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

[ChartBuddy]

Explanation

[1714326855]

1714326855

[1714326855]

1714326855

[OutOfMemory]

Who keeps deleting WO posts?  Things are jumping around—again and again.  At this rate, WO’s page-count will soon dip below the Bitcoin price without any recovery in the latter.

Did you hack Chartbuddy, slowly deleting his posts, from oldest to most recent? 
Now you're probably asking this, just to try to move yourself out of scope as a suspect? 
A clever move...

/irony off

No idea why, but it happens from time to time.
Isn't there a web page with WO statistics somewhere? You could track the posts-per-username figures (maybe programmatically using wget and grep as a start) to find out...

[modrobert]

I wonder how much money good old "bitcoin vanga" cost various sheep along the way?

How about Pirate@40?

[Cryptotourist]

Meh,

The break

See you in a few months time, yo.

[OutOfMemory]

Meh,

The break

See you in a few months time, yo.

No threating, please  
Have a good time, though  

[death_wish]

Who keeps deleting WO posts?  Things are jumping around—again and again.  At this rate, WO’s page-count will soon dip below the Bitcoin price without any recovery in the latter.

Did you hack Chartbuddy, slowly deleting his posts, from oldest to most recent? 
Now you're probably asking this, just to try to move yourself out of scope as a suspect? 
A clever move...

Scary:  Buddy currently has 31,198 posts.  Unless the account has been used outside WO (not sure), that is 1,559.9 pages of the Wall Observer.  Deleting Buddy would crash WO’s current page from 30,982 (near-ish the beginning of the page) to 29,422.

Need some TA:  Can we hold support at 30k?

/irony off

No idea why, but it happens from time to time.
Isn't there a web page with WO statistics somewhere? You could track the posts-per-username figures (maybe programmatically using wget and grep as a start) to find out...

I am not a WO specialist.  The only WO-specific site I have in my bookmarks seems to have disappeared; here is the last non-blank copy in Wayback.  Someone else probably has a site somewhere.

I wonder how much money good old "bitcoin vanga" cost various sheep along the way?

How about Pirate@40?

Recently mentioned:

Defi is a wilderness—just like early Bitcoin was a wilderness of scams, Ponzis, and children’s games, but with added VC corruption.  Early Bitcoin was an obscene shitshow from pirateat40 to Gox, to name only a few of the most notorious early-Bitcoinland embarrassments that remind me of defi today.  If you venture out into defi today, put on your waders and prepare to get knee-deep in bull-excrement.

[ChartBuddy]

Explanation

[OutOfMemory]

Some Zen wisdom:

You don't respect an old vagina for its look or smell,
you respect it for the number of dicks it got filled by.

Sorry, i totally made this up, but it probably has some use for generating a good laugh or two  

Have a nice day!

[modrobert]

Recently mentioned:

Defi is a wilderness—just like early Bitcoin was a wilderness of scams, Ponzis, and children’s games, but with added VC corruption.  Early Bitcoin was an obscene shitshow from pirateat40 to Gox, to name only a few of the most notorious early-Bitcoinland embarrassments that remind me of defi today.  If you venture out into defi today, put on your waders and prepare to get knee-deep in bull-excrement.

I disagree, at least regarding Pirate@40, it was market manipulation which worked (for a while); pool a lot of BTC to one guy who makes whale splashes at the biggest exchange, at the expense of everyone else trading. When he went insolvent due to taking on more than he could chew (in profit payouts) his former backers cried ponzi.

[death_wish]

Recently mentioned:

Defi is a wilderness—just like early Bitcoin was a wilderness of scams, Ponzis, and children’s games, but with added VC corruption.  Early Bitcoin was an obscene shitshow from pirateat40 to Gox, to name only a few of the most notorious early-Bitcoinland embarrassments that remind me of defi today.  If you venture out into defi today, put on your waders and prepare to get knee-deep in bull-excrement.

I disagree, at least regarding Pirate@40, it was market manipulation which worked (for a while); pool a lot of BTC to one guy who makes whale splashes at the biggest exchange, at the expense of everyone else trading. When he went insolvent due to taking on more than he could chew (in profit payouts) his former backers cried ponzi.

A large proportion of defi, in a nutshell.  (Some of the rest of defi has some awesome ideas, such as building no-KYC permissionless exchanges.)

P.S., how was pirate different than a16z, et al. now?  The latter are surely much more sophisticated, and “respectable”.  I mean:  If you peer through the layers of grand-scale financial manipulation, and set aside the implementation details, how are they essentially different?

