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

[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]

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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

[jbreher]

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.

I'll reply back on the thread that you're porting this from (when I get back there). Suffice to say that I believe that market forces can solve this (non)problem without centralized command and control from the Core devs.

As just one tangential observation, I note that my rather modest node seems to have encountered no issue in swallowing up the referenced block 364292.

[JimboToronto]

A late good morning Bitcoinland.

We had a little volatility overnight I see but we seem to have ended up right back around $430, i.e. about halfway back from the Dec. 26 panic dump.

Sub-$400 seems so long ago doesn't it? Hopefully it's history now. We had lots of time to buy cheap coins. Let's see the price rise.

Overall 2015 was a good year for Bitcoin. We saw capitulation in January, a "live cat bounce" back down in August and a micro-bubble in October/November.

Final result: a net increase of 43% over the course of the year. Not bad.

[Cconvert2G36]

Color me surprised. 

[BitUsher]

Color me surprised.  

Rusty is a talented and competent developer and I am grateful that he can contribute to our ecosystem. I really appreciate all the testing and data he has provided our community.

without centralized command and control from the Core devs.

The core devs have little control. The miners can push through a hardfork without the developers. The miners have most of the keys to the kingdom and simply choose to trust the developers for the time being based upon their competence.

This really shouldn't be an us vs them debate... because we should always prepare for the worst and support all the implementations. Other implementations need a lot of help and I would personally welcome some of the competent core developers breaking off and leading other repositories.

[jbreher]

Market prices tend to rise with increased demand. That is a market function. And when you are still lower than your closest competitor, people will still prefer your service over theirs. If a bank wire costs 10$ and takes days and a btc transfer costs 1$ and takes minutes, why would I use SWIFT instead of BTC?

True, Bitcoin today enjoys a 91% market share of crypto. However, in the overall scope of a USD $7B asset class adrift in a many-$T sea, that market share is not unassailable. Indeed, should the masses finally decide to adopt crypto, I would expect them to adopt one that they can actually _use_, rather than one that prevents them from participating due to an arbitrary limitation. Any of dozens of shitcoins are waiting in the wings to meet this market need, jealously awaiting a chance to procure adoption by delivering real value in comparison to Bitcoin.

What will happen, at most, is that shitcoins will be used for low-value txs and btc will be used for high value txs. You want to gamble for a few cents => you use a shitcoin. You want to buy a chewing gum => you use a shitcoin. You want to transfer 500$ or $5 mn, you use BTC.

Why?

If everyone uses litecoin why would Bitcoin be better for larger transactions?

Isn't this similar to arguing about apples and oranges?
To me, it seems more likely that since crypto currencies occupy multiple spaces in realty, both a unit with inherent value, a representative direct transfer of said inherent value, and as a secure proof of existence ledger based on the security/hash power of the underlying item, that use cases would naturally gravitate to these options?

so with an altcoin like litecoin, it has a relatively fast transfer speed and nominal value worth but on the other hand, it's hash-power isn't necessarily as strong as bitcoin

then you have bitcoin which has a slower transfer speed, but possibly due to scarcity and first mover recognition, larger fiat value, but more importantly operates as a stronger public ledger.

so, if you are going to buy a cup of coffee, or transact a nominal value equivalent of a cup of coffee, or register an item of similar value, and then record that or transfer it to another individual, there are certain use cases which will naturally lend themselves to this option as they do not need enormous security behind it

on the other hand
if you are buying a car, or leasing a car, or perhaps a fleet of cars, or a multi-year,million dollar commercial property lease; this is a deal with significant financial liability associated with it; here as time is not necessarily an immediate concern but the concern is more over the duration of the contractual option and that proof of two parties entering into this agreement, you would want something harder to tamper with and more secure, which naturally would lead you to supporting a blockchain with more hash power.

I think you are missing my point. First, let us strike 'litecoin' from the discussion, as it only serves as a standin for 'some unspecified altcoin'. Next, let us dispense with 'speed of transaction' - most cryptos have essentially instantaneous transactions, with confirmations taking some time, and a 4x speedup in confirmation is meaningless from the standpoint of real use cases.

The issue is that there is no good reason for multiple blockchains. If you put 'little' transactions on one blockchain, and 'large' transactions on another blockchain, it makes no difference. Anyone who wishes to have trustless operation on both blockchains will need to have a full node for both blockchains. No reduction in overall resource demands.

But mostly, as the alt gains use due to fulfilling use cases that Bitcoin refuses to fulfill, it will necessarily rise in utility value (that's a tautology). With increased utility value, I posit that it will also increase in monetary value. Such will attract miners. Probably at the expense of Bitcoin losing miners. Such will accelerate to the point where the security position between Bitcoin and the alt will flip. At which point, there be no advantage whatsoever that Bitcoin can claim. Net result: Bitcoin would be abandoned forthwith, with complete collapse in monetary value of its associated token.

IOW, advocating a 'low value' alt to absorb all the 'small' transactions is suicidal.

[BitUsher]

IOW, advocating a 'low value' alt to absorb all the 'small' transactions is suicidal.

Agreed. All side, tree, sub , separated chains should be dependent upon the longest chain. This is the way forward.