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

[aminorex]

won't make 255 on this run, but will continue to trend up for 8-12 days, to a big test at 270.  fails the test.  retraces to 240, then continues up.

Seems legit.  Should make another run past 270 before any drop, though.

[ChartBuddy]

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[JayJuanGee]

just saw 800 coins bought on bitfinex in 4 orders that werent shown in the orderbook. buys were for solid amounts, 100, 200, 200, 290... all filled at one exact price, no slippage at all...

very strange...

Yeah, I saw that too. Business transactions aren't being allowed to move the price at all. Small transactions from private individuals aren't enough to go "to the moon" as they say. When Karpeles moved the price he did it by manipulating 10's of thousands of btc at once. When are individuals ever going to do that?

For better or worse, they need to allow the currently off book transactions to move the price.

YOu are full of conspiracies today, including repeating, nearly at nauseum your Gox Bot myth.

Gox bot myth?  BTW you spelled bot as Bot. 

Yes, that's right.  The gox bot is a bit of a myth... to give it so much credit for the rise in the price of BTC in 2013...   

It may have contributed to the rise in the price, but there were plenty of other things going on as well.

[JayJuanGee]

... Gox Bot myth.

Savvy investors agree:

...
I'm NOT joking.  I bought my first Bitcoin at that price - $1,201.35.  Actually to be more specific, I bought it on November 29, 2013 through a person I met through local bitcoins.  I bought in cash 1.2486 BTC for $1,500 USD.

That would make anyone cringe now thinking back on it... but hopefully with more of the "bullish" news coming out that the Chinese government might make bitcoin less restricted over there, and the fact that the halving is coming next year; we'll see a steady increase from here on out.  So hopefully JayJuanGee can make his money back if he hasn't already dumped his coins yet and holding on to them for better days ahead.

Hahahahahah...

Thank you for your concern about my making my money back, but I am stating a fact while at the same time, I am NOT too concerned about that 1.2486 BTC that I bought, since my average price per BTC is currently below $500 and I have a real decent stash of BTC and other investments, so I am o.k... and NOT in any way to be considered a BTC victim....

[JayJuanGee]

WillyBot would never have caused a bubble like the November 2013 spike on its own. China was primarily responsible for that pump. It's true that a mad rush for the exits from an exchange where only BTC withdrawals were possible caused buying, but only from those of us with fiat on the exchange.  Nobody in their right mind was sending fiat to Gox when there were so many options for buying cheaper elsewhere.

Krapeles was buying BTC with fake money to keep the illusion of solvency going, but he wouldn't have had to do that if their wasn't a demand for BTC external to EmptyGox.

It was also China's government hostility towards Bitcoin that contributed to the crash as much as the Goxxing.

it was a double whammy up and down. 

Yes, better said than me...

[mavericklm]

Bitcoin's going to crash if the blocksize isn't raised.

Again blocksize talk?

After the attacks from that shoddy company we have seen that the size is fine atm!

[Holliday]

Whoever is running this psyops divide-and-conquer blocksize consensus attack has one of two probable motives:

1) Want Bitcoin to crash, price crashes with it, they buy up BTC for pennies and then run a counter psyops campaign to get all the core devs to group hug.

2) Want bitcoin to crash so they can introduce a competing altcoin that they've premined or have some other way of profiting from, perhaps just from being early adopters.

Bitcoin's going to crash if the blocksize isn't raised.  In the event of an economic catastrophe, nobody will care about xaction fees. they will stampede using Bitcoin as an escape from FIAT hell until the exit gets jammed with bodies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias

Did you ever stop to think that some of us have legitimate concerns about the existing proposals to raise the block size?

I already have certain difficulties running a full node (if I don't change some settings to gimp it, it will often happily consume enough of my bandwidth to bring other internet uses to a crawl) and I have dedicated hardware and top tier home internet speeds.

There is no ulterior motive here. I don't plan to modify my Bitcoin holdings regardless of the exchange rate (I don't speculate at all, ever).

I am what I would consider a Bitcoin fanatic. Beyond the idealistic reasons that I choose to use Bitcoin, I have plenty to lose (financially) if Bitcoin drops in value (and plenty to gain if it increases in value). If I am concerned about my ability (as a Bitcoin fanatic) to run a full node with the current anti-spam (has spam been fixed by the way?) 1MB block size limit in place, what is going to happen when the data I need to share with my peers doubles (or increases 8-fold, wtf!)? When Bitcoin fanatics have doubts about running a full node, I would imagine that the robustness of the decentralized network has been harmed.