[modrobert]

Recently mentioned:

Defi is a wilderness—just like early Bitcoin was a wilderness of scams, Ponzis, and children’s games, but with added VC corruption.  Early Bitcoin was an obscene shitshow from pirateat40 to Gox, to name only a few of the most notorious early-Bitcoinland embarrassments that remind me of defi today.  If you venture out into defi today, put on your waders and prepare to get knee-deep in bull-excrement.

I disagree, at least regarding Pirate@40, it was market manipulation which worked (for a while); pool a lot of BTC to one guy who makes whale splashes at the biggest exchange, at the expense of everyone else trading. When he went insolvent due to taking on more than he could chew (in profit payouts) his former backers cried ponzi.

A large proportion of defi, in a nutshell.  (Some of the rest of defi has some awesome ideas, such as building no-KYC permissionless exchanges.)

P.S., how was pirate different than a16z, et al. now?  The latter are surely much more sophisticated, and “respectable”.  I mean:  If you peer through the layers of grand-scale financial manipulation, and set aside the implementation details, how are they essentially different?

The main difference seems to be how we interpret the words, to me "scam" or "ponzi" is associated with original intent to take the money and run, not how a failed plan ending in bankruptcy eventually plays out.

I agree about the grand-scale financial manipulation, it's basically the same thing, the key difference is it's being sanctioned by the banking system.

[El duderino_]

Little game

Where the Dude at

First guess first boosted

Exact name of the place

[OutOfMemory]

I don't like my TA now, honestly.

Seems like in times of high fear/uncertainty short term support and resistance levels are closely together and if there's no major breakout to the upside for the time of two weeks or more, a bigger drop is on the menu. Looks like traders trying to suck out small amounts of fiat gains on the back of accumulating hodlers. Good for the hodlers, though.
At some point market confidence has to reverse, to build big green, institutional dildos and keep shorters from klicking the red buttons to get away with some fiat ahead of the next dip.
First, this thought was SOMA, but it seems to match price action pretty well, in retrospection.

Little game

Where the Dude at

First guess first boosted

Exact name of the place

Fugg, i gotta leave 
Since most fully dressed people on the pic are asian, i guess it's some place in Asia.
Looks like a job for Fillippone or the WO hatter...   
Good luck!
Thanks for all the WAI-games, Dude 

[ChartBuddy]

Explanation

[ivomm]

Let's be fair to mindrust though. He sold in panic and disappointment at the price he had bought. Although he was not overexposed as he claimed - 2 to 1 in favor of fiat is anything but overexposed. Many of us are 100% in favor of bitcoin in terms of savings. I personally had exhausted the credit card limits and had taken a loan from the bank with which I had bought the day before at 7K. If I wasn't afraid of covid, I swear, I would go the next day and take out a 5x bigger loan and buy bitcoins for 4K. Whatever.

But in the last year we have seen something even more unfortunate, not to say ridiculous. We see an influx of institutions, thousands of them, who have invested in bitcoin and even more companies and retail behind them. However, over 90% of them have no knowledge, no beliefs, no intention to hold for at least 4 years. Some of them were quite influenced by the tweets of elon musk, which shows what their intellectual level was. That is why these crashes last year and this year turned out to be so big. All these companies and retail lost over 50% of their money. And this can be easily checked on the glassnode website. What I noticed, for example, I see today that many others have noticed on Twitter. From the Canadian purpose ETF were withdrawn 24K bitcoins at the end of Friday (50% of the bitcoins). It is almost certain that this is a company that has found a way to sell them on the exchange the next day. Something that caused the big crash.

So, several large companies have practically gone bankrupt, and others are moving in that direction. Probably over 90% of the companies. There, in addition to the fact that customers want an annual interest rate, contracts are often made, in case the price falls to a certain level, the asset to be sold immediately. This is de facto a long position with a margin call. Michael Sailor did something similar, but there the calculations are better and even at 3K he is not in danger of liquidation. Not to mention the companies that use bitcoins as collateral for their collapsed shitcoins.

What follows from now on? This process of exodus of the institutions and the weak hands will probably continue for another 2-3 years at least. But even afther that, we clearly cannot rely on them for sustainable price growth. In addition, until the very end of 2020, despite the withdrawal of 650K bitcoins from Greyscale from the market, the price could not pass 10K due to the ugly Bart manipulations on 20x+ derivatives exchanges such as Bitmex. The paypal sensation had to appear before the bull market could start. Assuming that the ETF will be given to Greyscale within 3 years, this means that these bitcoins will return to the exchanges. And if there is no sensational news like PayPal, there may not even be a significant bullish market despite the halving.

