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

[micalith]

What's up with the $14 million cny bidwall on huobi?
http://coinsight.org/huobi

It makes me think about the one on coinbase last week. It's good to see giant bid walls being played with again

[Tzupy]

Largest spike in BDD since March 2014, nice... should provide bear ammo for the next month.

[Sitarow]

Largest spike in BDD since March 2014, nice... should provide bear ammo for the next month.

Volume look at the volume and realize what it is.

[Kupsi]

Largest spike in BDD since March 2014, nice... should provide bear ammo for the next month.

Only 101 coins moved 

https://blockchain.info/tx/97facbd7e07c4f3140d9ea167c2e54d85bc5f6fd04d9774d80b1284b706920ff

[JorgeStolfi]

If I understand your philosophy re: Bitcoin, there is only 'the worst':  Either Bitcoin will fail on its own defects, or some government(s) will destroy it, if it works as designed.  Is that a fair summation of your position?

As it says in my signature, I cannot imagine a plausible future where bitcoin will be successful.  I see many ways in which it could fail, those are two of them.  The more I read, the more skeptical I become.

Take the economy of mining, for example. Yesterday I found this paper claiming that the bitcoin mining network now consumes about as much electricity as the whole country of Ireland , ~1 GW.  I found that hard to believe, but it seems correct.  For what? So that some drug dealers can be absolutely certan that their customer will not double-spend them? So that no one can retroactively change the amount that someone spent on Overstock?  So that the police cannot seize the coins of ransomware criminals?

That absurd consumption of energy does not have any rational justification.  It does not even make the network more secure against 51% attacks, because it is still the case that 4-5 mining entities have more than 51% of the hashing power, and that situation is more likely to get worse than better if the network grows more.  Moreover, further price drops and/or the next halving may cause morethan 51% of the hashpower to be turned off -- and may be acquired or rented by a hostile entity, at scrap iron prices.

The absurd consumption of energy is merely a consequence of the block reward being fixed at 50 BTC irrespective of the price, and of the price being 50 times what the current use as currency would imply.  The overvaluation, in turn, is a consequence of the fixed supply, that created the mirage of a currency whose value will grow to astronomic levels; a mirage that led to a spiral of hoarding and absurd price increases.   The overvaluation also resulted in the block reward being 100 times or more the typical fees contained in a block, so that miners have essentially no incentive to include transactions in it.  Worse, the network consumes about 1 million dollars per day that must be provided by new investors, lured by the promise of fabulous speculative gains.  And the absurd will only grow if the price increases again.

This system simply does not make any economic sense.  It is not sustained by sound market principles, but totally by hype, by the belief of gullible people that they will become billionaries if they just buy as much bitcoin as they can and hold hard to it.

From what I have read around, most people who claim to believe in bitcoin's future do so because of various reasons -- because they own bitcoins, because they are employees or investors of bitcoin-related enterprises, because they see it as a way to buy drugs and other illegal things, because of hallucinations about it ending poverty, corruption, banks, governments... but almost never because they rationally believe that it will be a viable currency and efficient payment system.  Which is the only thing that it was designed to be, and it is becoming clear to everybody that it will not be.

[Sitarow]

If I understand your philosophy re: Bitcoin, there is only 'the worst':  Either Bitcoin will fail on its own defects, or some government(s) will destroy it, if it works as designed.  Is that a fair summation of your position?

As it says in my signature, I cannot imagine a plausible future where bitcoin will be successful.  I see many ways in which it could fail, those are two of them.  The more I read, the more skeptical I become.

There is no shame on speaking a point of view and in time we will be able to reflect on past events and gloat.

[ChartBuddy]

Coin
Explanation

[Torque]

If I understand your philosophy re: Bitcoin, there is only 'the worst':  Either Bitcoin will fail on its own defects, or some government(s) will destroy it, if it works as designed.  Is that a fair summation of your position?

As it says in my signature, I cannot imagine a plausible future where bitcoin will be successful.  I see many ways in which it could fail, those are two of them.  The more I read, the more skeptical I become.

