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

[Cconvert2G36]

-snip-

Embrace , Extend, Extinguish.

It is their usual policy. It isn't evil, but smart and cutthroat. I am not attacking them, just waking up some naive investors into the likely outcome. If Ethereum is to succeed they need to expect to compete with MSFT eventually. If Bitcoin is to succeed , it will have to compete with at least some fiat currencies. (unlikely to dominate over fiat ever or anytime soon )

Blockstream also is a profit motivated company. The employees have set up the corporation differently however to insure their motivations are aligned with Bitcoin by locking up their large holdings of BTC. This doesn't mean that their vision or plans are necessarily correct.(I believe they do have a better roadmap, but time will tell) . This also doesn't mean they aren't also motivated to make tons of profit from selling consulting services and other sidechain products. We should be on guard with this and support many implementations (Bitcore, libbitcoin, ect...) and be very careful there are multiple payment channel solutions that are open source and equally accessible to all users. This means Bitpay needs to immediately finish developing "impulse" channel and WTF is coinbase doing without at least investigating a payment channel solution, and sitting by allowing people to steal from them with their weak 0 conf algo's that are easily defeatable.

Embrace , Extend, Ensnare, Enrich.

I hear this bandied about, mainly by themselves, but now by their defenders. Do you have any specific information about the "locking up their large holdings of BTC", part? I question whether it is sufficient to ensure that their incentives align with the success of BTC, the token and native network, vs Blockstream, the Corporation.

Blockstream is a for profit corporation, now with $76MM of outside equity in the company. I will eat my shoe if their "time locked BTC compensation" is one twentieth of the amount of stock equity the founders now possess. Assuming this… I'm not convinced, at all, that they would refuse to hamper the utility of transacting on-chain in order to economically favor the solutions they are working hard to provide. Years ago, a bearish gmax famously claimed that Bitcoin was fundamentally broken, Adam Back ignored it until the bubble of 2013 (familiar?), I believe this is their effort to fix it. In that sense, I don't think they are being totally dishonest about their intentions or motivations, getting filthy rich is not their main goal, just a happy side effect of "fixing" a "broken" Bitcoin.

You mention side chains, and consulting, but you omit the possibility of them operating large, well funded, and highly connected lightning hubs, why? Simply because it will be open source and Joe Blow will have a fancy hub? Both of the changes they are pushing hard lately, Replace-By-Fee and Segregated Witness, are mandatory for these products to function. SW as currently designed gives signature heavy settlement transactions a 75% fee discount. Directly changing the economics of the system with hardly a debate about it… (the discount specifically).

Less listening and swallowing what they say... more watching what they do (and don't in the case of on-chain capacity) pls.

* Cconvert2G36 adjusts green beret for marcus

[1714834395]

1714834395

[BitUsher]

About a minute after the previous block. How long did it take to arrive? We don't know. Perhaps a few seconds before they scored their block (lucky them)? Would you expect them to just not mine in the time it takes them to build a new block that excludes all transactions in the previous?

I see 2 pools doing this, Antpool and BTCC. There are various reasons you don't see other pools doing this but that is besides the point. I don't expect them to do anything that isn't within their selfish interest... but you damn sure I will criticize them when they mine tx less blocks routinely when others aren't and than at the same time criticize core for stalling on increasing capacity.

Again, you miss the point. An entity that regularly needs to make hundreds of transactions is not likely to be entering each one by hand into some off-the-shelf wallet. The fact that some make fee suggestions (some wildly off the mark, by recent reports) is irrelevant.

Who said anything about manually sending out tx's?
You understand there are off the shelf API's to ascertain the appropriate fee in an automated manner, right?

[BlindMayorBitcorn]

Whoever said ETH doesn't have a future clearly hasn't been to the magical land of Etheria.

[BitUsher]

Less listening and swallowing what they say... more watching what they do (and don't in the case of on-chain capacity) pls.

My advice applies if they have ill intentions or not. We need to have a healthy amount of skepticism for coinbase/Bitpay's motivation, Garzik's Bloq, and Blockstream. One has to assume that any one of these groups can either unintentionally or intentionally cause harm to our ecosystem. The appropriate solution is to support the development of alternative implementations with separate teams of developers who aren't trying to attack the network with a contentious hardfork, and to support many payment channels developed and maintained by various organizations with a sense of coopertition. Wasting your time mudslinging or creating conspiracy theories won't get us anywhere.... assume the worst outcome is possible from blockstream , but not just them , but all of the other companies and organizations in our ecosystem and prepare and guard against these concerns.