So, let's hope that the ETF will not be given and the institutions will not inflate the price and then bring it down. What is sure to happen is that the convinced hodlers will continue to increase their stash and will not sell on a loss.

[empowering]

Little game

Where the Dude at

First guess first boosted

Exact name of the place

Finns Beach club (Bali)


(FYI Bali are toying with the idea of doing 5 year Nomad visas  )

[a1 Hashrate LLC2022]

Some Zen wisdom:

You don't respect an old vagina for its look or smell,
you respect it for the number of dicks it got filled by.

Sorry, i totally made this up, but it probably has some use for generating a good laugh or two  

Have a nice day!

Kind of like the old timex commercials.

"It takes a licking but keeps on ticking. "

[ChartBuddy]

Explanation

[death_wish]

Celsius is Pirate 2.0

Pirate presaged Celsius Network, which is worse than anything in defi.

There is nothing new under the sun.  Some people here categorically reject defi, while they forget what Bitcoin was like in its toddler years.  Bitcoinland was befouled with mountains of garbage worse than anything in defi:  These early Bitcoin mass-scams were the forerunners of Celsius Network.

Yes, it is ironic that Vitalik wrote the below-quoted article; he knew this world well!  Compare the blatant HYIP schemes in defi called “Yield Farming” in the past two years.  Then pause to reflect that at least those Yield Farms do not entrust funds to a centralized custodian—unlike the following.  “Not your keys...”

Ponzi schemes: The Danger of High Interest Savings Funds

Vitalik Buterin
May 31, 2012

Over the past five months, the Bitcoin community has seen the emergence of savings funds offering interest rates far higher than any seen in the traditional economy. The most innocuous form of high-interest deposits, mining contracts, have been around for a long time, allowing anyone to financially participate in mining operations by buying shares and collecting a percentage of the profits in return, offering returns of up to 1.4% per week, or an annual percentage rate (APR) of 106%. Non-mining opportunities began to offer even higher returns than this. GLBSE assets like TYGRR-BANK return up to 2.2% per week, or 211% APR, and in mid-January a forum user known as “imsaguy” offered 6% per 2 weeks, or 357% APR, although at the cost of a somewhat long-term commitment. More recently, however, the interest rates seem to have lost all sanity. Looking at the “lending” and “securities” subforms at bitcointalk.org, we see headlines like “ShadowAlexey’s Deposits 12-18% per month“, “Savings Account, 4% Weekly“, and even “Hashking’s 6.75% Weekly Deposit Special” – a staggering 2921% APR.

The largest of these lenders, and likely the one that many of the other funds are at least partially themselves invested in, goes by the name “pirateat40″, or Pirate for short, and Pirate’s deposit operation is formally called “Bitcoin Savings & Trust”. Accounts in BST are heavily coveted, with Pirate enforcing limits on the number and size of deposits, and interest rates are very high: 4.2% for deposits of at least 100 BTC, 5.6% at 500 BTC and 7% (that’s 3313% APR) at 2000 BTC. Pirate has been unwilling to reveal much about how he is able to earn such high interest rates in the first place, although the reasons that he has given include market arbitrage and “private loans to network members”. Pirate boasts that his activities in such fields provide returns of 10.65% per week, and he pays out an average of 5.98%.

Recently mentioned:

Defi is a wilderness—just like early Bitcoin was a wilderness of scams, Ponzis, and children’s games, but with added VC corruption.  Early Bitcoin was an obscene shitshow from pirateat40 to Gox, to name only a few of the most notorious early-Bitcoinland embarrassments that remind me of defi today.  If you venture out into defi today, put on your waders and prepare to get knee-deep in bull-excrement.

I disagree, at least regarding Pirate@40, it was market manipulation which worked (for a while); pool a lot of BTC to one guy who makes whale splashes at the biggest exchange, at the expense of everyone else trading. When he went insolvent due to taking on more than he could chew (in profit payouts) his former backers cried ponzi.

A large proportion of defi, in a nutshell.  (Some of the rest of defi has some awesome ideas, such as building no-KYC permissionless exchanges.)

P.S., how was pirate different than a16z, et al. now?  The latter are surely much more sophisticated, and “respectable”.  I mean:  If you peer through the layers of grand-scale financial manipulation, and set aside the implementation details, how are they essentially different?

The main difference seems to be how we interpret the words, to me "scam" or "ponzi" is associated with original intent to take the money and run, not how a failed plan ending in bankruptcy eventually plays out.