Yes, I am of the opinion that I absolutely must run a full node to take full advantage of Bitcoin.

So, before we take the training wheels off the software, perhaps we should take a long hard look at network efficiency (and that fucking miserable database).

In order for Bitcoin to provide us with censorship-proof transactions, it needs to function (and function well) in situations where Bitcoin data is difficult to share. This task obviously becomes more difficult when the amount of data to be shared is increased! Call me crazy, but I won't be happy until the Bitcoin network is running smoothly on a worldwide distributed wireless mesh network (this is what I think needs to happen in order to keep Bitcoin transactions censorship-proof).

What you call a "psyops divide-and-conquer blocksize consensus attack", I call genuine disagreement (and after reading this forum for the past few month, possible inability to reach agreement).

I've used Bitcoin for going on five years now and I can count the number of transactions I've made on my fingers and toes. Every transaction does not need to be censorship-proof in a world where censorship-proof transactions exist.

[ChartBuddy]

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[Mervyn_Pumpkinhead]

Yes, that's right.  The gox bot is a bit of a myth... to give it so much credit for the rise in the price of BTC in 2013...    

It may have contributed to the rise in the price, but there were plenty of other things going on as well.

The most popular belief is that it was caused by a sudden and mysterious rise of demand in China. They base their assumption on the high volume that BTCChina showed during that time, while ignoring the fact that Chinese exchanges have the habit of faking volume.
The pump upwards was fueled by MtGox and BTCChina's volume was created only as a misdirection. BTCChina volume was only created to explain this sudden rise in demand and to hide the fact that the price is mainly pumped by Karpeles and his non existent money. Karpeles thought that he can pump bitcoin enough to start a rise that would make him back the coins that were lost by the previous hack. It backfired of a simple reason - Karpeles is a terrible trader. He was outplayed even by the majority, so his losses got even bigger in both coin and fiat. Most of the smart traders just profited from this pump and got out at the right time. Only the inexperienced get-rich-quick folks were the ones who didn't know the right time when to get out, but their investments were small and meaningless anyway.

I think that the bitcoin scenery is amusing because people are still in strong denial about the whole 2013 pump situation. Miners are still holding their high production cost coin because "any minute now, another mysterious and unexplained pump will surely come". But it won't come if no one is orchestrating a similar fraud.
The coming of Gemini is finally dissolving this myth that institutional investors are waiting for the right chance to be the greater fools of bitcoin. I think that this myth will now be more in the form of "ETF will change everything!".
So, to me, it's not a question if the bitcoin price will face a total collapse, but only when will it happen.
When will all the illusions of bitcoins worth finally fade. When people will finally realize that artificial scarcity doesn't work with something that is easily replaceable, and the network effect of bitcoin is mostly dependent on a bad brand name. That the future of crypto is not about them getting easy riches, but about better technological solutions that have addressed the problems that have kept bitcoin from being a practical tool of finance.

[Fatman3001]

@Holliday

Thanks for a properly solid contribution! Well thought, well written.

[Cconvert2G36]

Thanks for the honest sentiment Holliday.

My main quibble is that an increase doesn't automatically mean max blocks forever. If we went to a 4MB max tomorrow, chances are the avg blocksize would stay on the same trajectory. Bigger blocks are actually a deterrent to large scale spam attacks imo because it means more of their fees will be collected vs dropped from mempool with the potential to be recycled.

Limiting the number of peers you will allow to your node in line with your bandwidth and data cap limitations seems a reasonable response vs halting the capacity growth of the entire network. Miners also have limits as to what makes sense for them, too big of a block means an undue orphan risk... a free market check on blocksize growth.

It really comes down to whether you think the fee market should be forced into existence now, around the halving to 12.5 block reward, or whether it should develop more asymptotically to the decreasing block reward. I've heard all about the bitcoin as gold argument, where you can just stash some keys away and change the world... but as an open source protocol you need a bit more in addition to being first... you need to be the best. We don't have the benefit of the periodic table in this sphere. 

[BlindMayorBitcorn]

@Holliday

Thanks for a properly solid contribution! Well thought, well written.

Yes, if only he could finally decide...

[ChartBuddy]

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[cbeast]

Whoever is running this psyops divide-and-conquer blocksize consensus attack has one of two probable motives:

1) Want Bitcoin to crash, price crashes with it, they buy up BTC for pennies and then run a counter psyops campaign to get all the core devs to group hug.

