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

[tomothy]

What I'm getting at is that I don't understand how the economics will play out. Bitcoin can't "decide" that it is going to be used by the big players and everything else goes to litecoin. You'd want to use the unit with the most liquidity and broadest support if you're going to transfer large amounts of money. Todays BTC value is driven by speculation about its future utility. If that future utility is intentionally bottlenecked, the price will plummet. And any idea of a meaningful and functional fee market with a highly illiquid asset is a joke.

We might think that Bitcoins lead is astronomical, but imagine if it stops working properly, for months, because the number of legitimate fee-paying customers went up much faster than anticipated. Or, it's working, but the rising fees makes whatever made it relevant to mainstream irrelevant again. Litecoin works. And they're not going to close the gates when the plebs come running.

So, the facebook generation or the twitteraty or similar starts using Litecoin, taking with them massive liquidity and a market cap 10 times (or more) that of Bitcoin. Why would you buy a car with Bitcoin instead of Litecoin? Why would you transfer 50 million USD from the US to China using Bitcoin rather than Litecoin?

Because Bitcoin is gold and Litecoin is silver? They're not. They're competing cryptos. And that's why we need to plan for success. Or pray success doesn't come too soon.

I think it is important not to immediately dismiss the fact that cryptocurrencies have value, different market sizes, and different liquidity functions. We already are seeing how the economics are playing out. The big players have ALREADY gone to bitcoin. If you examine the current digital landscape, CoinBase, Circle, Bitpay, Yogabbagabba hey, etc etc etc lol, they use bitcoin not another currency. Large banks are either looking at integrating with Bitcoin or attempting to weaken it. You don't see such similar actions with any of the altcoins to any significant degree as compared to bitcoin. As such I think it is safe to say that bitcoin is being used by big players. This doesn't mean bitcoin has the most liquidity, offers the easiest means of transfering money, or provides currency stability.

If you bought $500k of bitcoin off an exchange, how would that impact the bitcoin market as compared to $500k LTC or $500k Dogecoin, or $500k ethereum. The bigger question is on which exchange is the transaction taking place? An exchange with sufficiently deep orderbooks might have no impact whereas on a different exchange you could see a drastically different effect. So you need to look not only at the liquidity of the single asset but also transferrable assets and slippage. It could be easier to cash out in one coin than another and there seems to be links in market movements between various crypto commodities. I think it's dangerous to only see the competing nature of variable cryptos and not recognize that they also operate hand in hand.

I guess the question would be, whether the market has seen an uptick in litecoin usage given the recent bitcoin block size debacle. If you examine the bitcoin/ltc price ration, the answer, apparently, would be no.

I think an interesting question would be if litecoin had the same hashpower as bitcoin, what would happen to bitcoin usage?


If you can have coke or pepsi but generic cola is 1/5 the price, why do so many people keep drinking coke and pepsi?

[Richy_T]

I'd like to see a business start to pay people for running nodes.  Maybe they can get advertisers to pay them money to cover the cost.  I end up running a node for a few weeks then stop since I get nothing.

They could already pay Amazon to run a node.

What would be interesting would be to have a method for rewarding people for running nodes. Possibly by putting a Bitcoin address in the comment or something?

[aztecminer]

get ya some europe! happy new years!

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/january-1-2016-the-new-bank-bail-in-system-goes-into-effect-in-europe


better get your money out the 'interest to infinity' debt slavery system. this is surely an act of desperation.. it shows us how bad things have become .. if this were not true then they would not require a bank bail-in system in place ..

metals is probably the best place to move your fiat.. maybe bitcoin.. but that is a us govy manipulated market that is not guaranteed to succeed... as a matter of fact.. bitcoin has some issues to overcome, which might not be able to overcome and still be successful... a new system will have to come though because the 'interest to infinity' debt slavery system is failing. they are not admitting it is failing because they still think they have some chance or something.. its hard to see into the minds of people whose brains are coated with flouride and aluminum. they are stupid enough to poison themselves then they are dumb enough do really dumb stuff... like bank bail-ins... hey lets take all the sheeples purchasing power see how that works out.

[JorgeStolfi]

Regarding what Satoshi expected Bitcoin to be: no one should care.

In my opinion, he is an outstanding genius but nobody is smart enough to understand the best use of Bitcoin in the future.

