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

[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]

Coin

Explanation

[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]

Coin

Explanation

[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]

Coin

Explanation

[mexxer-2]

Coin

Explanation

Wooh we crossed the 270 mark once more, seems more stable than last time though.

[Pierre 2]

Wooh we crossed the 270 mark once more, seems more stable than last time though.

It's only 270.1$ for some exchanges. I wouldn't call that "passed".

[billyjoeallen]

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

I didn't know that. Is there any way that you know of to verify a node is an actual full node? 

21 seems to have some way of doing it. They have suggested that their bitcoin computers will get compensated for running a full node more than just the pathetic share of blockreward/hashing power.

The only thing I can think of is some kind of hybrid POW/POS solution, which admittedly is somewhat radical and should be tested on an altcoin first. Are there any hybrid POS/POW coins that exist now?

[hdbuck]

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.

Greed is essential.

The sheeple & bitcoin (from: https://archive.is/7dX46)


Lets face it most of the public don't give a shit about the correct terminology of Fiat, Crypto or Gold.
What they care about is money! you know the stuff that buys food beer and pays the goddamn bills.

Let's be honest this sub does not represent the demographic breakdown of the mainstream public, it's full of geeks, smart arses and libertarians, the rest are shills and trolls employed by the "MAN" to throw a spanner in the works to fuck this crypto shit up.

The so called sheeple are busy watching the latest soap opera or some vacuous Kardashian related shite.
If not the Oscars or some Z Celebrity, they're engrossed by the latest "Demockery" rigged voting competition, misguidedly thinking that their vote somehow counts lol .

Before I forget,.... those who express philanthropic tendencies, and wish to empower the unbanked around the world, very noble ..but lets be real.. most of you don't give a flying fuck about them really!, it's just a good line to drop when your real motive gets exposed.

The first priority of most sheeple in the western world is to find somewhere to live, and that might involve getting a mortgage or renting with bank controlled fiat.
Once you sign the dotted line you are subject to the "TAX!" that they will enforce with their guns and corrupt criminal police force.

As for the people of the so called third world, their first priority is food, dodging bullets and bombs, that the sheeple of the first world empowered their sociopathic leaders to manufacture for profit, to drop on the innocent and disenfranchised in the so called third world.

If you want Bitcoin to make a difference, "HOARD" it and "SAVE" it or "HOLD" it or "HODL" it.

"I know, I know" many people say you should just use it, get real! you don't walk around with a Gold Bar all the time, do you?

For christ sake! stop trying to copy banks, you have the power to get the price of each Bitcoin to $5,000 at least, and watch the tsunami of so called mainstream adopters.

Unpalatable as it sounds "Greed"! is the catalyst, you're fortunate as early adopters, and it's your duty! to get BTC above the price of Gold, and watch the fiat ivory towers collapse.




TLDR;; HODL!

I dont oppose scaling.

Just in due time, with actual metrics, with proper researches and solutions that does not hamper the universality and inalienability of the network, not at the expense of decentralization and censorship resistance, not to hand bitcoin to big corps, whether it be payment processors or mining consortiums, etc etc... and no, i am certainly not craving some "governance" besides bitcoin's own rule, which are meant to be HARD, if not impossible to change.

95% consensus is hard to get, that is why bitcoin will always be n°1, because you cant brainwash as much people with false socialist hopes and silicon unicorns. Because it is already spreading in the wild (and beyond the tiny weeny reddit and btct sphere).

SO yes, I certainly oppose arbitrarily raising a limit that has been set up to prevent spam attacks.

You can always repeat ad nauseum that "Bitcoin's going to crash if the blocksize isn't raised", to me it just shows how misinformed and gullible you are.

Not reconcilable? please, i've come to think the sooner you and your alike fork off to some "infinite-Zomg-ecofriendly-POS-blockchain-technology-3.0-VISAmimic" the better, and bitcoin could finally resume its progression towards domination and with no concessions whatsoever.

[billyjoeallen]

greed is essential.

I mean the stupid kind of greed that would rather take a bigger slice of a smaller pie.

Which would you prefer, 100% block reward of a $300 coin or 80% of the block reward of $1,000 coin, giving the rest to full node operators.


The same argument applies if you increase blocksize.  The cost of mining a bigger block is lower than the increased value to the network, which will likely make the coins more useful and valuable.