2) Want bitcoin to crash so they can introduce a competing altcoin that they've premined or have some other way of profiting from, perhaps just from being early adopters.

Bitcoin's going to crash if the blocksize isn't raised.  In the event of an economic catastrophe, nobody will care about xaction fees. they will stampede using Bitcoin as an escape from FIAT hell until the exit gets jammed with bodies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias

Did you ever stop to think that some of us have legitimate concerns about the existing proposals to raise the block size?

I already have certain difficulties running a full node (if I don't change some settings to gimp it, it will often happily consume enough of my bandwidth to bring other internet uses to a crawl) and I have dedicated hardware and top tier home internet speeds.

There is no ulterior motive here. I don't plan to modify my Bitcoin holdings regardless of the exchange rate (I don't speculate at all, ever).

I am what I would consider a Bitcoin fanatic. Beyond the idealistic reasons that I choose to use Bitcoin, I have plenty to lose (financially) if Bitcoin drops in value (and plenty to gain if it increases in value). If I am concerned about my ability (as a Bitcoin fanatic) to run a full node with the current anti-spam (has spam been fixed by the way?) 1MB block size limit in place, what is going to happen when the data I need to share with my peers doubles (or increases 8-fold, wtf!)? When Bitcoin fanatics have doubts about running a full node, I would imagine that the robustness of the decentralized network has been harmed.

Yes, I am of the opinion that I absolutely must run a full node to take full advantage of Bitcoin.

So, before we take the training wheels off the software, perhaps we should take a long hard look at network efficiency (and that fucking miserable database).

In order for Bitcoin to provide us with censorship-proof transactions, it needs to function (and function well) in situations where Bitcoin data is difficult to share. This task obviously becomes more difficult when the amount of data to be shared is increased! Call me crazy, but I won't be happy until the Bitcoin network is running smoothly on a worldwide distributed wireless mesh network (this is what I think needs to happen in order to keep Bitcoin transactions censorship-proof).

What you call a "psyops divide-and-conquer blocksize consensus attack", I call genuine disagreement (and after reading this forum for the past few month, possible inability to reach agreement).

I've used Bitcoin for going on five years now and I can count the number of transactions I've made on my fingers and toes. Every transaction does not need to be censorship-proof in a world where censorship-proof transactions exist.

Consensus is dead. There is no roll-out plan, only talks. We'll see peace in the middle-east before consensus is reached with Bitcoin scalability. If this is it and it is good enough for you, then there is nothing left to even discuss because you have already decided to do nothing. Again, you have chosen to do nothing. Your fantasies about mesh-nets add nothing to the conversation.

[billyjoeallen]

Whoever is running this psyops divide-and-conquer blocksize consensus attack has one of two probable motives:

1) Want Bitcoin to crash, price crashes with it, they buy up BTC for pennies and then run a counter psyops campaign to get all the core devs to group hug.

2) Want bitcoin to crash so they can introduce a competing altcoin that they've premined or have some other way of profiting from, perhaps just from being early adopters.

Bitcoin's going to crash if the blocksize isn't raised.  In the event of an economic catastrophe, nobody will care about xaction fees. they will stampede using Bitcoin as an escape from FIAT hell until the exit gets jammed with bodies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias

Did you ever stop to think that some of us have legitimate concerns about the existing proposals to raise the block size?

I already have certain difficulties running a full node (if I don't change some settings to gimp it, it will often happily consume enough of my bandwidth to bring other internet uses to a crawl) and I have dedicated hardware and top tier home internet speeds.

There is no ulterior motive here. I don't plan to modify my Bitcoin holdings regardless of the exchange rate (I don't speculate at all, ever).

I am what I would consider a Bitcoin fanatic. Beyond the idealistic reasons that I choose to use Bitcoin, I have plenty to lose (financially) if Bitcoin drops in value (and plenty to gain if it increases in value). If I am concerned about my ability (as a Bitcoin fanatic) to run a full node with the current anti-spam (has spam been fixed by the way?) 1MB block size limit in place, what is going to happen when the data I need to share with my peers doubles (or increases 8-fold, wtf!)? When Bitcoin fanatics have doubts about running a full node, I would imagine that the robustness of the decentralized network has been harmed.

Yes, I am of the opinion that I absolutely must run a full node to take full advantage of Bitcoin.

So, before we take the training wheels off the software, perhaps we should take a long hard look at network efficiency (and that fucking miserable database).

