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

[Fatman3001]

Ideally I'd like to see both versions plus a snapshot of the mempool size. Or a version without empty blocks, number of empty blocks for that period, and a snapshot of the mempool size... but that sounds like a lot of work.

Actually surprisingly little. I'll see if I can do it and work out JJG's size increase. Also, there's a bug which nobody seems to have noticed yet

Cool, looking forward to it.

[JayJuanGee]

So I see no issue with including them.

The issue is that they cause the situation to be represented inaccurately. Say we had a backlog sufficiently large that we could fill a hundred blocks. Each block could legitimately be mined up to close to the full block limit of 1000000. Somewhere around 5-7 blocks mined in an hour's sample should honestly produce an aggregate average block fill of 99/100%.

Now, consider that if 3 empty blocks get thrown out there on top of those 5-7 (empty blocks tend to get mined very quickly since miners will usually start mining in transactions asap), that pulls the percentage down to maybe 70%. The question is, is that a fair representation of the situation?

My inclination is to regard empty blocks as NOOPs and exclude them from the calculation. Though I would probably indicate that empty blocks were found.

It seems that you are attempting to tweak to make it more accurate, but in the end, your tweaking may cause it to be a little bit less accurate.

Hopefully, you can provide a short explanation for what you are doing in order that fewer readers will be mislead by the resulting number, and if it is controversial, you may want to put two numbers next to each other in order that readers can assess the weight that they want to give to each rendition (edit... oh?? maybe that is what Fatman3001 was suggesting?).

[JayJuanGee]

When I re-read my post it sounded a bit terse. That was not my intention.

Aaaghhh!!!

I don't understand why my user name would be included in your quoted attribution - when I was not taking part in the discussion?

[Richy_T]

As/when the blocks fill up with real demand then the empty blocks will start getting used because the fees will incentivise the miners to develop more efficient software that will queue profitable enough waiting transactions to be mined immediately into the next block. You need to leave them in for your analysis ...

Nope. Because the reason for mining empty blocks is that the miner does not, at the time, have enough information to mine a valid block with transactions from the mempool. It's fiendishly clever.

So the miner is mining purely for the block reward because that is all that is available for that short period of time. Which incentive only goes away when the block reward does.

[BlindMayorBitcorn]

Stupid question: Why are miners including 0-fee transactions in blocks at all? AFAIK, they can refuse to do so regardless of max blocksize.

Because they are paid to do so through block rewards. Plus, some pools are concerned with their own and Bitcoins image.

Edit: When I re-read my post it sounded a bit terse. That was not my intention. Large scale miners are HEAVILY invested in Bitcoin. They've got facilities, equipment, employees, and long term deals with electricity providers and isp's. They're not here for the quick scam. Most of them (the ones acting rationally) will not do anything to hurt Bitcoin.

These technical discussions have really improved the quality of posts here. I'm starting to feel like maybe I should relegate myself to Reddit.

Don't worry. Soon the price will start climbing and we'll all be posting sexist images and throwing poo at each other again.

I can now be found in the Humanities section.

Sorry for bombing your thread.

Wait until I get to the part about how governments are using fluoridation in your tap water to direct your thoughts and how the pharmaceutical industry invented Aids.

[Richy_T]

Stupid question: Why are miners including 0-fee transactions in blocks at all? AFAIK, they can refuse to do so regardless of max blocksize.

Absolutely correct. Though the default client allows for some zero fee transactions and miners may choose to keep doing so because they feel it's good for Bitcoin at this stage.

Including in Blocks

This section describes how the reference implementation selects which transactions to put into new blocks, with default settings. All of the settings may be changed if a miner wants to create larger or smaller blocks containing more or fewer free transactions.

50,000 bytes in the block are set aside for the highest-priority transactions, regardless of transaction fee. Transactions are added highest-priority-first to this section of the block.

Then transactions that pay a fee of at least 0.00001 BTC/kb are added to the block, highest-fee-per-kilobyte transactions first, until the block is not more than 750,000 bytes big.

The remaining transactions remain in the miner's "memory pool", and may be included in later blocks if their priority or fee is large enough.

[marcus_of_augustus]

As/when the blocks fill up with real demand then the empty blocks will start getting used because the fees will incentivise the miners to develop more efficient software that will queue profitable enough waiting transactions to be mined immediately into the next block. You need to leave them in for your analysis ...

Nope. Because the reason for mining empty blocks is that the miner does not, at the time, have enough information to mine a valid block with transactions from the mempool. It's fiendishly clever.

So the miner is mining purely for the block reward because that is all that is available for that short period of time. Which incentive only goes away when the block reward does.

I think you are wrong but don't have time or inclination to go into the gory details of mining strategies and the reasons for empty blocks arising ... basically if the fee levels are "profitable enough", i.e. near to the level of reward/1MByte, then the miner who found the most recent block will most likely not mine an empty block, if there are such TX still queued in the mempool (this miner has all the information needed to build a valid block from mempool and is the one most likely to be mining empty blocks right now).

[Fatman3001]

Stupid question: Why are miners including 0-fee transactions in blocks at all? AFAIK, they can refuse to do so regardless of max blocksize.

Because they are paid to do so through block rewards. Plus, some pools are concerned with their own and Bitcoins image.