I agree about the grand-scale financial manipulation, it's basically the same thing, the key difference is it's being sanctioned by the banking system.

“Scam” denotes fraud:  Knowingly making false statements of material fact that mislead people to their detriment.  (Legal elements of fraud.)  “Ponzi” denotes a scam which uses new investors’ money to pay old investors.

I don’t want to go off into a detailed scrutiny of the facts here.  Rather, I will assume for the sake of discussion that your description is fully accurate as to fact.

Still, I don’t buy for even one moment any proposition that Trendon Shavers started with honest intentions.  He promised BTC interest rates that are impossible to sustain.  His advertising was so outrageous that I am unsympathetic to anyone who lost money with him.  The greed and foolishness of the victims does not excuse the scam, but it does to some degree mean that they were “asking for it”.

Defi was the wrong comparison.  According to your own description, the Pirate scam was most similar to Celsius Network, which is not even defi.

Promise depositors that they will be paid interest on BTC.  Celsius promised rates that seemed superficially at the outside bounds of what could arguably be plausible—maybe.  pirateat40 promised wildly impossible rates that should have set off the “SCAM!” senses of any ordinary reasonable person.

Use “arbitrage” as an excuse for promising impossible yields.  Arbitrage can be good; I have profitably done it myself, and I plan to do much more of it in the future.  However, arbitrage opportunities are limited and competitive.  Neither Celsius nor Pirate could plausibly claim to generate the promised returns from arbs with the volumes of money involved.

Take deposits.  Use the BTC to trash the BTC market (one way or another), to make it possible to pay interest to depositors—for awhile.  How do you like what Celsius has allegedly done to our market for about the past six months?

Ultimately go insolvent, because the scam is unsustainable.

Needless to say, both systems are entirely centralized and custodial.  “Not your keys” overtly centralized custodial garbage cannot be called “defi (decentralized finance)”.


The earliest available Wayback snapshot of the “First Pirate Savings and Trust” OP:

First Pirate Savings & Trust | www(.)BTCLending(.)com

[...]

7-Day Interest Rate on Deposits

• 100 BTC + 4.2%
• 500 BTC + 5.6%
• 2000 BTC + 7.0%

In the case of pirateat40, everyone had an explicit warning that this was an obvious, blatant scam.  Post #2 in the thread was by someone with good sense, and a finely tuned b.s. detector:

Smells like a classical HYIP scam.

I apologize to defi for comparing it to pirateat40.  Celsius Network is the proper comparison to pirateat40.  The worst shitcoin Ponzis in defi look innocent by comparison.

[Hamza2424]

Celsius is Pirate 2.0

Pirate presaged Celsius Network, which is worse than anything in defi.

There is nothing new under the sun.  Some people here categorically reject defi, while they forget what Bitcoin was like in its toddler years.  Bitcoinland was befouled with mountains of garbage worse than anything in defi:  These early Bitcoin mass-scams were the forerunners of Celsius Network.

Yes, it is ironic that Vitalik wrote the below-quoted article; he knew this world well!  Compare the blatant HYIP schemes in defi called “Yield Farming” in the past two years.  Then pause to reflect that at least those Yield Farms do not entrust funds to a centralized custodian—unlike the following.  “Not your keys...”

Ponzi schemes: The Danger of High Interest Savings Funds

Vitalik Buterin
May 31, 2012

Over the past five months, the Bitcoin community has seen the emergence of savings funds offering interest rates far higher than any seen in the traditional economy. The most innocuous form of high-interest deposits, mining contracts, have been around for a long time, allowing anyone to financially participate in mining operations by buying shares and collecting a percentage of the profits in return, offering returns of up to 1.4% per week, or an annual percentage rate (APR) of 106%. Non-mining opportunities began to offer even higher returns than this. GLBSE assets like TYGRR-BANK return up to 2.2% per week, or 211% APR, and in mid-January a forum user known as “imsaguy” offered 6% per 2 weeks, or 357% APR, although at the cost of a somewhat long-term commitment. More recently, however, the interest rates seem to have lost all sanity. Looking at the “lending” and “securities” subforms at bitcointalk.org, we see headlines like “ShadowAlexey’s Deposits 12-18% per month“, “Savings Account, 4% Weekly“, and even “Hashking’s 6.75% Weekly Deposit Special” – a staggering 2921% APR.