That is true.  One should not choose between small-blocks or big-blocks just because "Satoshi said so".

However, looking at why bitcoin was created helps understand why it has certain features, what consequences they are expected to have, and whether it is a good idea to change them.  

Would it be a good idea to modify a car so that it floats, in order to get a vehicle that travels on water?  Obviously not: because every detail of the car's design, from the four rubber wheels to the placement of the license plate, was determined by its original goal of traveling on roads.  Those details are totally wrong for the goal of traveling on water.  If you want a vehicle for that purpose, you should design one from scratch, starting from that goal and letting it guide all choices along the way.  The result will be totally different, of course: a boat instead of a car.  Even if your goal is a vehicle that can travel on both roads and water, the result will not be at all like a car.

And you had better justify why you are designing a new boat, rather than buying an existing one.  Just because a new car is better than all existing cars, it does not follow that adapting it to float on water will yield something that is better than all existing boats.

In this case, reading Satoshi's writings can help us see and understand bitcoin's limitations and capabilities.  It cannot scale enough to replace VISA, and it will make a lousy medium for large settlements, because it was not designed with those goals in mind.  

If we understand the reasoning that led to certain details of the design (like the 1 MB limit and the abrupt halvings of the reward) we have a better chance of predicting what would happen if we changed them.  

Those who want to reform bitcoin so that it replaces VISA or ACH should put bitcoin aside and start the design such a system from scratch, choosing at each step the gears and rivets that are better suited to those goals.  But, first, they should justify why the world needs a better option for those goals and why they think that they can design one.

(That said: in fact, I believe that, as a software engineer, Satoshi, was much better than Gavin and Mike, who are much better than all the Blockstream developers -- who are totally incompetent and irresponsible in that regard.)

The only mechanism able to make Bitcoin fullfil its potentialities is the market. The market is a mechanism of agregation of knowledge and no human being can outsmart it, the market is collective intelligence at play.

1 000 000 average people are more knowlegeable  than one outstanding genius. 1 000 000 people are more knowledgeable than 20 decently intelligent Blockstream employees.

So you think that 1 000 000 traders could have designed bitcoin?  

The market is only the average of all the trader hunches.  For a purely speculative asset like bitcoin, the hunches cannot contain any intelligence, and the average is still a random value.  The bitcoin market is like a headless pig flying in circles, chasing its own tail.  (Hm, wait, I think I must work some more on that metaphor.)

[sAt0sHiFanClub]

So, the facebook generation or the twitteraty or similar starts using Litecoin, taking with them massive liquidity and a market cap 10 times (or more) that of Bitcoin. Why would you buy a car with Bitcoin instead of Litecoin? Why would you transfer 50 million USD from the US to China using Bitcoin rather than Litecoin?

 

The poor generation somehow is going to lead the way for a coin to grow 10x the size of Bitcoin.

There's strength in numbers. The common dross may be distasteful to you, but they do have volume.

[r0ach]

The $5 million dollar Finex shorter has now covered and stopped manipulating down.  Time to go up.  Now China manipulators + Finex manipulators both have longs in around 420-430, so it's probably going a lot higher.

[aztecminer]

The $5 million dollar Finex shorter has now covered and stopped manipulating down.  Time to go up.

finex went down this morning.. he probably getting hell out there. imagine if a big move happened while finex was down.

[Fatman3001]

So, the facebook generation or the twitteraty or similar starts using Litecoin, taking with them massive liquidity and a market cap 10 times (or more) that of Bitcoin. Why would you buy a car with Bitcoin instead of Litecoin? Why would you transfer 50 million USD from the US to China using Bitcoin rather than Litecoin?

 

The poor generation somehow is going to lead the way for a coin to grow 10x the size of Bitcoin.

https://www.youtube.com/user/PewDiePie

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

[brg444]

So, the facebook generation or the twitteraty or similar starts using Litecoin, taking with them massive liquidity and a market cap 10 times (or more) that of Bitcoin. Why would you buy a car with Bitcoin instead of Litecoin? Why would you transfer 50 million USD from the US to China using Bitcoin rather than Litecoin?

 

The poor generation somehow is going to lead the way for a coin to grow 10x the size of Bitcoin.

There's strength in numbers. The common dross may be distasteful to you, but they do have volume.