Take the economy of mining, for example. Yesterday I found this paper claiming that the bitcoin mining network now consumes about as much electricity as the whole country of Ireland , ~1 GW.  I found that hard to believe, but it seems correct.  For what? So that some drug dealers can be absolutely certan that their customer will not double-spend them? So that no one can retroactively change the amount that someone spent on Overstock?  So that the police cannot seize the coins of ransomware criminals?

That absurd consumption of energy does not have any rational justification.  It does not even make the network more secure against 51% attacks, because it is still the case that 4-5 mining entities have more than 51% of the hashing power, and that situation is more likely to get worse than better if the network grows more.  Moreover, further price drops and/or the next halving may cause morethan 51% of the hashpower to be turned off -- and may be acquired or rented by a hostile entity, at scrap iron prices.

The absurd consumption of energy is merely a consequence of the block reward being fixed at 50 BTC irrespective of the price, and of the price being 50 times what the current use as currency would imply.  The overvaluation, in turn, is a consequence of the fixed supply, that created the mirage of a currency whose value will grow to astronomic levels; a mirage that led to a spiral of hoarding and absurd price increases.   The overvaluation also resulted in the block reward being 100 times or more the typical fees contained in a block, so that miners have essentially no incentive to include transactions in it.  Worse, the network consumes about 1 million dollars per day that must be provided by new investors, lured by the promise of fabulous speculative gains.  And the absurd will only grow if the price increases again.

This system simply does not make any economic sense.  It is not sustained by sound market principles, but totally by hype, by the belief of gullible people that they will become billionaries if they just buy as much bitcoin as they can and hold hard to it.

From what I have read around, most people who claim to believe in bitcoin's future do so because of various reasons -- because they own bitcoins, because they are employees or investors of bitcoin-related enterprises, because they see it as a way to buy drugs and other illegal things, because of hallucinations about it ending poverty, corruption, banks, governments... but almost never because they rationally believe that it will be a viable currency and efficient payment system.  Which is the only thing that it was designed to be, and it is becoming clear to everybody that it will not be.

Then again, the question on everyone's mind: why the F-- are you here, in the Bitcoin spec forum.  Day. After. Day. After. Day. After. Day. After. Day.

You believe that you can change the minds of a few longs that MIGHT happen across your posts?  Most of your readers are gonna be a few day traders and trolls.  That's it.

C'mon dude, the majority of bitcoin believers in the world don't even speak or read English. They certainly wouldn't spend most of their time here, supposedly hanging on your every word. So you are wasting your breath and everyone's time.

Go write some dissenting blogs, articles, white papers, something other than trolling this spec sub.

[aminorex]

And for that reason, opponents of totalitarianism are switching to cryptonote's dark ledger.

Anyhow, monkey sees 2-3 hours of downside intraday, followed by another attack on resistance at 237 on the daily chart, which seems likely to succeed this time; but, 296 is almost certain to hold, if it is even achievable before the run down to 180 which monkey expects on the weekly chart.

None of what you wrote makes any sense.

Allow me to explain:  

1) A ledger using the cryptonote protocol enables transactions to be effected while providing strict numerical guarantees regarding the privacy of the transacting parties.  This is commonly referred to as a dark ledger, in contrast to the transparent ledger system used by bitcoin and its derived imitations.  Transparent ledgers facilitate extortion, and tyrannical control.  Dark ledgers prevent that.

2) "Monkey" is a name I have used in this forum for, well, years now, to refer to my own machine learning system.  The history of the name is of questionable interest, so I will not describe it.  A description of the allusion is published in earlier pages of this topic.

3) Monkey makes estimates on various time-scales.  On an intra-day timescale (at the time of the quote leading this post) he estimated the turning point of the present downtrend (changing it into an uptrend) to come in 2-3 hours.  

4) On a scale of days, Monkey sees resistance to upward progress at 237 and 296 on the daily chart.  I personally interpret his signals as implying that 237 is likely to be surpassed, but doubt very much that 296 can be surpassed before a continuation of the larger downtrend.

5) Monkey thinks the larger downtrend ends with a price in the 126-188 range, about a month from now, where 180 represents the first support level.

