model" cannot go on indefinitely.

Thanks!
I wish you were wrong...
Within the big picture as described above, do you believe is still possible to have another future hype (fueled maybe by the interested actors and human psychology) or rather a continuous series of crashes/resistance?

Please keep up the good work!

It is not good work at all, it is elaborate trolling dressed up analysis. Stolfi always uses a small set of deviously well-chosen assumptions to ensure he gets the negative results he is looking for.

Monetary benefits can not be analysed simply by considering a payments network. The broader society-wide, intangible, economic benefits from good, sound money are manifest and difficult to quantify. What we do know is that rampant money printing, like from central bank fiat money, can be devastatingly destructive to whole nations, especially poor people and those not well-connected to government troughs, like university professors.

Ask Stofli to analyse the downsides experienced by multiple devaluations of the Brazilian money? Especially for the victims of those fiat money scams perpetrated by the governments he champions at every turn. He is an unashamed cheerleader for the financial destruction and poverty bought about by all the worst economic theories entrapping hundreds of millions. He is an enemy of freedom of the most devious, disgusting kind.

[inca]

Tim Swanson (who understands bitcoin's economy much better than most bitcoin gurus) is looking at the miners as an entity that performs a service to the "bitcoin system" (validating and securing transactions) in return for a payment (the block rewards and transaction fees).

That's where you and Tim are mistaken prof. You are completely ignoring the main function of the block reward, which is to distribute the tokens.

That may be one intended function of the block reward; but now it is effectively the main payment that miners get for their work.  (It is far from ideal for both purposes, though.  The 25 BTC reward would be adequate if the price was in the single-digit range; which would be the case, if Satoshi had not been brainwashed by his libertarian friends with that Austrian Economics fiction about deflationary money...)

oh cool, you know the future with perfect certainty, must be nice.

well, no harm then in letting us crazy libtard anarchist criminals try it out then, right? It will just fail instantly and you and your statist brethren will have definite proof that it can't work and you'll get to suck big brothers dick in peace forever and ever

Jorge deliberately chooses to ignore the role of a bitcoin miner. That role is to distribute new coins and maintain network security. Moaning that miners get paid with the block reward and that this somehow makes bitcoin inefficient is stupid. It is a design choice. The block reward is falling exponentially and the coin inflation he is so concerned new users have to pay for will be irrelevant by 2020.

[becoin]

money which the bitcoin holders have put into the system, and expect to get back from it ---

I've put dollars into bitcoin but I don't expect to get back dollars. I expect to get back goods and services.

It does not matter.  If you buy 1 BTC today, the only way you will get 240$ worth of goods tomorrow is if tomorrow's new investors, after buying all the 3600 coins that will be issued tomorrow, will also buy from BitPay the 1 BTC that you spent on said goods.

240$ worth of goods tomorrow will be much less than 240$ worth of goods today. All central banks have quite successfully taken care of this to be unstoppable.

[ChartBuddy]

Coin
Explanation

[testerman]

it is just like calm weather before panic buy storm before the next sunday

i expect 250+ in a few days

[ChartBuddy]

Coin
Explanation

[JorgeStolfi]

I'm curious about that bolded part. What, in your opinion, would be a more "ideal" distribution method?

There wasn't (isn't) any good distribution method for a private currency.  Solving that sub-problem would require another genial invention that hasn't been invented yet.  Giving the coins to the miners who create them may have been the "least bad" decision, but it was still bad.  

It wouldn't have been so bad if the price had remained low enough for mining to remain distributed among most users, and remained so while the currency became widely adopted, until most of the coins were issued.  That would have made transaction fees relevant since the beginning ("users pay").

Instead, hoarding and speculation pushed the price to 1000x its "natural" level, transaction fees became insignificant compared to block reward ("ïnvestors pay"), mining became industrialized and concentrated and 1000x more costly than what it should...   And the price bubble attracted all those snake oil salesmen and ponzi operators...

[Cassius]

It's increasingly clear that Jorge's opposition to bitcoin is primarily emotional. He backs it up with some reasonable evidence, whilst ignoring clear evidence that doesn't fit his position. Call him on this and he won't answer you, or he'll just say that's why bitcoiners do too, so it's ok. He is not objective and not scientific, despite his credentials. Take his posts with a truckload of salt.
I'm not too worried about miners selling, since the block rewards are and were always meant to be a temporary situation to bootstrap the network. Speculators have run away with it too far, sure, but it's not a killer blow. I'm not even sure that it's a bad thing.

Looking at it another way, at the current price (call it an average of around $230 for 4 months now), people are investing $800,000 in the bitcoin network every day. That doesn't seem like a dead project to me. In fact, after 15 months of bear market, that's kind of promising, isn't it? (Jorge will tell you it's testimony to the greed and stupidity of bitcoiners, just to save him the time.)

@becoin You just made me wipe my screen.