[ChartBuddy]

Coin



Explanation

[sAt0sHiFanClub]

So, the facebook generation or the twitteraty or similar starts using Litecoin, taking with them massive liquidity and a market cap 10 times (or more) that of Bitcoin. Why would you buy a car with Bitcoin instead of Litecoin? Why would you transfer 50 million USD from the US to China using Bitcoin rather than Litecoin?

 

The poor generation somehow is going to lead the way for a coin to grow 10x the size of Bitcoin.

There's strength in numbers. The common dross may be distasteful to you, but they do have volume.

So you are now saying that the number of transactions you do is directly proportional to your net worth?

You are quite mad.

[faince222]

What do you expect for the next year? Will price rise or drop? Hope that will double, considering that there will be the "halving"

[BldSwtTrs]

The only mechanism able to make Bitcoin fullfil its potentialities is the market. The market is a mechanism of agregation of knowledge and no human being can outsmart it, the market is collective intelligence at play.

1 000 000 average people are more knowlegeable  than one outstanding genius. 1 000 000 people are more knowledgeable than 20 decently intelligent Blockstream employees.

So you think that 1 000 000 traders could have designed bitcoin?  

The market is only the average of all the trader hunches.  For a purely speculative asset like bitcoin, the hunches cannot contain any intelligence, and the average is still a random value.  The bitcoin market is like a headless pig flying in circles, chasing its own tail.  (Hm, wait, I think I must work some more on that metaphor.)

The market is a lot more than traders. Financial markets are a subset of the market. Market is the process of voluntary exchange, it's this process which foster the cooperation between people and coordinate all the endeavours through the mediation of the price signals.

Entrepreneurs, free innovation and workers will make Bitcoin what it is suppose to be. Traders only monitors what happens in the market and speculate accordingly, they are just observers of the market.

[jbreher]

You have to choose a team. There are only 2 and you can't have a different opinion.

Well, no. If you are nominally a "small blocker", you may choose from: recent roadmap based on SegWit first; SegWit only; Core 11; whatever MP's acolytes are running; and probably others. If you are nominally a "large blocker", you can choose from: any number of BIPs; XT; Bitcoin Unlimited; roll your own; and probably others.

[Fatman3001]

What I'm getting at is that I don't understand how the economics will play out. Bitcoin can't "decide" that it is going to be used by the big players and everything else goes to litecoin. You'd want to use the unit with the most liquidity and broadest support if you're going to transfer large amounts of money. Todays BTC value is driven by speculation about its future utility. If that future utility is intentionally bottlenecked, the price will plummet. And any idea of a meaningful and functional fee market with a highly illiquid asset is a joke.

We might think that Bitcoins lead is astronomical, but imagine if it stops working properly, for months, because the number of legitimate fee-paying customers went up much faster than anticipated. Or, it's working, but the rising fees makes whatever made it relevant to mainstream irrelevant again. Litecoin works. And they're not going to close the gates when the plebs come running.

So, the facebook generation or the twitteraty or similar starts using Litecoin, taking with them massive liquidity and a market cap 10 times (or more) that of Bitcoin. Why would you buy a car with Bitcoin instead of Litecoin? Why would you transfer 50 million USD from the US to China using Bitcoin rather than Litecoin?

Because Bitcoin is gold and Litecoin is silver? They're not. They're competing cryptos. And that's why we need to plan for success. Or pray success doesn't come too soon.

I think it is important not to immediately dismiss the fact that cryptocurrencies have value, different market sizes, and different liquidity functions. We already are seeing how the economics are playing out. The big players have ALREADY gone to bitcoin. If you examine the current digital landscape, CoinBase, Circle, Bitpay, Yogabbagabba hey, etc etc etc lol, they use bitcoin not another currency. Large banks are either looking at integrating with Bitcoin or attempting to weaken it. You don't see such similar actions with any of the altcoins to any significant degree as compared to bitcoin. As such I think it is safe to say that bitcoin is being used by big players. This doesn't mean bitcoin has the most liquidity, offers the easiest means of transfering money, or provides currency stability.

