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

[Hyperjacked]

We'll get more volatility very soon. Just give the market some time to get past the holidays and back to work. 

And let's not forget there has been a nasty dump on Christmas when everybody was celebrating. Stabilty and Bitcoin trading don't rhyme yet and probably never will. So yes, expect some turbulence soon

It usually happens when ppl least expect it...

Can't say I don't like the cheap price...

Cheers and enjoy the New Year!

[sAt0sHiFanClub]

economic retardation

That's the pathology of (supposedly honest) blockchain bloaters. Refusing to see that increasing the blocksize without providing incentives to dissuade destructive behaviors (from spam attacks to gratuitous crap) is both pointless and suicidal.

Nonsense.  

1.  Are you going to define and provide cut off points for what constitutes "gratuitous crap"?  Someone who is legitimately  sending 1000 tx today at the average per kb fee, does this become spam if they fail to meet your new fee targets?

2. Please use the more accurate term "charge higher fees" instead of "dissuade". Because that is all you are doing.

3. Miners are currently incentivized to produce the smallest blocks possible with respect to the transaction volume.

4. Letting the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Core Devs of Blockstream decide the issue, rather than the market itself seems a strange thing to do in what is supposed to a decentralized anti-fragile ecosystem such as Bitcoin.

[ChartBuddy]

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Explanation

[conspirosphere.tk]

economic retardation

That's the pathology of (supposedly honest) blockchain bloaters. Refusing to see that increasing the blocksize without providing incentives to dissuade destructive behaviors (from spam attacks to gratuitous crap) is both pointless and suicidal.

Nonsense.  

1.  Are you going to define and provide cut off points for what constitutes "gratuitous crap"?  Someone who is legitimately  sending 1000 tx today at the average per kb fee, does this become spam if they fail to meet your new fee targets?

2. Please use the more accurate term "charge higher fees" instead of "dissuade". Because that is all you are doing.

3. Miners are currently incentivized to produce the smallest blocks possible with respect to the transaction volume.

4. Letting the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Core Devs of Blockstream decide the issue, rather than the market itself seems a strange thing to do in what is supposed to a decentralized anti-fragile ecosystem such as Bitcoin.

1. No, until he keeps paying fees high enough to let his tx included, given the traffic of the moment. Which means: at the rising of demand (blocks getting full), tx fees have to go up, because TANSTAAFL.

2. of course. For the very retarded I might use that.

3. and making them bigger they are incentivized to mine empty blocks.

4 on the market value has a price. and free shit is still shit.  I don't care at all about Blockstream and whatever, until the hard core remains hard.

[sAt0sHiFanClub]

1. No, until he keeps paying fees high enough to let his tx included, given the traffic of the moment. Which means: at the rising of demand (blocks getting full), tx fees have to go up, because TANSTAAFL.

2. of course. For the very retarded I might use that.

3. and making them bigger they are incentivized to mine empty blocks.

4 on the market value has a price. and free shit is still shit.  I don't care at all about Blockstream and whatever, until the hard core remains hard.

If there were ever a 4 Step Plan to eradicate bitcoin, then this would be it. Congratulations, bankster! 

Regarding point 3 - How does that incentive work, and why isnt it happening now?

 

[ChartBuddy]

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Explanation

[Richy_T]

Which only means that it must really suck for them that the master himself thought of max blocksize as a trivially easily changeable spam prevention measure, not some grand economic variable that must be protected by the spilling of blood of free Randian Übermenschen once in a while.

Yes. This is really my point. I'm not saying that we should increase it because Satoshi said we should, I'm just saying that it is an arbitrary limit with no meaning and was chosen to be so high that it would not interfere with regular transactions (which will no longer be the case shortly). Something like doubling the limit would have zero effect in the immediate term but will avoid us running head-first into a wall in 3 months or so.

[hdbuck]

lol so now chartbuddy gone total shill and advertise yet another dead on arrival altcoin.

mods? banhammer time?

[Cconvert2G36]

lol so now chartbuddy gone total shill and advertise yet another dead on arrival altcoin.

mods? banhammer time?

[r0ach]

That's the pathology of (supposedly honest) blockchain bloaters. Refusing to see that increasing the blocksize without providing incentives to dissuade destructive behaviors (from spam attacks to gratuitous crap) is both pointless and suicidal.

The incentive to prevent people from spamming the blockchain is minimum transaction fee.  If people are spamming the blockchain for no reason as an attack vector, it means minimum transaction fee should be higher.  Zero fee transactions never should have existed.  Since finite block size is an open, readily available attack vector, the one thing the small blockers have going for them is, it's inevitable you'll reach a fee market no matter what you set block size to.  I still think Bitcoin needs to scale to around 8-10MB blocks to not have a glass ceiling on price, but it should be able to do that with time.

Also, even though I want block size increased, since the blocks will become full no matter what you set them to, it's probably better to let them fill first to test how the system works and create solutions for whatever problems occur rather than dealing with the same problem at 10 or 20MB blocks later.  So yea, raising the block size isn't really that urgent yet as some people say.

[ChartBuddy]

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Explanation

[Richy_T]

Shill? The desperation is showing.  

I'm going to stop including 1 transaction blocks in the full-block calculations though. There were three out of six (all F2Pool) when I looked yesterday. That's skewing things way down.