What one shouldn't entertain is the fanciful and delusional notion that Bitcoin can scale without it becoming a settlement network. Just do the math and even If I grant you the best possible numbers you will realize that scaling completely on the chain is impossible and will leave bitcoin stunted and centralized.

Whoever said ETH doesn't have a future clearly hasn't been to the magical land of Etheria.

Ohh , don't get me wrong, There will indeed be many Dapps, they won't scale and are merely curious gimmicks. The people who disagree are caught up in some silly notion that blockchains are efficient (the opposite is true, it is an extremely ineffecient database) or that there is any need for scripts to use blockchains to run their code rather than just interact with bitcoin for a secure immutable ledger or settlement network.

If you disagree , than please explain to me how Etheria offers anything superior to simply downloading a game and networking with peers.

Edit --Gotcha ,  didn't pick up on the sarcasm because there are many Ethereum fanbois who think their dapps are innovative, but its still good that people consider the above before investing in Eth. Eth is a solution chasing a problem that doesn't exist and an act of supererogation that will grow into a monstrously inefficient database.

[BlindMayorBitcorn]

I tend to be pretty sarcastic. 
Maybe the decentralized alarm clock would have been more obvious.

[bargainbin]

...
What one shouldn't entertain is the fanciful and delusional notion that Bitcoin can scale without it becoming a settlement network. ...

And to think I bought into that whole Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System load of crap... O well, settlement layer for prepaid gift card Lightning Network it is then.

Thanks for settin' me straight, BitUsher

>Eth is a solution chasing a problem that doesn't exist
*Bitcoin
You keep misspelling it.

[BlindMayorBitcorn]

...
What one shouldn't entertain is the fanciful and delusional notion that Bitcoin can scale without it becoming a settlement network. ...

And to think I bought into that whole Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System load of crap... O well, settlement layer for prepaid gift card Lightning Network it is then.

Thanks for settin' me straight, BitUsher

I remember the day I learned Bitcoin couldn't scale right. It was last summer. I'm sure you made this discovery sometime earlier.

[bargainbin]

...
I remember the day I learned Bitcoin couldn't scale right. It was last summer. I'm sure you made this discovery sometime earlier.

Everybody made that discovery a bit earlier, just not something to talk about in polite company. Ruins the Currency of the Future backstory/spooks greater fools. Not in your rational self-interest, know what I mean?

[Cconvert2G36]

Less listening and swallowing what they say... more watching what they do (and don't in the case of on-chain capacity) pls.

My advice applies if they have ill intentions or not. We need to have a healthy amount of skepticism for coinbase/Bitpay's motivation, Garzik's Bloq, and Blockstream. One has to assume that any one of these groups can either unintentionally or intentionally cause harm to our ecosystem. The appropriate solution is to support the development of alternative implementations with separate teams of developers who aren't trying to attack the network with a contentious hardfork, and to support many payment channels developed and maintained by various organizations with a sense of coopertition. Wasting your time mudslinging or creating conspiracy theories won't get us anywhere.... assume the worst outcome is possible from blockstream , but not just them , but all of the other companies and organizations in our ecosystem and prepare and guard against these concerns.

Bloq, Bitpay, and Coinbase aren't getting everything they want, their way, from Core. If they were, I would complain just as loudly against it, especially if sacrifices were being made to make it happen.

As Core is the reference implementation, and, as you say, any implementation that diverts from their "consensus" rules is an attack... No change is actually possible in Bitcoin, unless it comes from them. And then, it can be soft forked in without old nodes even realizing it had happened. This is not the way the system is described in the white paper, and as long as you keep convincing the newbs and rubes that any contention is very scary and dangerous, I will continue to argue against what I view as your false premise.

What one shouldn't entertain is the fanciful and delusional notion that Bitcoin can scale without it becoming a settlement network. Just do the math and even If I grant you the best possible numbers you will realize that scaling completely on the chain is impossible and will leave bitcoin stunted and centralized.

You are painting a false narrative here about my position, fine, let me correct you. I never said that all transactions could and should be crammed into the blockchain! I welcome payment networks, and side chains, and I think a revised and economically neutral segwit offers many benefits. I don't welcome slanting the economic playing field in their favor.

You don't realize it, but you are advocating economic favoritism and central planning, exercised by an infallible and unimpeachable (no "contentious" implementations allowed) priesthood of Core devs (that already have an obvious and flagrant Conflict of Interest). I will argue vigorously against any and all attempts to steer and control Bitcoin by anything other than Nakamoto Consensus.