Edit: When I re-read my post it sounded a bit terse. That was not my intention. Large scale miners are HEAVILY invested in Bitcoin. They've got facilities, equipment, employees, and long term deals with electricity providers and isp's. They're not here for the quick scam. Most of them (the ones acting rationally) will not do anything to hurt Bitcoin.

These technical discussions have really improved the quality of posts here. I'm starting to feel like maybe I should relegate myself to Reddit.

Don't worry. Soon the price will start climbing and we'll all be posting sexist images and throwing poo at each other again.

I can now be found in the Humanities section.

Sorry for bombing your thread.

Wait until I get to the part about how governments are using fluoridation in your tap water to direct your thoughts and how the pharmaceutical industry invented Aids.

I can recommend a couple of books for you if you need material:

http://www.amazon.com/Obama-Mahabharata-Catastrophes-Vegas-Luna-ebook/dp/B00O2FCUJI/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

http://www.amazon.com/Andromeda-Martian-Catastrophe-Black-Illustrations/dp/0692448640/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

I've seen a picture of the author with a geiger counter on a beach in San Francisco. Very serious stuff.

[ChartBuddy]

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[Richy_T]

It seems that you are attempting to tweak to make it more accurate, but in the end, your tweaking may cause it to be a little bit less accurate.

As is often the case, it's less about the answer than "What question do I want to ask". The question I want to ask is how much of the available block space is being utilized. Since empty blocks are blocks which be definition cannot be utilized...

Now, if we were only having a few transactions per hour and empty blocks were being mined because there were simply no transactions to mine, that would be a totally different question.

Aside to fatman: I'm not sure that mempool size will be a totally useful number since mine will be different from everybody else and there's no telling where we will be between blocks. It might be worth having as a rough indicator though.

[Fatman3001]

Adam Back's thread just turned good: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1312371.msg13431477#msg13431477

Such integrity. Such wisdom. Such constructive criticism.

[Richy_T]

I think you are wrong but don't have time or inclination to go into the gory details of mining strategies and the reasons for empty blocks arising ... basically if the fee levels are "profitable enough", i.e. near to the level of reward/1MByte, then the miner who found the most recent block will most likely not mine an empty block, if there are such TX still queued in the mempool (this miner has all the information needed to build a valid block from mempool and is the one most likely to be mining empty blocks right now).

Absolutely. But other miners cannot start mining new blocks with transactions until they have the new block and know which transactions in their mempool are no longer supposed to be there. In the meantime, there is a bunch of hashpower going to waste so they just throw in an empty block which will be valid since it will only contain the coinbase transaction since that is the only transaction that they know will be valid (though they could also generate other transactions that they would know to be valid so detecting this can be worked around).

Ideally, they'll also validate the block they have received as well. Some miners have not in the recent past which has meant they have mined on invalid blocks (which made their block invalid also).

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/38437/what-is-spv-mining-and-how-did-it-inadvertently-cause-the-fork-after-bip66-wa

That was f2pool there too...

[Richy_T]

Adam Back's thread just turned good: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1312371.msg13431477#msg13431477

Such integrity. Such wisdom. Such constructive criticism.

Small blockers are so edgy and cool. I bet they smoke behind the bike sheds at lunchtime too.

[ChartBuddy]

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[Cconvert2G36]

Adam Back's thread just turned good: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1312371.msg13431477#msg13431477

Such integrity. Such wisdom. Such constructive criticism.

Small blockers are so edgy and cool. I bet they smoke behind the bike sheds at lunchtime too.

Watch out gentlemand, Richy_T's gunning for your comedy crown. 

Calm, rational discussion punctuated by tourettes outbursts like that... a winning strategy for the "1MB4EVA socioeconomic majority".

[Fatman3001]

Adam Back's thread just turned good: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1312371.msg13431477#msg13431477

Such integrity. Such wisdom. Such constructive criticism.

Small blockers are so edgy and cool. I bet they smoke behind the bike sheds at lunchtime too.

I see he supports Front National. So he is openly bully. I think that technically makes it ok.

But I'm just not sure about Blockstream.

[ChartBuddy]

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[JimboToronto]

Remember when GIFs were mostly still images? Nobody even bothers calling them animated GIFs anymore. It's a given.

Oops. Post and link deleted.

[niktitan132]

It looks like it's coming back up to me.
$500 by next month?
Reality or pipe dream?

Based on low volume and the almost non-movement of BTC price in the past few days, I kept considering that the price was preparing for a dump of 1 to 2 %... like  odds of 55%/45%.   

Currently, my thinking is sort of reversing, but not strong, and I am leaning more towards and upsurge in price by maybe 1 or 2%.. odds of... that would be about 55%/45%.. only a feeling and I'm not really sure as you can see by my numbers...

Also, a long weekend, can cause a certain amount of waiting until the end of the weekend to make some attempts at a high volume push in one direction or another.. but sometimes it seems that the big players may each be waiting for some other big player to act first, but no one bigger player wants to act first at this time, so we await in a kind of limbo land in which we do not know whether one or more big players have a plan to attempt a push of the price.

That's an interesting take. I just figure as soon as people are back to work and looking at the 2016 calendar they'll know that this is the year of btc price and start fomoing into the market.

[ChartBuddy]

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