[ChartBuddy]

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Explanation

[AlexGR]

Shill? The desperation is showing.  

I'm going to stop including 1 transaction blocks in the full-block calculations though. There were three out of six (all F2Pool) when I looked yesterday. That's skewing things way down.

How is it calculated right now?

(Btw, last block was also a 1-transaction block https://blockchain.info/block/0000000000000000011bcf42f3520787eb3172c9d3dc42b2379be12cf43f3567 )

[Richy_T]

Shill? The desperation is showing.  

I'm going to stop including 1 transaction blocks in the full-block calculations though. There were three out of six (all F2Pool) when I looked yesterday. That's skewing things way down.

How is it calculated right now?

(Btw, last block was also a 1-transaction block https://blockchain.info/block/0000000000000000011bcf42f3520787eb3172c9d3dc42b2379be12cf43f3567 )

It iterates over all blocks since the last check, totals the block space used and the block space available (by adding 1000000 for each block) and calculates the percentage from that.

In theory, empty blocks *could* be valid but in practice, I think it's fair to say that 100% are from early mining empty blocks (which is a valid miner activity according to the rules but skews calculations and causes the difficulty higher than it should be, causing a lower tps availability)

[ChartBuddy]

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Explanation

[sAt0sHiFanClub]

In theory, empty blocks *could* be valid but in practice, I think it's fair to say that 100% are from early mining empty blocks (which is a valid miner activity according to the rules but skews calculations and causes the difficulty higher than it should be, causing a lower tps availability)

No, that must be wrong!! According to well known crypto-expert conspiro that can only happen if smelly big blockers get their way!!

3. and making them bigger they are incentivized to mine empty blocks.

[jbreher]

The result is that Bitcoin still does the same txs per kb as before. There is no actual improvement in scaling, more like a tradeoff where decentralization and network vulnerability to bloat attacks are tuned to "worse" so that more low-to-zero fee txs can go through.

Such would move the hard cap of somewhere around half a million transactions a day to a higher number. If you do not feel that the ability to process more transactions per unit time is an element of scalability, fine. I find such a position absurd, but so be it. If you insist on clinging to such a definition, than I am more interested increasing potential transactions per unit time than in your definition of scalability -- at least at this point in time, when we are rapidly approaching that limit.

And despite your repetitive statements stripping the reality, this has nothing to do with whether the transactions are zero- low- or ouch!-fee. Half a million a day regardless of the fees paid. Period.

It has everything to do with low or zero fees.

If, say, you go from 0.5mn txs per day to 1mn txs per day and a spammer can add 0.5mn txs per day for peanuts to fill the extra capacity where does that leave you?

You'll go back to square 1 and you'll still be crying "ahhh the blocks are full, we need a new increase, my negligible fee doesn't get me confirmed in 5-10-20 confirmations and I need to pay more and more", etc etc.

But not only will you be crying for the same things, you'll now have to deal with double the bloat, more hardware requirements, higher expenses for running nodes, a more centralized network, etc etc.

Yes. A 'spammer' with sufficient resources can clog the system, no matter how high the maxblocksize is. So what? That is not the relevant point.

The relevant point is that, at the current maxblocksize, the system supports only a half-million transactions per day (+/-). Period. No more may be processed, even if every such attempted transaction was accompanied by 0.01, 0.1, 1, 10, or more BTC. This is a hard limit currently, and this is an absolute fact. I don't know why you keep trying to deflect the conversation to the less-important 'amount of fees issue'.

In and of itself, the half-million per day limit would be no issue, but only as long as no more than a half-million 'valid' transactions are attempted per day. However, we are currently trending towards saturation. On average, blocks are currently approximately half-full. And in the last year, actual block size has increased 136%. On current trend, we don't have a year to raise this limit before user frustration. We don't have a half-year. If we get a surge in adoption this month (not an unlikely prospect, given the widely-media-discussed doubling in price over the last quarter), we could easily saturate within weeks of today.

When new interested parties arrive, money in hand, but are thwarted by not being able to acquire Bitcoin due to there being no room in any block for their transaction, what do you think the result will be?

[jbreher]

I'm going to stop including 1 transaction blocks in the full-block calculations though. There were three out of six (all F2Pool) when I looked yesterday. That's skewing things way down.

If the current formula accurately reflects the percentage of total potential used block space that had actually been filled, I would advocate no change. To do otherwise turns it into a meaningless statistic. Better to have the simple unvarnished truth, rather than some manipulated figure meant to illuminate some vague outcome.

[sAt0sHiFanClub]

I'm going to stop including 1 transaction blocks in the full-block calculations though. There were three out of six (all F2Pool) when I looked yesterday. That's skewing things way down.

If the current formula accurately reflects the percentage of total potential used block space that had actually been filled, I would advocate no change. To do otherwise turns it into a meaningless statistic. Better to have the simple unvarnished truth, rather than some manipulated figure meant to illuminate some vague outcome.

+1  The existence of empty blocks is more a result of the gaming inherent in bitcoin than any explicit aim on the part of miners. As Richy said, empty blocks are allowed, but they will only succeed where no better block is found in the interim. A chain with a non empty block at its tip will always have more work than one with an empty block.  A chain with the most valid work is by definition the longest chain. But if the fuller block isnt found quickly enough, the empty one will be built upon next.

So I see no issue with including them.