In general, a price series will move in trends which alternate on increasing time-scale.  The finest time scale uptrend terminates in a resumption of the downtrend which encloses it.  That downtrend, in turn, terminates in a resumption of the uptrend which encloses it, and so on.  The metric on the temporal axis is variable, but the overall behaviour is universal (with the possible exception of Mongolia).

[sAt0sHiFanClub]

If I understand your philosophy re: Bitcoin, there is only 'the worst':  Either Bitcoin will fail on its own defects, or some government(s) will destroy it, if it works as designed.  Is that a fair summation of your position?

As it says in my signature, I cannot imagine a plausible future where bitcoin will be successful.  I see many ways in which it could fail, those are two of them.  The more I read, the more skeptical I become.

Then again, the question on everyone's mind: why the F-- are you here, in the Bitcoin spec forum.  Day. After. Day. After. Day. After. Day. After. Day.

You believe that you can change the minds of a few longs that MIGHT happen across your posts?  Most of your readers are gonna be a few day traders and trolls.  That's it.

C'mon dude, the majority of bitcoin believers in the world don't even speak or read English. They certainly wouldn't spend most of their time here, hanging on your every word. So you are wasting your breath and everyone's time.

Go write some dissenting blogs, articles, white papers, something other than trolling this spec sub.

If bitcoin is to succeed, then these points must be argued against. But that rarely happens. The poster will be simply called a troll, a few ad hominen attacks on him and then put on a stupid, pointless ignore list.

The sad thing is that even the most rabid bitcoiners find it difficult to string a few words together into a logical argument to defend bitcoin. Thats what worries me most.

[minerpumpkin]

If I understand your philosophy re: Bitcoin, there is only 'the worst':  Either Bitcoin will fail on its own defects, or some government(s) will destroy it, if it works as designed.  Is that a fair summation of your position?

As it says in my signature, I cannot imagine a plausible future where bitcoin will be successful.  I see many ways in which it could fail, those are two of them.  The more I read, the more skeptical I become.

There is no shame on speaking a point of view and in time we will be able to reflect on past events and gloat.

Even being a Bitcoin long-term-success believer, I know that we simply can't be certain at this point that Bitcoin will prevail or even exist in 10 years from now. I understand that there are hardcore believers and I understand that there are a lot of skeptics. What I don't understand this why someone puts so much time and initiative into posting about how bad this idea is and how it won't work.

[dropt]

Then again, the question on everyone's mind: why the F-- are you here, in the Bitcoin spec forum.  Day. After. Day. After. Day. After. Day. After. Day.

You believe that you can change the minds of a few longs that MIGHT happen across your posts?  Most of your readers are gonna be a few day traders and trolls.  That's it.

C'mon dude, the majority of bitcoin believers in the world don't even speak or read English. They certainly wouldn't spend most of their time here, supposedly hanging on your every word. So you are wasting your breath and everyone's time.

Go write some dissenting blogs, articles, white papers, something other than trolling this spec sub.

FFS, just stop.  Look at him, he's a tired old stick in the mud that is devoting his life to rambling philosophical BS born in the mind of the generation that caused all these problems.  Stop giving him an audience, stop recognizing his nonsense.  Put him on ignore, or better yet, report his posts so they can be moved to the proper forum.

[LFC_Bitcoin]

Quite a slow, mundane time for the price at the moment.
Hopefully we see some positive news next week.

[xyzzy099]

If I understand your philosophy re: Bitcoin, there is only 'the worst':  Either Bitcoin will fail on its own defects, or some government(s) will destroy it, if it works as designed.  Is that a fair summation of your position?

As it says in my signature, I cannot imagine a plausible future where bitcoin will be successful.  I see many ways in which it could fail, those are two of them.  The more I read, the more skeptical I become.

Then again, the question on everyone's mind: why the F-- are you here, in the Bitcoin spec forum.  Day. After. Day. After. Day. After. Day. After. Day.

You believe that you can change the minds of a few longs that MIGHT happen across your posts?  Most of your readers are gonna be a few day traders and trolls.  That's it.