The largest of these lenders, and likely the one that many of the other funds are at least partially themselves invested in, goes by the name “pirateat40″, or Pirate for short, and Pirate’s deposit operation is formally called “Bitcoin Savings & Trust”. Accounts in BST are heavily coveted, with Pirate enforcing limits on the number and size of deposits, and interest rates are very high: 4.2% for deposits of at least 100 BTC, 5.6% at 500 BTC and 7% (that’s 3313% APR) at 2000 BTC. Pirate has been unwilling to reveal much about how he is able to earn such high interest rates in the first place, although the reasons that he has given include market arbitrage and “private loans to network members”. Pirate boasts that his activities in such fields provide returns of 10.65% per week, and he pays out an average of 5.98%.

Recently mentioned:

Defi is a wilderness—just like early Bitcoin was a wilderness of scams, Ponzis, and children’s games, but with added VC corruption.  Early Bitcoin was an obscene shitshow from pirateat40 to Gox, to name only a few of the most notorious early-Bitcoinland embarrassments that remind me of defi today.  If you venture out into defi today, put on your waders and prepare to get knee-deep in bull-excrement.

I disagree, at least regarding Pirate@40, it was market manipulation which worked (for a while); pool a lot of BTC to one guy who makes whale splashes at the biggest exchange, at the expense of everyone else trading. When he went insolvent due to taking on more than he could chew (in profit payouts) his former backers cried ponzi.

A large proportion of defi, in a nutshell.  (Some of the rest of defi has some awesome ideas, such as building no-KYC permissionless exchanges.)

P.S., how was pirate different than a16z, et al. now?  The latter are surely much more sophisticated, and “respectable”.  I mean:  If you peer through the layers of grand-scale financial manipulation, and set aside the implementation details, how are they essentially different?

The main difference seems to be how we interpret the words, to me "scam" or "ponzi" is associated with original intent to take the money and run, not how a failed plan ending in bankruptcy eventually plays out.

I agree about the grand-scale financial manipulation, it's basically the same thing, the key difference is it's being sanctioned by the banking system.

“Scam” denotes fraud:  Knowingly making false statements of material fact that mislead people to their detriment.  (Legal elements of fraud.)  “Ponzi” denotes a scam which uses new investors’ money to pay old investors.

I don’t want to go off into a detailed scrutiny of the facts here.  Rather, I will assume for the sake of discussion that your description is fully accurate as to fact.

Still, I don’t buy for even one moment any proposition that Trendon Shavers started with honest intentions.  He promised BTC interest rates that are impossible to sustain.  His advertising was so outrageous that I am unsympathetic to anyone who lost money with him.  The greed and foolishness of the victims does not excuse the scam, but it does to some degree mean that they were “asking for it”.

Defi was the wrong comparison.  According to your own description, the Pirate scam was most similar to Celsius Network, which is not even defi.

Promise depositors that they will be paid interest on BTC.  Celsius promised rates that seemed superficially at the outside bounds of what could arguably be plausible—maybe.  pirateat40 promised wildly impossible rates that should have set off the “SCAM!” senses of any ordinary reasonable person.

Use “arbitrage” as an excuse for promising impossible yields.  Arbitrage can be good; I have profitably done it myself, and I plan to do much more of it in the future.  However, arbitrage opportunities are limited and competitive.  Neither Celsius nor Pirate could plausibly claim to generate the promised returns from arbs with the volumes of money involved.

Take deposits.  Use the BTC to trash the BTC market (one way or another), to make it possible to pay interest to depositors—for awhile.  How do you like what Celsius has allegedly done to our market for about the past six months?

Ultimately go insolvent, because the scam is unsustainable.

Needless to say, both systems are entirely centralized and custodial.  “Not your keys” overtly centralized custodial garbage cannot be called “defi (decentralized finance)”.


The earliest available Wayback snapshot of the “First Pirate Savings and Trust” OP:

First Pirate Savings & Trust | www(.)BTCLending(.)com

[...]

7-Day Interest Rate on Deposits

• 100 BTC + 4.2%
• 500 BTC + 5.6%
• 2000 BTC + 7.0%

In the case of pirateat40, everyone had an explicit warning that this was an obvious, blatant scam.  Post #2 in the thread was by someone with good sense, and a finely tuned b.s. detector:

Smells like a classical HYIP scam.

I apologize to defi for comparing it to pirateat40.  Celsius Network is the proper comparison to pirateat40.  The worst shitcoin Ponzis in defi look innocent by comparison.

Tell me Honestly Who Made it Reading Complete this Topic.

++++++++

Honestly Only thing related to me was Last Lines 😃
That was all we were talking about