If you bought $500k of bitcoin off an exchange, how would that impact the bitcoin market as compared to $500k LTC or $500k Dogecoin, or $500k ethereum. The bigger question is on which exchange is the transaction taking place? An exchange with sufficiently deep orderbooks might have no impact whereas on a different exchange you could see a drastically different effect. So you need to look not only at the liquidity of the single asset but also transferrable assets and slippage. It could be easier to cash out in one coin than another and there seems to be links in market movements between various crypto commodities. I think it's dangerous to only see the competing nature of variable cryptos and not recognize that they also operate hand in hand.

I guess the question would be, whether the market has seen an uptick in litecoin usage given the recent bitcoin block size debacle. If you examine the bitcoin/ltc price ration, the answer, apparently, would be no.

I think an interesting question would be if litecoin had the same hashpower as bitcoin, what would happen to bitcoin usage?


If you can have coke or pepsi but generic cola is 1/5 the price, why do so many people keep drinking coke and pepsi?

Bitcoins market cap is tiny for a money system. And these "big players" in Bitcoin("Coinbase, Circle, Bitpay") are tiny as well. They're startups that can be wiped away in an instant. And the real big players are playing with ripple, private blockchains and ethereum as well. They're not fully invested in crypto yet and are ready for some trial and error. The "danger" with micropayments is that they're not too sensitive when it comes to slippage, so it would be no problem for Litecoin to absorb a fairly huge volume of new users from an economic standpoint.

And. Of course we haven't seen an uptick in litecoin. Bitcoin hasn't hit the wall yet. But Bitcoin isn't Pepsi or Coke, yet.

Mining power? Miners will follow the money.

[BldSwtTrs]

Traders only monitors what happens in the market and speculate accordingly, they are just observers of the market.

Observers? If traders don't want to buy your BTC, BTC price collapses. If traders are willing to pay $1,200 (lol, remember?) that's what your BTC is worth.

It's like quantum physics, observers have an impact on the process.

[suda123]

Traders only monitors what happens in the market and speculate accordingly, they are just observers of the market.

Observers? If traders don't want to buy your BTC, BTC price collapses. If traders are willing to pay $1,200 (lol, remember?) that's what your BTC is worth.

It's like quantum physics, observers have an impact on the process.

lol I see what you did there

[jbreher]

metals is probably the best place to move your fiat.. maybe bitcoin..

Those may be good choices. Only after 'beans, bullets, and band-aids' though. Don't forget water storage. Three days without and you're dead. If the tinfoilhatters are right about the FEMA camps, TPTB have no better tool than municipal water supplies to get the masses lined up at the gates.

[BitUsher]

Since the scaling discussion is rolling over here, I would like everyone to consider this data -

But simulation by bitfury already indicated that we will have a severe performance problem with 4MB blocks on average home computer

I'd like to see that report. Got a link?

With only several thousand running full nodes now, it seems to me that 'average home computer' is not the limiting issue.

This is the data you are looking for -
https://rusty.ozlabs.org/?p=522

here is the simulation test code-
https://gist.github.com/rustyrussell/9c3c4bf3127419bd3f1d


This is an example of a tx that can push validation times to their limit and potentially crash nodes--

https://www.blocktrail.com/BTC/tx/bb41a757f405890fb0f5856228e23b715702d714d59bf2b1feb70d8b2b4e3e08

There are solutions to this problem and principally why core devs want to roll these out first ... before increasing the blocksize limit on the main tree.

This problem is far worse if blocks were 8MB: an 8MB transaction with 22,500 inputs and 3.95MB of outputs takes over 11 minutes to hash. If you can mine one of those, you can keep competitors off your heels forever, and own the bitcoin network… Well, probably not.  But there’d be a lot of emergency patching, forking and screaming…

And this assuming the initial optimizations completed to speed up Verification!
This means that If we hardforked a 2MB MaxBlockSize increase on the main tree and we softforked/hardforked in SepSig, we would essentially have up to a 8MB limit (3.5MB to 8MB) in which an attack vector could be opened up with heavy input and multisig tx which would crash nodes.

These are edge cases... but edge cases are what attackers use to disrupt the network.

Remember we have to design code to expect the worst and hostile intent, especially for bitcoin which has many extremely powerful adversaries. This is why I have a nuanced view of simultaneously supporting multiple implementations, the conservative approach from the core devs, and eventually increasing the block limit.  

[ChartBuddy]

Coin



Explanation