C'mon dude, the majority of bitcoin believers in the world don't even speak or read English. They certainly wouldn't spend most of their time here, hanging on your every word. So you are wasting your breath and everyone's time.

Go write some dissenting blogs, articles, white papers, something other than trolling this spec sub.

If bitcoin is to succeed, then these points must be argued against. But that rarely happens. The poster will be simply called a troll, a few ad hominen attacks on him and then put on a stupid, pointless ignore list.

The sad thing is that even the most rabid bitcoiners find it difficult to string a few words together into a logical argument to defend bitcoin. Thats what worries me most.

Every one of Dr. Stolfi's 'point's has been addressed multiple times, most of them in this very topic, over the several years he has been trolling here.  If he was really interested in debating the merits or lack thereof of Bitcoin, he would do so in the technical discussion forum where there are people who are more qualified to address his concerns.

[empowering]

If I understand your philosophy re: Bitcoin, there is only 'the worst':  Either Bitcoin will fail on its own defects, or some government(s) will destroy it, if it works as designed.  Is that a fair summation of your position?

As it says in my signature, I cannot imagine a plausible future where bitcoin will be successful.  I see many ways in which it could fail, those are two of them.  The more I read, the more skeptical I become.

Take the economy of mining, for example. Yesterday I found this paper claiming that the bitcoin mining network now consumes about as much electricity as the whole country of Ireland , ~1 GW.  I found that hard to believe, but it seems correct.  For what? So that some drug dealers can be absolutely certan that their customer will not double-spend them? So that no one can retroactively change the amount that someone spent on Overstock?  So that the police cannot seize the coins of ransomware criminals?

That absurd consumption of energy does not have any rational justification.  It does not even make the network more secure against 51% attacks, because it is still the case that 4-5 mining entities have more than 51% of the hashing power, and that situation is more likely to get worse than better if the network grows more.  Moreover, further price drops and/or the next halving may cause morethan 51% of the hashpower to be turned off -- and may be acquired or rented by a hostile entity, at scrap iron prices.

The absurd consumption of energy is merely a consequence of the block reward being fixed at 50 BTC irrespective of the price, and of the price being 50 times what the current use as currency would imply.  The overvaluation, in turn, is a consequence of the fixed supply, that created the mirage of a currency whose value will grow to astronomic levels; a mirage that led to a spiral of hoarding and absurd price increases.   The overvaluation also resulted in the block reward being 100 times or more the typical fees contained in a block, so that miners have essentially no incentive to include transactions in it.  Worse, the network consumes about 1 million dollars per day that must be provided by new investors, lured by the promise of fabulous speculative gains.  And the absurd will only grow if the price increases again.

This system simply does not make any economic sense.  It is not sustained by sound market principles, but totally by hype, by the belief of gullible people that they will become billionaries if they just buy as much bitcoin as they can and hold hard to it.

From what I have read around, most people who claim to believe in bitcoin's future do so because of various reasons -- because they own bitcoins, because they are employees or investors of bitcoin-related enterprises, because they see it as a way to buy drugs and other illegal things, because of hallucinations about it ending poverty, corruption, banks, governments... but almost never because they rationally believe that it will be a viable currency and efficient payment system.  Which is the only thing that it was designed to be, and it is becoming clear to everybody that it will not be.

And of course the current financial system, makes much more sense, does not waste any resources and does not make any particular groups rich, or have any problems at all...  

Oh wait....

(ps Just off to dig up some gold,  and find a vault to stash it in, I will e-mail you some gold for.your efforts though Jorge, what email address can I send this gold to)

[Omikifuse]

Bitcoin back to $220?

not this month

[TakeTheSkyRoad]

Dr Stolfi I see bitcoin made it onto your wikipedia entry !

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Stolfi

In late 2013 Jorge took an active interest in the economics of cryptocurrencies. He became extremely skeptical about its underlying soundness and chances of success, and has been advising the Brazilian public against investment in bitcoin. [13]

Following the link I also see there was a "Beware Bitcoin!" article back in December 2013.

http://advivo.com.br/blog/jorge-stolfi/cuidado-com-bitcoin

All I ask is would you write the article now, 18 months later ?