[BlindMayorBitcorn]

...
I remember the day I learned Bitcoin couldn't scale right. It was last summer. I'm sure you made this discovery sometime earlier.

Everybody made that discovery a bit earlier, just not something to talk about in polite company. Ruins the Currency of the Future backstory/spooks greater fools. Not in your rational self-interest, know what I mean?

Nudge nudge wink wink. Say no more.

[AlexGR]

What one shouldn't entertain is the fanciful and delusional notion that Bitcoin can scale without it becoming a settlement network. Just do the math and even If I grant you the best possible numbers you will realize that scaling completely on the chain is impossible

If you are talking for the short-term future, that's probably the case and that's why blocksize matters or why workarounds are needed. That's definitely not the long-term outcome though because technology moves on continuously.

If we follow the tech trendline (1000x in processing/ram/storage/networks in 1995-2015), what is technologically possible today (let's say 10 tx/s - it's probably more but anyway) can become 1000x, or 10.000tx/sec in 20 years.

With software improvements this could be bumped up even further, or, alternatively, make the 10.000tx/sec possible even faster.

The numbers sound as absurd as it would be in 1995 discussing the possibility of seeing 4K / 60fps video from your ...http browser (yet it was possible 20 years later), in an era that even 3kb gifs were getting compressed for the pages to load faster. Still, that's similar to what we are looking ahead in the 2020+ and seems unfathomable. And with that, there is the absolute certainty of scaling. It's not a matter of impossibility - just a matter of time.

[Cconvert2G36]

Adam Back floats the idea of changing the coin distribution method... with a soft fork. Seriously??

The stuff he is willing to offer without a full node referendum is truly frightening to me.

[ChartBuddy]

Coin



Explanation

[bargainbin]

B...buh but they promised... <snip>

Saying this as a friend, Alex: What one shouldn't entertain is the fanciful and delusional notion that Bitcoin can scale without it becoming a settlement network. Just do the math.
And stop being fanciful and delusional.

[JayJuanGee]

Lol... The last 4 LTC blocks (the equivalent of 1 BTC block), LTC had 4-2-3-6 txs, of which 4 are the block rewards (so actual txs = 11).

Last BTC block had over 2000 txs. It's averaging between 2k and 3k txs per block (last 6: 2165/3079/2496/2300/2782/3012).

Why the lol? No... really.

Are you trying to make the case that the only reason LTC has only processed 11 transactions in that time is because they are limited to that number? Would that be by design or by flaw?

...

Why the lol? No... really.

What do you want me to say for a "business" that doesn't want to pay a few cents and says "Altcoins are now cheaper to use than bitcoin."... like it was ever the opposite.

Laughing about a business seeking to optimize the value of the expenditures it makes brands you as someone unknowledgeable about how to run a business. That's all.

bitcoin (and altcoin) are way too volatile to ever be of any direct utility for commerce.

but whatever, keep the crytopiate fucking up your brain.

NEVER say never in bitcoinlandia.


If bitcoin were to achieve a $10 trillion or possibly a $100 trillion market cap (in today's values), then it would be a whole hell-a-va lot less volatile.   

[JayJuanGee]

B...buh but they promised... <snip>

Saying this as a friend, Alex: What one shouldn't entertain is the fanciful and delusional notion that Bitcoin can scale without it becoming a settlement network. Just do the math.
And stop being fanciful and delusional.

I am glad that friends are being made here in bitcoinlandia.


 


 

[AlexGR]

B...buh but they promised... <snip>

Saying this as a friend, Alex: What one shouldn't entertain is the fanciful and delusional notion that Bitcoin can scale without it becoming a settlement network. Just do the math.
And stop being fanciful and delusional.

Dat look....

[BlindMayorBitcorn]

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/is-bitcoin-under-attack-spam-fees-block-size-debate

"This would seem to imply that a single wallet or set of wallets is potentially sending the same coins over and over, to themselves"

[AlexGR]

"But for now, bitcoin users are reporting transactions taking hours upon hours to be confirmed—that is, to complete—and requiring high transaction fees in order to have their transactions included in a block."

He makes it sound like one has to pay serious money. "High fees" my ass.... 0.05 - 0.06$ for a high prio tx.

[BlindMayorBitcorn]

"But for now, bitcoin users are reporting transactions taking hours upon hours to be confirmed—that is, to complete—and requiring high transaction fees in order to have their transactions included in a block."

He makes it sound like one has to pay serious money. "High fees" my ass.... 0.05 - 0.06$ for a high prio tx.

It's true, their coverage of Bitcoin isn't the best. I had a tx included in the first block today for 4 cents.