In order for Bitcoin to provide us with censorship-proof transactions, it needs to function (and function well) in situations where Bitcoin data is difficult to share. This task obviously becomes more difficult when the amount of data to be shared is increased! Call me crazy, but I won't be happy until the Bitcoin network is running smoothly on a worldwide distributed wireless mesh network (this is what I think needs to happen in order to keep Bitcoin transactions censorship-proof).

What you call a "psyops divide-and-conquer blocksize consensus attack", I call genuine disagreement (and after reading this forum for the past few month, possible inability to reach agreement).

I've used Bitcoin for going on five years now and I can count the number of transactions I've made on my fingers and toes. Every transaction does not need to be censorship-proof in a world where censorship-proof transactions exist.

It wouldn't be an effective attack unless there was genuine disagreement to exacerbate. The shrinking number of nodes could be easily fixed by borrowing a trick from our Proof of Stake friends: Take some fraction of the block reward away from the miners and distribute it to full node operators. Small miners already running nodes would be largely unaffected.  Pool miners would take a little hit, but that's a good thing, right? Pools are a threat to decentralization, aren't they?

I've been in Bitcoin since 2011 also, and I quit running a full node, but since this bear market dragged on so long, I've been forced to arbitrage my coins just to generate some income. This means my transactions on the chain have gone up by a factor of 50.  None of these transactions are dust.

If Bitcoin reaches escape velocity, blockchain traffic will get exponentially higher.  It doesn't matter if sidechains are used or not. It doesn't matter if fees go up to $10/xaction.  If we go from a million active users to a Billion,  we could reduce on chain transactions by 90% and still have well over 100X the current xaction volume. 

Even 1% of current worldwide Western Union and Moneygram, and international wire transfers would far exceed our current 7TPS cap. This doesn't count ACH and SWIFT xfers, credit cards, PayPal, or any other payment processors. 

The blockchain is also used for colored coin xactions which you may or may not consider dust, but if we get even 1% of the volume of NASDAQ, NYSE, and other stock, bond, commodity, and derrivatives market traffic--even just settlements between exchanges--it would swamp Bitcoin.

The block chain is also used for other time stamp operations and these would increase in volume also.

There is NO WAY a mainstream Bitcoin can remain even a symbolic peer-to-peer network without increasing transaction capacity. 

if miners really cared about the falling number of nodes, they would support proposals to give up part of their block reward to full node operators. Until they do that, the only plausible explanation for resisting blocksize increases is GREED. 

You want the price to go up? Give investors more for their money. Give them a network that is more useful. If Bitcoin doesn't, some altcoin will.

[Cconvert2G36]

Full nodes are pretty easy to fake by calling home to an actual node. There's a reason this direction hasn't been taken.

[Fatman3001]

Limiting the number of peers you will allow to your node in line with your bandwidth and data cap limitations seems a reasonable response vs halting the capacity growth of the entire network. Miners also have limits as to what makes sense for them, too big of a block means an undue orphan risk... a free market check on blocksize growth.

Just make sure you take this into account:


https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1scd4z/im_running_a_full_node_and_so_should_you/cdw3lrh?context=3

"gavinandresen: Most ordinary folks should NOT be running a full node. We need full nodes that are always on, have more than 8 connections (if you have only 8 then you are part of the problem, not part of the solution), and have a high-bandwidth connection to the Internet.
So: if you've got an extra virtual machine with enough memory in a data center, then yes, please, run a full node."

"JochenKlump: do you mind explaining why nodes which allow only 8 connections create a problem?"

"dustcoin: The number of connections itself does not cause a problem. Having a maximum of 8 connections corresponds to bitcoin not being set up to listen to the outside world on port 8333, usually due to a router or firewall. If a node is not listening for connections, then it can only connect to existing nodes that have their port open. Nodes without their port open cannot make connections with nodes joining the network or looking for more connections. By running a node without the port open, you are essentially taking resources from the network but not giving anything back yourself.
TL;DR: Port 8333 Closed = Leeching, Port 8333 Listening = Seeding"

@Holliday

Thanks for a properly solid contribution! Well thought, well written.

Yes, if only he could finally decide...

The decision has been made




"He knows when you are sleeping,
 He knows when you're on the can,
 He'll hunt you down and blast your ass from here to Pakistan.
 Oh, You'd better not breathe, you'd better not move,
 You're better off dead, I'm telling you, dude.
 Santa Claus is gunning you down!"

[ChartBuddy]

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