[aminorex]

...economics of minining ... This system simply does not make any economic sense.  

I believe this quote captures the substance of your post and is the point which merits discussion.

I agree generally, that the centralization of mining is a threat, in principle, albeit not in practice to date, to the security of the ledger.

I also agree, generally, that the current energy expenditure is far in excess of the need of the design goals.

I further agree, generally, that price motivates that expenditure.

Whether it makes "economic sense" is a strange question, politically and philosophically loaded.  Clearly it makes sense, because you have made sense of it, explaining features of its causal structure.  I think what you mean is that the gap between energy expenditure motivated by technical needs, and energy expenditure motivated by economic factors is offensive to your sensibilities.  I am somewhat sympathetic to this complaint, but the market is, as we see, without sympathy.

An argument can be made that the economic value-add of the network suffices to explain all or part of the gap which offends you, and you seem to acknowledge that implicitly, but consider it inadequate to the scale of the gap.  This view would gain respect, if you were to quantify it, or to offer a reasoned case as to why the value-add is less than the present energy cost.

No "hype" is required to explain a deviation of current price from some present fundamental metric.  All that is required is a rational discounting of a future price estimate (which should really be in the form of a distribution).

(Aside, I observe that this discussion is off-topic, which may annoy some who frequent the thread.)

[Fatman3001]

If I understand your philosophy re: Bitcoin, there is only 'the worst':  Either Bitcoin will fail on its own defects, or some government(s) will destroy it, if it works as designed.  Is that a fair summation of your position?

As it says in my signature, I cannot imagine a plausible future where bitcoin will be successful.  I see many ways in which it could fail, those are two of them.  The more I read, the more skeptical I become.

Then again, the question on everyone's mind: why the F-- are you here, in the Bitcoin spec forum.  Day. After. Day. After. Day. After. Day. After. Day.

You believe that you can change the minds of a few longs that MIGHT happen across your posts?  Most of your readers are gonna be a few day traders and trolls.  That's it.

C'mon dude, the majority of bitcoin believers in the world don't even speak or read English. They certainly wouldn't spend most of their time here, hanging on your every word. So you are wasting your breath and everyone's time.

Go write some dissenting blogs, articles, white papers, something other than trolling this spec sub.

If bitcoin is to succeed, then these points must be argued against. But that rarely happens. The poster will be simply called a troll, a few ad hominen attacks on him and then put on a stupid, pointless ignore list.

The sad thing is that even the most rabid bitcoiners find it difficult to string a few words together into a logical argument to defend bitcoin. Thats what worries me most.

It's been done to death. On this thread alone it's been done every other page. That's 6000 pages. Knock yourself out.

[JorgeStolfi]

Go write some dissenting blogs, articles, white papers, something other than trolling this spec sub.

If he was really interested in debating the merits or lack thereof of Bitcoin, he would do so in the technical discussion forum where there are people who are more qualified to address his concerns.

I did and do both things.  Like thisand this for example.

As I explained several times before, I have about a hundred threads in my watchlist, but most of the time this is the only one that comes up.  (Second one is a bizarre thread about the BFL opera, and next is 'Answer the above question with a question'.)  And this is the best of them in several ways: most interesting news and issues about bitcoin get mentioned here.  Moreover, most people here are basically gamblers; insults and all, you are a saner crowd than the deluded fanatics and conmen that frequent some of the other threads.

I am not here to convince anyone, but of course I cannot rest idle when I see something wrong on the internet.  And if someone asks my opinion, why should I not answer?

Every one of Dr. Stolfi's 'point's has been addressed multiple times, most of them in this very topic, over the several years he has been trolling here.

Yes, they have been "addressed", but I did not find the answers convincing.

Note that the answer to almost every question about the future of bitcoin ultimately rests on what one believes that some persons or institutions will do in suh and such circumstaces.  Well, bitcoin believers and skeptics obviously have quite different views on such things, and there is little chance that debating will change that sort of belief...